http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i11/11a01501.htm
From the issue dated November 9, 2007
A 'Beautiful Monster' of the Dada Movement Draws Researchers' Attention
By PETER MONAGHAN
The Dada movement that erupted throughout Europe alongside the First World War was a convulsive artistic response to a culture that had created the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare. And because of its unique cultural and political qualities, Dada has been studied as much as any other movement in 20th-century art. A major retrospective landed in museums in Paris, Washington, and New York in 2005 and 2006.
Dada remains fascinating, in part because almost a century later it retains much of its power to shock viewers. "Whenever it looks like art is successfully isolating itself from unseemly realities, Dada raises its protest," says Jay Bochner, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Montreal who has written books on two Dada-related artists, the poet Blaise Cendrars and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
To see scholars poring over Dada surely would have appalled the movement's originators, who reveled in confounding sense and meaning, but research on the phenomenon continues apace. Included in the wave of renewed interest are two new books published by the MIT Press about one of Dada's prime movers, Francis Picabia. The first, I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings. The second, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, by George Baker, is a major study of a key period in Picabia's career, which progressed from Dada (from which he broke in the early 1920s) through Surrealism and then into abstraction before his death, in 1953.
As a purposefully baffling artist, writer, filmmaker, and all-around agitator, Picabia possessed a subversive wit that was ideally suited to create Dada's absurdist, contrarian gestures. In Paris, New York, and Zurich, he, along with Marcel Duchamp and an international band of collaborators, claimed to create art that was "anti-everything," including art. Yet in addition to labeling himself a failure and an "imbecile," Picabia also claimed that he was a "pickpocket" — a euphemism for his borrowings from other thinkers.
Marc Lowenthal, an assistant editor at the MIT Press, did the translations of Picabia's work for I Am a Beautiful Monster. He says that grappling with the extent of Picabia's pickpocketing, especially from Friedrich Nietzsche, afforded him a view of Picabia as a proto-postmodernist, rather than as the incohesive figure of reputation.
"His visual career was so scattered-looking," says Mr. Lowenthal. "Its stages seemed to have little to do with each other, but what's common was that he was copying from, for example, postcards and classical works. From his art to his writing, there was a parasitic, plagiaristic continuity."
In a recent review in Bookforum, the poet Frances Richard calls the translations "tough and nimble" outcomes of "the mammoth task of translating and annotating more than 160 pieces of writing by this protean nutcase."
Ready-Made and Willing
Borrowing from everyday life was also a key element in Picabia's work. Many of his creations were closely allied to his friend Duchamp's "ready-mades," artworks constructed from, for example, a urinal, a bird cage, or a thermometer. Among Picabia's creations were "mechanomorphs" that often eroticized mechanical objects, as in his infamous 1915 nude in the form of a spark plug. It was just a picture of a spark plug, unless the title, "Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity," persuaded a viewer otherwise.
It was an approach that Picabia extended into "Dada collages" made from everyday objects, including matchsticks and copies of photographs and diagrams — of engines, light bulbs, combs — and then words that may or may not have had any relation to the objects.
In The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, Mr. Baker, an assistant professor of art history at the University of California at Los Angeles, asks questions about the larger influence of Picabia and the Dada movement. Much of his attention focuses on Picabia's role in defining Dada.
Mr. Baker suggests that while Dada laid claim to anarchy, its thoroughgoing disparagement of its bête noire, modernism, paradoxically made it a cohesive movement. "Dada did have a deep formal consciousness about itself," he says.
Dada eschewed all legacies, observes Mr. Baker, but it did not lack for a theory, thanks in part to Duchamp's and Picabia's invention of the ready-made. Picabia saw that the ready-made could taunt bourgeois art with the possibility of creating mass, commodity art. But it also mocked the larger machine of capital that had commandeered societies. Thus, says Mr. Baker, it became "the theoretical object of the avant-garde," an ideal subversive form: "a monetary phenomenon turning around on itself."
Mr. Baker's analysis of Picabia, and of Dada, is just the latest. Since the 1930s, Dada has been re-evaluated — anecdotally, by participants; theoretically, by art historians; artistically, by many acolytes; and by the mechanisms of the art world, such as sales. Mr. Baker cites, for example, the rise of "neo-Dada" in the late 1950s and 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of odd materials, Jasper Johns's mutations of familiar symbols, Pop Art. Dada was also important to 1970s and 1980s postmodern art, as exemplified in the work of the conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, whose work has echoed Picabia's "mechanomorphic language," and that of Sherrie Levine, who has "rephotographed" famous photographs and has even revamped Duchamp's urinal.
The irony in the many re-evaluations and revivals is that they do precisely what Dada resisted: reintegrate the movement into art and art history, says Mr. Bochner, of Montreal, who knew both Picabia and Duchamp in New York. But that was always the way with Dada, he says: "Duchamp wanted an art in which he exercised no taste at all, but he continually failed to do that. His urinal, as anti-art, quickly became reabsorbed into art."
Also ironic, he says, is that while Dada does attract revivals, "there was a time in the 1950s when people didn't even remember who Duchamp was."
Dada Lives
At the MIT Press, Roger Conover, an executive editor, has long published books about Dada and avant-garde art. He has been encouraged recently, he says, by growing interest that has led to increased sales.
The MIT Press also issued books in 2004 and 2006 that, like the current two, reflect his view that a clearer picture of Dada will come from its "edges and corners." Mr. Conover has published books about female Dadaists, and East European artists and writers steeped in Dada and other avant-garde movements that were virtually unknown in the West during the cold war, but are now spawning new research. "When I first started talking about books on Slovenian constructivists, Romanian Dadaists, and Serbian Zenitists," he says, "people thought I was being oxymoronic. Now I have booksellers asking me when we're going to do something on Ukrainian Futurism or Croatian conceptualism, and they aren't joking."
Mr. Conover has edited two editions of the work of the Dada-influenced poet and novelist Mina Loy (1882-1966). His own project of more than two decades and counting has been a biography of Loy's husband, the enigmatic "poet boxer," Arthur Cravan, a seminal New York Dadaist and one-time contender for Jack Johnson's heavyweight crown who in 1918 simply disappeared, at the age of 31.
"To this day, no one knows what happened to him," says Mr. Conover. But the trail runs through "boxing clubs in Mexico, bullfighting arenas in Spain, brothels in Berlin, police archives in Lausanne, homicides in Canada, forgeries in Paris, classified files in Washington. … His whole life was a kind of philosophical performance or rehearsal of Dada's essence."
Picabia, he suggests in an e-mail message, merely lived that essence out: "Warhol had it easier because of Picabia's example. Julian Schnabel and David Salle would not be who they are without him. … In many ways, [Picabia] gave life to the idea of 'contemporary artist.' Abuse your friends, waste yourself, lie, boast, luxuriate, pose, propagandize, paint badly, contradict yourself, appropriate, enjoy your shit."
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
