Going Gaga Over Dada

It was April 18, 1916, and a volatile group of artists who’d found refuge from World War I in Switzerland were gathered around a table at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, arguing about a label for themselves and their work. They settled this dispute, according to art lore, by thrusting a letter opener randomly into a French-German dictionary. The word it pointed to — dada — has many meanings: “hobbyhorse” in French, “cube” in certain Italian dialects and “yes, yes” in Slavic languages. That night, they agreed on a name but continued to dispute what the word — and the movement — signified. Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet and the author of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, came up with what may be the only accurate definition: “Dada means nothing.”

That presents the curators of a new exhibition of Dadaism with a wonderful opportunity: to define the undefinable through the remarkably varied work the Dadaists produced. And produce the Dadaists did — collages, letters, manifestos, music, paintings, posters, photographs, sculptures, textiles, typography and more. They had no common medium and no particular mission, simply a dedication to spontaneity, chaos, innovation and nonsense. Though Dada burned out in less than a decade, it was hugely influential and continues to resonate in the work of such controversial artists as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Robert Rauschenberg.

And that legacy is the point of the intelligent “Dada” show, at Paris’ Pompidou Center until Jan. 9. The exhibition displays more than 1,000 items from museums and private collections around the world. Next year, the 90th anniversary of the movement, a version of the show will travel to Washington’s National Gallery of Art, which jointly organized the exhibition, and then to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

In keeping with the randomness that characterized Dada, the Pompidou has organized the show like a chessboard, making it easy to move through more than 40 rectangular exhibition spaces in no particular order. Thankfully, there are introductory rooms that explain the importance of Zurich, a neutral haven for European intellectuals from Carl Jung to Vladimir Lenin; discuss the Cabaret Voltaire, the local tavern where the Dadaists met for conversation, poetry and drama; and introduce Dada’s large cast of characters through their portraits.

These pictures, many of them photographs, bring a sense of reality to artists who would have none of it. The photographer Man Ray stands amid what appears to be a collapsed building, André Breton puts on huge spectacles, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Stella pose together on a sofa, while Tzara, Max Ernst and Jean Arp relax on a Tyrolean holiday. In one photo Sophie Täuber-Arp holds the fanciful Dada Head, 1920, which she constructed; the actual painted sphere is just a few rooms away. Her husband and frequent collaborator, Jean Arp, is seen with a monocle-like disk over his left eye — the Dadaists, fascinated with mechanization and also repelled by it, often used geometric shapes in their art. Another photograph shows Francis Picabia at the wheel of an open-topped sports car. Picabia used the same image in an assemblage also on view. He pasted the photograph on canvas, drew a similar sketch of himself at the wheel and titled the work The Merry Widow.

It was not meant to make sense. After all, the world, bloodied by the first modern war, hardly seemed a rational place. The Dada movement rejected history, literature, bourgeois values and, of course, artistic conventions. “I don’t even want to know if there were men before me,” wrote Tzara, the movement’s polemicist in chief, in 1918.

Dada spread around the world, to Barcelona, Tokyo, New York City (where Duchamp and Picabia found refuge during the war), Berlin, Cologne, Hanover and ultimately Paris. The first International Dada Fair took place in 1920 in Berlin, at an art gallery evoked here in a room similarly dominated by a hanging dummy dressed in a policeman’s uniform wearing a fake pig’s head. Members of Berlin’s Club Dada, who specialized in “propagandada,” are well represented. George Grosz, who served in the German army in the early days of the war, satirizes the false patriotism and misplaced optimism of postwar Germany in his Republican Automatons. Here two faceless capitalists — one with a flag, the other wearing a war medal — strut arrogantly, although their hands and legs are cylindrical stumps. Raoul Hausmann’s The Spirit of Our Time is just as cynical about the German bourgeoisie. He has taken a mannequin’s head and added to it a traveler’s collapsible cup, measuring devices, a typesetting cartridge and the No. 22. Measured and mechanized, this “spirit” has none of its own. Hausmann, along with John Heartfield — formerly Helmut Herzfelde who anglicized his name to show his opposition to the war — among others, pioneered the field of photomontage. Hausmann’s fierce, cut-and-paste man in a militaristic pose is not a soldier but The Art Critic.

Not that Dadaists cared what critics thought. In fact, they bequeathed us the enduring notion that art is what the artist says it is, an approach taken up with gusto by people such as Hirst and Koons. In describing the readymades of Duchamp, fellow Dadaist Breton called them “manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of objets d’art by means of the artist’s choice.” These avant-garde icons, complete rejections of the traditional hierarchy that put painting as the most important art form, are all on show: the snow shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm), the urinal (Fountain), the Bicycle Wheel, the Hat Rack and the bearded reproduction of the Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q., which is a racy double entendre in French). How did Duchamp choose his objects? On “visual indifference,” he once said, “as well as a total absence of taste, good or bad.”

The Dadaists loved words, and the Pompidou show displays rooms full of them. It’s a legitimate exercise, since the movement started with poetry and performance art at the Cabaret Voltaire. But the books, brochures, letters, manifestos, posters and reviews are simply too much to read. They bog the exhibition down, adding an academic seriousness that the Dadaists would have found unpalatable. In fact, it was a manifesto — written by Breton in 1924 that tried to bring organization to Dada by linking it to Surrealism — that led to the final split among the movement’s individualistic adherents.

But the spirit of Dada — and it was always an attitude rather than a coherent school of thought — survived. The Pompidou tries to reinforce this point in the final display space, which includes René Clair’s almost coherent 1924 film Entr’acte, and Duchamp’s never-quite-finished The Large Glass (also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), two painted and otherwise embellished panes of glass in a wooden frame. The curators even consider the view of Paris through the room’s windows to be part of the show. This denouement is frankly puzzling. The Dadaists would have loved it.