Dada at MoMA www.moma.org June18, 2006 through September 11, 2006 Written by John Harris Photographs Courtesy of MoMA

Where would Madison Avenue be but for Dada? 

World War I was a horror movie of epic proportions; an exercise in mass slaughter and stalemate futility unrivaled by any other war in human history.  The gigantic bone yard which became western Europe appalled a generation of artists and galvanized them to create "Dada", a wide ranging movement with different objectives in different cities.

The word "Dada" literally translated means "wooden horse" in English.  It was picked randomly out of a French-German translation dictionary by the artists Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck.  They liked the word's sound and it seemed to suggest an irreverence toward language.  The wonderful new show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a comprehensive retrospective of the movement.  It is broken down by city, specifically:  Zurich; Berlin; Hanover; Cologne; Paris; and New York.

Francis Picabia, Reverence , New York

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, New York

Theo van Doesberg, Small Dada Evening, Hanover

Max Ernst, Celebes or The Elephant of Celebes, Cologne

Some of these artists became refugees and ended up in Zurich.  Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball were two of the more famous players in the Zurich "school".  They opened the Cafe Voltaire, where performance art as we know it, was probably born.  Like many of today’s performance artists, they would "let it all hang out."   Combining the theatrical and absurd elements of primitive art, ancient ritual, pre-linguistic sounds, catcalls, tomfoolery and "non-rational" states, they moved art from the art studio and brought it into the cabaret.  The artist was encouraged to experiment with many different mediums, not just painting.

Two of these refugees landed in New York: Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Assuming the dada "brand" created in Europe; they brought their own well defined product and introduced it to the New York art scene.  The meeting of the minds of these two very different artists, who were both temperamentally and intellectually diverse, led to some of the breakthroughs which would coalesce into New York Dada.  Duchamp's renunciation of Cubism and ultimately of painting itself, allowed him to introduce new ways of approaching the creation of art.  His "readymade" pieces, such as his famous "fountain"(a urinal!) and "bicycle wheel", tried to challenge our notions about art, reality and our very humanity itself.  He seemed to be saying that the artist should be very much more than just someone who holds a palette and wears a beret and a smock.  Picabia raised the props of commercial and mechanical drawing to an elegance and beauty which transcended mundane matters of commerce.  According to the show, "...industrial manufacturing was the antithesis of traditional fine art, a perfect weapon for Dada."

The other four cities are equally well represented by the show.   Contemporary art as we know it could not exist without Dada.  The notion of art as performance, collage and assemblage and expropriation of elements of pop culture, as well as the assimilation and regurgitation of "retro'" art forms, all evolved from Dada.  In fact, where would Madison Avenue be but for Dada?  The actual Dada "movement" lasted maybe ten years, but it changed the history of art.  Some of the art movements which trace their roots to Dada include: surrealism; consructivism; letterism; pop and op art; conceptual art; and minimalism.  The various cities are deftly displayed (George Grosz' "Prussian Archangel", a pig in a German uniform, is hung upside down from the ceiling), and films made by Dada artists are discretely replayed over and over from several vantage points.