The Dada diffusion

Art in America, June-July, 2006 by Jori Finkel

Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, edited by Leah Dickerman, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and New York, D.A.P., 2005; 519 pages, $65.

The Dada Seminars, edited by Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and New York, D.A.P., 2005; 308 pages, $45.

Anyone who has tried to map out the range of activities that were branded as Dada in the World War I era knows how elusive this avant-garde movement can be. For starters, there's the sheer elasticity of the term Dada, which was used by myriad artists (as a noun, adjective and, above all, a pair of incantatory syllables) to evoke everything from child's play to war, from a new form of philosophy to political anarchy. Then there's the considerable diversity of artistic and literary activities--drawing, painting, collage, assemblage, photography, photomontage, film, performance, interventions, poetry, plays, manifestos and sound poetry, not to mention the meta-genre that we would now call conceptual art. Further complicating matters is geopolitical diversity, since artists rallied under the banner of Dada in over half a dozen countries.

No wonder so many curators have for so long persisted in viewing Dada through the lens of Surrealism. Ever since Alfred Barr's landmark show "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism" opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the connections have been hard to resist. This treatment gives Dada dual capitals (Zurich and Paris) as well as a primary language (French), character (an obsession with chance and automatic or unconscious processes) and cast of characters (Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Andre Breton and confreres). It also gives Dada a clear teleology, as Surrealism appears to have codified some of the discoveries, or cleaned up some of the mess, made by its predecessor.

But, as many art historians have begun to recognize, viewing Dada as a predecessor to Surrealism usually means taming the many-headed beast, while decoupling the two allows for a wider reading of Dada's contributions to contemporary art. Francis Naumann took a major step in this direction by staging an important New York Dada show at the Whitney Museum in 1996. Now, Leah Dickerman, associate curator at the National Gallery of Art, has gone even further by overseeing the first major international survey of Dada for an American museum, featuring roughly 400 works by 50 artists [see article this issue]. What's more, Dickerman has edited an ambitious English-language catalogue and co-edited a collection of critical essays, The Dada Seminars, which together represent a major addition to scholarship in the field.

In both books, Dickerman fruitfully approaches Dada not as a movement with an identifiable style so much as a matrix--or, to use her favorite expression, a "crucible"--from which many current art practices emerged. As she writes in the catalogue introduction, "Looking at Dada across the work of various artists from six cities of production, as this book allows us to do, makes clear the degree to which it coheres instead around a set of strategies--abstraction, collage, montage, the readymade, the incorporation of chance and forms of automatization--so foundational for the rest of the century that today we have to struggle to recognize their historical novelty." She elsewhere adds "media pranks" to the list, recognizing the way in which Dada artists used posters, newspapers and other vehicles of mass communication to both create and provoke their audience.

Following Dickerman's introduction, which is one of the most clear-minded overviews one could hope for, come essays by several art historians on Dada's presence in Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York and Paris. Along the way, the book revisits the origin stories behind key innovations, including the Rayograph (which May Ray claimed to have discovered by accident in his darkroom in Paris but which may in fact have come to him after he saw Christian Schad's work) and photomontage (which Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann and George Grosz may have all had a hand in). Meanwhile, the chapter on New York Dada presents fresh evidence to help settle the perennial question: Who created God? A loop of plumbing pipes mounted on a miter box, God (1917) was attributed to Morton Schamberg (who photographed the work) for many years, until Naumann, for starters, gave Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven the credit.

Not so fast, says Michael Taylor, modern art curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the work is housed. According to recent chemical analysis, Taylor reports, the plumbing trap was coated with the same silver metallic paint that Schamberg used for his machinist paintings, "confirming his active participation in the making of God." Taylor soon rests his case, although you can be sure it will not be the final word. One begins to wonder whether the lack of clear attribution was itself a Dada shenanigan, designed to prompt a sacrilegious-sounding debate over the origin of God.