The New York pre-school - Dada art, various artists, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Art in America, June, 1997 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

So, was there a New York Dada? According to art historian Francis M. Naumann, there was, and its essence was humor. His thesis is encapsulated in the title of the Whitney Museum's exhibition "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York," which Naumann organized with the museum's associate curator Beth Venn. Naumann elaborated on this proposition in his catalogue essay, which is called (and I wince) "New York Dada: Style with a Smile." This is not the black humor of a war-shattered generation which, according to Philip Gibbs's 1920 memoir, laughed the harrowing "laughter of mortals at the trick that had been played on them by an ironical fate."[4] Rather the exhibition presented its audience with a puckish crew who romped through a secure playground called Manhattan, aimed ironic barbs at a stodgy art world, and celebrated the liberating forces of the machine age while Europe exploded.

The international nature of the exhibition's theme was tailor-made for the present-day Whitney, which is striving to expand the visual horizons of its programming without betraying its founding mandate to tell the story of American art. "Making Mischief" offered a smooth blend of well-known and little-known works by American and European artists from public and private collections here and abroad. One also imagines that the show was a labor of love for Naumann, who has written extensively on the subject for more than a decade. Indeed, there was an almost palpable affection embodied in the installation, which provided safe coves for intimate inspection of the many small objects that otherwise would have been lost in the Whitney's cavernous third floor. In 1994 Naumann published the book on which the exhibition was based, and his edited volume of the papers of Marius de Zayas -- an artist, writer, dealer and art consultant of the period -- appeared in 1996.[5]

This is a story only spottily known, and well worth telling. Yet there was a waning of coherence as one moved through the exhibition, and a nagging loss of confidence in the guiding curatorial concept. Many of the objects were more intelligently conceived than the woolly-headed labels and texts which accompanied them on display. Many of the works were far more sober than the show's regrettable emphasis on humor suggested. And finally, many worthy pieces simply did not seem to belong under the rubric of Dada. All this pointed to an interpretive miscalculation, or at least equivocation, at the exhibition's heart.

"Making Mischief" opened by establishing Duchamp and Man Ray as the Franco-American axis along which New York Dada was aligned. A prefatory array of works introduced the readymade as the most significant conceptual link and, perhaps inadvertently, also demonstrated the appetite for replicas experienced by museums that now face the vanishing of the ephemera of 20th-century art. Here were a 1964 version of Duchamp's 1915 In Advance of the Broken Arm, an inscribed snow shovel which was his first readymade conceived in New York, and the original Tu m' of 1918, which Duchamp had declared would be his final work on canvas. Hanging from the ceiling was a 1961 replica of Man Ray's 1920 Obstruction, an early mobile of wooden clothes hangers, forking and proliferating like a three-dimensional genealogical chart. Midway across the gallery and in line with a window stood a 1991-92 reconstruction of the Large Glass, a sterile hulk with neither the cracks nor the dust of the original work and about as much charm as the commercial shower curtains which reproduce the composition.