DADA AT MoMA

Drove under Magritte skies and through deadly confetti (a truck shedding part of its cardboard cargo on the interstate) to get to the new Dada exhibit at MoMA. It was an eerily clear blue day in a sort of 9/11 way, and the radio reported as I was driving into town that the FBI had just broken up a plot to blow up the Holland tunnel, reporting also that the plotters had hoped the explosion would flood downtown. Anyway, I crossed the Triborough bridge, exited at 53rd street, and had that strange experience of going in a matter of seconds from driving on the highway at 70mph to crawling along a skyscraper canyon thronging with highly aggressive pedestrians. I met my friend Chris, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while, in the MoMA lobby and we headed up to the Terrace café for a glass of Prosecco, an overpriced lunch (the highlight was watching the waiter pour Chris’s chilled cucumber soup out of a cute little pitcher), and a lot of catching up. When we were ready to hit the exhibit, we entered through New York rather than Zurich, perhaps drawn by the snow shovel dangling from the ceiling. As we looked, we talked, covering such subjects as the role of the “little mag” in modernism, the current crop of scare stories about China (The Dragon Stirs!), the difficulties besetting university writing programs, the incorporation of commercial art techniques into “serious” painting (think Man Ray’s air brush anticipating Warhol’s stencils), the battle of “gesture” versus “concept,” the surprising amount of Dada embroidery in existence, Japanese innovations in bathroom design, the vagaries of the academic job market, the respective merits of verbal and visual Dada, the mark of Expressionism on German Dada, and so on.

I came away from the exhibit with twin impressions: 1) that Dada had certainly proved Ezra Pound’s dictum that artists are the antennae of the race. Receiving the horrendous electromagnetic disturbances of a ravaged Europe, the Dadaists produced a “deranged” art looking ahead to many of the artistic and cultural developments of the twentieth-century, from the rise of mass media as a vehicle for the manipulation of consciousness to the cyborgian interpenetration of man and machine to the eventual ascendance of “conceptual” art in the late twentieth century to the desacralization or dethroning of “art” itself; and 2) that the Dadaists had, in fact, succeeded so well, especially on that last score, that it’s simply impossible for Dada artifacts to retain even a fraction of the shock value that was once so central to the enterprise, with its revolutionary claims and aims. One piece on display (I’ve forgotten which) was distinguished by a few bullet holes recording the moment when some outraged students (all dust by now) had taken it into the street for a little target practice. Ah, the good old days! I can’t imagine anyone now caring enough to want to waste the ammunition.