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

Man Ray seemed preoccupied less with destabilizing the art audience than with exploring the shifting nature of visual meanings. His 1918 photographs called Man and Woman feature, respectively, an eggbeater and an assemblage of two light reflectors and clothespins clipped to a sheet of glass. Two years later, he printed the compositions with the titles reversed. Naumann interprets the gesture as an inside joke coinciding with the coming out of Rrose Selavy around 1920. But the switch equally might be viewed as the artist's acknowledgment of the inconclusiveness inherent in images, in gender and in words. Such an acknowledgment of openness is at once emancipating and troubling, and is related only superficially to Duchamp's narcissistic burlesque.

This portion of the exhibition also boasted one notorious and wholly "original" ready-made not by Duchamp. It was God, an assemblage consisting of a plumbing trap mounted on a miter boy, which is usually credited to Morton Schamberg but here was offered as a collaboration between Schamberg and the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. The oddly abstracted nature of the plumbing fragment was a fine visual lead-in to the next subject, "Machinist Imagery." Picabia's paintings of kinetic contraptions with kinky sexual connotations (Le Fiance, Machine Tournez Vite) shared the stage with Schamberg's more earnest and introverted abstractions. The adjacent area of the gallery presented images of New York. Among the highlights were Man Ray's early and very chic drawings made with an airbrush, and a monitor playing Paul Strand's and Sheeler's Manhatta, a collaborative film of 1920 which collages mechanical and metropolitan images.

In the selection of works in this part of the show, one encountered a replay of the associative reasoning that brought Stettheimer into the Dada circle. The proposition now would be that since Dada artists were known to have used machine imagery, then any machine-based composition by an artist associated with the Arensberg Circle was a Dada image. What else could explain the wishful inclusion of Joseph Stella's collage study for Man Seen Through the Window on the Elevated, which is an orthodox Futurist theme executed with Cubist forms and mediums? Does Arthur Dove's knowledge of Dada and his presence at some Arensberg soirees confer Dada status on his painting Gear, a moody study in gray, rust and Beckmann-black which monumentalizes machine forms? Surely Charles Demuth's Business (1921) and Sheeler's Skyscrapers (1922), two precisionist essays in geometricized representation, should be excluded from Dada as well.

After this point the exhibition's momentum turned into donouement. The written materials recounted the story of the Society of Independent Artists, explained the Fountain fracas, and documented the growing exchanges between the Americans and Tzara. Final features included information on the exploits of two terrific Dada eccentrics, the aforementioned Baroness and Arthur Cravan. She was an impoverished fixture of Greenwich Village who made art, modeled, and took off her clothes at, well, the drop of a hat, He was a combative cafe habitue who boxed with Jack Johnson, wrote poetry and also evinced a penchant for disrobing in public.