Yale University Art Gallery Photos
Georg Grosz’s Drinnen und Draussen.
Entering the new exhibition Everything is Dada, you might think you have stumbled into a secret portal from Chapel Street to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
The Dadaists — if they were still around to comment — might not have approved.
Yes, they would have been happy to see their legacy preserved. That’s the thing about posterity. But the exhibition’s presentation in capacious, bright white spaces — not at MoMA, but at New Haven’s Yale University Art Gallery — raises a question: A century after they shook up the art world, is this what the Dadaists would have wanted for their humor-filled, nonsensical, often irreverent work?
Maybe so, but maybe not.
As an “anti-art” movement that began 100 years ago in Zürich, Switzerland, in response to the chaos, carnage, and unprecedented scale of World War I, Dada bucked against Cubism and Expressionism, the artistic traditions that defined the first 15 years of the 20th century. The intellectual baby of Hugo Ball, Tzara, Jean (Hans) Arp and many others, Dada combined poetry, dramatic performance, music, puppetry, and visual output with unconventional and found objects to create a constellation of art forms bound by subversion, parody, and experiment.
Ground zero was Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire, where several Dada performances took shape. After the war, artists left Switzerland — so loved because it was neutral territory — and brought Dada to their homes around Europe and in New York. The aesthetic value of an object usually took a backseat to the ideas behind it (e.g., everything Duchamp ever touched. Ever), and the artists left a huge legacy that informed, among others, Surrealism, which dovetailed with Dada’s sense of the unconventional and unconscious. Basically, Dada was the barbaric yawp, translated into equal parts gibberish and German and turned to art 15 years after Whitman gave voice to it.
Jean Arp’s Mustache Hat
But walk into the exhibition, and you’re going to have to look a little harder to find that. Obsessively white walls dominate the space, punctuated by zigzagging, stencil-like lines and fat, raised lettering in red. From inside the first gallery, works beckon in their clean, matching black frames. One hundred years out, is this degree of polish what the Dadaists would have imagined? What is Dada even supposed to look like today?
YUAG’s answer: static and restrained.
The same galleries were show-stopping during last year’s The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art, filled with objects attendees had to navigate. Now they feel a little too big and too clean. They’re like walk-in freezers where the side doors are stocked with good stuff, but the floors have all been cleared out prematurely. Pieces like Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Sculpture en bois tourné (Turned Wood Sculpture), remarkable and witty as it channels a gnome, go a long way to remedy this. But the pieces don’t disrupt or engage with the space, as the Dada Messe did in Berlin in 1920.
That’s not the case throughout. Certain pieces, such as Georg Grosz’s eye-catching Drinnen und Draussen (Inside and Outside; pictured at top), ask so much of the attendee that the act of viewing becomes joyously immersive. Like the title suggests, the painting is a sort of split scene. From the right, a hoggish aristocrat, cigar in mouth, looks out, a cluster of pinch-faced and bloated socialites laughing in the background. At the left, a haggard World War I amputee right out of one of Grosz’s Expressionist woodcuts begs on the street. Passers-by are thrust into bitter social parody with their see-through furs and visible, undulating ass cheeks.
Likewise, Man Ray’s delicate, gradated rayographs — so called for the way they were made in direct sunlight, with application of objects to a photosensitive substrate — are part of an exciting trend in the exhibition, which showcases tens of works on paper, often kept from the galleries because of their sensitivity to light. August Sanders’s portraits of the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann give viewers a glimpse into the inherently performative aspects of the genre. A suite of Kurt Schwitters’s collages helps contextualize the importance of layering and assembly — not to mention chance — to the movement. A bright drawing formerly attributed to artist Francis Picabia showcases some serious pseudo-mechanized stops and starts, and with it, the Dadaist impulse to veer toward the dysfunctional and funny.
And a punchy, black-and-white “Dada Lounge” designed by Chris Sleboda, YUAG’s director of graphic design, and a team of Yale BFA students, drives a point home: Dada is an old man who has been given a potent sedative, but it’s worth listening to some of his stories before urging him to retire. Clips of Dadaist poetry in the lounge bring the movement to life. Voices from the past spring up before the listeners at the press of a button. Along the floor, stacks of “dadaist” newspapers turn viewers into active participants, both students of Dada and willing pawns in the ongoing, anti-sense performance that is Dada’s legacy at Yale and in the New Haven art scene. And a very cool video shows what Dada might look like with social media, outlandish twitter handles scrolling across the bottom of a screen as a video performance unfolds at the top.
Ultimately, then, Everything is Dada — like MoMA itself, which it channels all too valiantly — is a case study in the conventions to which museums are still held, while modes of making have come so far, so fast. Even a so-called “Dada un-symposium” that suggests inversions of traditional structures is, at second glance, pretty conventional, offering a series of lectures and performances that will take place during the spring … and look amazing, but not particularly novel. Maybe that’s the takeaway. These events, like the exhibition, leave something to look forward to — Dadaists approving or not.
