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Das Ist Dada–An Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC
By Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. | Education/Inspiration |
Sep 7, 2006
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| DADA on bus © Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. |
Dada has come to New York City with a huge exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art (http://www.moma.org) as well as several galleries in the
New York City Area.
Perhaps the better title for this article would be “Was ist Dada?
(“What is Dada?”) or the Dutch version in Theo Van Doesburg’s
“Wat is Dada?” Why would these be better? It seems that is
the question going around New York is just what Dada actually
means. For those depending on a clear, precise definition
supplied by a guide or tape at the Museum, Dada may prove to be more
difficult.
Unlike impressionism or expressionism, Dada as one of Tristan Tzara and
Paul Eluard’s Dada Fliers says: “Dada ne signnifie Rien.” (“Dada
doesn’t mean any thing.”) Hence those desiring an easy fix of what it
is or what one is supposed to see, interpret and understand may need to
take a deep breath and actually provide a meaning themselves. It
is obviously taken seriously or it would not have survived its
beginnings in not one, but six major cities—Zürich, Berlin, Paris,
Cologne, New York and Hannover in the years 1919 to 1924.
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| DADA exhibit at Modern Museum of Art |
However, when I visited the Dada Exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art, much of the visitors’ response to the Dada works was raucous
laughter. Marcel Duchamp bears a lot of responsibility for such a
seemingly irreverent response. His version of Da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa sports a moustache and goatee. There is an
old-fashioned urinal as well as a bicycle wheel attached to a
stool. Whimsical, meaningless, perhaps, as many texts point
out—the work shows that Dadaists were interested in getting away from
serious discussions and deep, hidden meanings about art. After
all, they had just been through the First World War and its horrors and
needed a way to lighten up.
1916 is cited as the year Dada began in the unlikely city of
Zurich, Switzerland. Café Voltaire is rumored to have combined
various types such as draft-dodgers, pacifists, political immigrants
and intellectual expatriates. Hugo
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| Wat Is DADA by Theo Van Doesburg |
Ball
is viewed as the main
person along with his girlfriend Emmy Hennings, whom he met in Munich
during the same year. Samuel Rosenstock, better known as Tristan
Tzara—along with Marcel Janco, both from highly assimilated
Jewish families in Rumania—joined them in the cabaret activities at the
Café. According to another member Richard Hulsenbeck, “Dada was a
collective struggle for individual rights. It was not interested
in providing moral justification for political activism or for that
matter, any political system. The Dadaist knows that moral
struggle is individual; man must arrive at his own decisions, his own
values.”
The actual word dada; however, has different meanings in different
languages: it is a "crazy narrative" in German, "rocking horse" in French
and
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| DADA cities |
possibly most defined in Rumanian as "yes, yes." As Hugo Ball became
tired of heading the group, Café Voltaire closed in the same year it
opened, and Tristan Tzara took over the helm. He was interested
in expanding Dada beyond Zurich. The Premier Exposition of Dada
was held in Zurich in 1917, and additional new members like Sophie
Tauber provided dance, Hans Arp (later her husband), exhibited abstract
wooden reliefs, and Hans Richter (just returned from combat on the
front in World War I), produced mask paintings and films. (There is a
one-person exhibition of Richter’s work at the Maya Stendhal Gallery
located at 545 West 20th Street in New York City through September
16th. For more information: http://www.mayastendhalgallery.com).
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| Dada Head by Hans Richter |
Christian Schad produced photo grams which were some of the first
abstract photographs. However, by 1920, the group of Dadaists had
primarily dispersed—Taza to Paris, Hulsenbeck to Berlin, and Richter
to his parents in Klein-Koetzig with another filmmaker Eggeling.
Hugo Ball had retired to a small Swiss village, and only Janco and
Arp remained in Zurich.
The Dada Movement was brought from Zurich to Berlin by Richard
Hulsenbeck in 1917. He collaborated with George Grosz and
Heartfeld to publish the Neue Jugend (New Youth), which was a
publication about the Dada Movement. The Dada Movement in
Berlin had political overtones as seen in the work by George Grosz.
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| Metropolis by George Grosz |
One of the earliest Dada speeches declared its newness, esthetic and
opposition to cubism, futurism and most of all expressionism. It
was described as “perfectly lighthearted malice, and alongside
exact photography, the only legitimate pictorial form of
communication and balance in shared experience.”
A new invention in Berlin Dada was that of the Photomontage (note that
in this case it meant cutting out images and pasting them onto a piece
being created) by Raoul Hausmann and Hannna Hoech in 1918. One of
her photomontages speaks to the lack of specificity of the Dada
Movement with a text in the piece sayingl, “He, he junger Mann, Dada
ist keine Kunstrichtung (Ha, ha young man, Dada is
not an art movement.)
This discovery of Photomontage by Hausmann and Hoech was disputed
by George Grosz, who gave himself and John Heartfeld credit for the
discovery of the Photomontage in his Suedende Studio at 5:00 am in May,
1916. Herzfeld included a dog food advertisement in one of his
photomontages. Perhaps this concept was an influence on Andy
Warhol, who introduced Cambell’s soup and Brillo
cleaning products as art in the 1960s.
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| Photomontage by Hanna Hoech |
In Berlin, Walter Benjamin—who later emigrated to the United States and
taught at The New School in New York—said that “Dadaism
attempted to produce with means of the painting of literature the
effects which the public today seeks in film.”
When the Berlin Dada Group began to fall apart, Raoul Hausmann
went to Prague, and Theo Van Doesburg to the Netherlands where he
collaborated with Hans Arp and El Lissitsky, who produced some
exceptional experimental photographs.
In Hannover, Germany, Kurt Schwitters was a trained painter who
became a late bloomer in the Dada Movement with his collages for which
he adopted the term “Merz.” (Derived from Kommerz and
Privatbank). However, Hannover was not a center for Dada like
Berlin or Zurich. In 1921 Hausmann, Hoech, Schwitters and his wife
Helena undertook a second Dada tour to Prague.
Dada came to Cologne, Germany in 1919 and offered its own contributions
to the movement. They were more explicit than implicit and mainly
implemented by four artists: Max Ernst who is better known for his
surreal work which came later, Heinrich Hoele who produced Die
Kripplemappe (Cripple Portfolio, portraits of physically-challenged
subjects), his wife Angelika Hoele who was the only woman in this group
of male artists (a crossroads of female roles in the 1920’s), and
Johannes Baargeld (actually a pseudonym for Alfred Grünwald) who
incorporated his own body into his work.
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| Fruit of Long Experience by Max Ernst |
In order to enter Cologne’s Dada Early Spring Exhibition visitors had
to walk past the men’s toilets while a girl in a communion dress
recited bawdy poetry. Max Ernst’s participation in this
exhibition created a huge split between him and his father, who was a
devout catholic. Perhaps the exhibition should have used Frank
Wedekind’s very controversial (especially since it was written in
1891) tragi-comedic play; “Spring’s Awakening” for its title. The
Early Spring Exhibition was closed down by police on the grounds of
obscenity. When it was discovered that the work in question by
Max Ernst was a print of Albrecht Dürer’s “Adam + Eve,” it was reopened.
One of the key artists in the New York Dada Movement was Marcel Duchamp,
who submitted a white urinal for inclusion in the exhibition of the
Society of Independent Artists. Although the exhibition was said
to be “jury-free,” the urinal with the signature of R. Mott on the bowl (aka Duchamp) was rejected.
New York art patrons—particularly of the Dada Movement—Louise and
Walter Arensberg had an incredible art collection on view in their
apartment, located at 33 West 67th Street from 1915 to 1921. One
of their frequent visitors was Joseph Stella who said, “Dada means
having a good time—the theatre, the dance, the dinner. But it
is a movement that does away with everything that has always been taken
seriously. To poke fun at, to break down, to laugh at, that is
Dadaism.” Walter Arensberg’s cousin John Covert was a Dada artist
who remained loyal to oil painting despite attacks on oil painting by
Marcel Duchamp. Covert affixed three dimensional elements such as
wooden dowels, string and nails to his paintings to enliven their
surfaces. However, his most unique contribution to the Dada
Movement was a series of gelatin silver photographs titled “Water
Babies.” German artist Hans Bellmer mahy have been influenced by
these photographs in creating his sculptures titled Le Poupee.
Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Covert won a scholarship from the
German government and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste (The
Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich from 1909 to 1912. He then moved
to Paris where he was often accosted because of his “German”
accent. In 1915 he moved to New York and met Marcel Duchamp
through Louise and Walter Arensberg. He and Duchamp formed The
Society of Independent Artists in 1916.
Katherine Dreier went to Cologne after the War (She was German-American
and had established contact with her family in Bremen). It was
there where she saw the work of Max Ernst and decided it had to be seen in
New York. Upon her return to New York she established the Sociéte
Anonyme, Inc.—Duchamp was president, Man Ray was secretary, and Dreier
was treasurer. The first exhibition was the work of Max Ernst and
it was followed by an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters' work.
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| Merz 8 by Kurt Schwitters |
Alfred Stieglitz was very involved with the Dada Movement and exhibited
the Dada artist Francis Picabia in his 292 Gallery, who declared his
intention of bringing the machine to his studio.
In 1921 Duchamp and Man Ray put together New York Dada Magazine, which
was a shift from painting to photography, photomontage, graphics and
film. Man Ray’s multiple exposures are examples of true
photomontage whereby those of Berlin Dadaists are in reality collages
of photographs since they are cut and pasted. This year also
signaled somewhat of an end for New York Dada because Man Ray and
Marcel Duchamp left for Paris where Man Ray began working with
photograms (placing objects on top of photo sensitive paper,
exposing it to light and developing it) which he termed “Rayograms.”
Dada came to Paris in 1920, and it was more literary in its emphasis as
in the works by Tristian Tzara and André Breton. The visual Dada
artists were Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picaba and Man
Ray. It began with live performances—public Friday
gatherings. Music was provided by Groupe des Six, and Eric Satie
was the head figure.
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| Star on the Transatlantic by Francis Picabia |
The Salon Dada Exhibition in June of 1921 was the final show of Dada’s
heyday. The audience walked out of Tristan Tzara’s new play “Le
cour á glas” (The glass heart). Duchamp produced a drawing of a check for $115.00 to his dentist
for dental work—reducing art to a monetary value.
Unfortunately, artists no longer wanted to be a part of the very pubic
stage of Dadaism and preferred to be more private in the new direction
of surrealism.
I hope you will be able to experience the Dada Exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art or the Hans Richter Exhibition at the Maya Stendhal
Gallery in Chelsea. It has been refreshing that the general public in
New York City has been interested in discovering Dada. The
good news is that they basically had to figure it out for
themselves, and subsequently realized that they would be able to
do that for any art direction.
References:
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| DADA exhibit © Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. |
1. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris by
Leah Dickerman, Brigid Doherty, Dorothea Dietrich, Sabine T. Kriebel,
Distributed Art Publishers, New York, November 15, 2005
2. Masters of Modern Art by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., distributed by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1954
3. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Second Edition by Jack D. Flam, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, April 14, 2005
____________________________________________________________________
Robert A. Schaefer, Jr. is a founding member of Photoworkshop.com, and
has been a fine-art photographer for over thirty years. His work is
displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the
Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, France. In 1999—2000 he had a 25-year
retrospective of his work at the Huntsville Museum of Art in
Huntsville, Alabama, his home state. His exhibition, Two Sides of the
Coin—which deals with his German family and the Holocaust—was held at
the DeFrog Gallery in Houston, TX in March, April and May as a part of
Fotofest. Currently he is part of a group exhibition called
“Amendicons,” which looks at the crisis in the Middle East. It was
at the Makor Gallery, and will open on Thursday, September 8th at the
Haven Art Gallery in the Bronx, NY. (www.amendicons.blogspot.com). Schaefer writes about photography
for Double Exposure, Fotophile Magazine in New York City and The Photo
Review in Pennsylvania. He has taught at The New School and given
workshops at Pratt Institute in New York and is currently on the
faculty at New York University.
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You can contact Robert Schaefer at rasjrpro@earthlink.net or visit his website at http://www.schaeferphoto.com.
Let us know if you found this article useful, and tell us what kinds of articles you'd like to see in upcoming issues. Send your comments and ideas to Lynne Eodice.
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Last Updated: Jul 3rd, 2009 - 15:04:15
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