Word: dada
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Yesterday's aggro and shock, today's museum relic. "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York," curated by Francis Naumann and Beth Venn and now running at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, is an interesting show of what is, ultimately, a spiky but fairly thin subject. Dadaism--its name made of baby-talk syllables, its intent to disorient bourgeois expectations of culture by any means possible--was a short-lived but fecund movement born and raised in Europe in the century's teens. It was more like a tiny religion than an art event, with a proselytizing...
...Dada left its traces in America, but never struck deep roots there. It never acquired the criticality, the indignation or the longing for social subversion that marked it in Europe. It devolved into amusing in-jokes and tended to preciosity and quirkiness. This grew out of the tiny clique of self-professed illuminati that sustained it. Its sense of humor never grew as robust as the work of the professional funny guys who helped inspire it, like Rube Goldberg or the Marx Brothers. In America the Dadas were plagued by the thought that American popular culture was more Dada than...
...soon become the center of modernist effort because its reality had made it the modernist site to beat all others. "Your New York," he told the press, "is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses modern thinking in its architecture, its life, its spirit"--everything but its art, which Dada would supply. This image of the city as social compressor also comes out in Man Ray's neatly epigrammatic New York, 1917--a bunch of slats, stacked to mimic the setbacks of skyscrapers, held together by a C clamp...
There wasn't much social criticism in New York Dada, though some of its members were clearly ticked off by the conservative character of the American art world. Picabia even satirized Alfred Stieglitz--whose 291 gallery was the main rallying point for modernist artists like Constantin Brancusi, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley--as an impotent figure, a camera with a collapsed bellows. Dove himself had a prod at the reviewing establishment in The Critic, 1925--a figure meant to represent Royal Cortissoz, the much feared conservative who had dubbed modernism "Ellis Island art." It is a paper...
...death; and, frequently, the use of a central conceit, sometimes quite fantastic, to structure his poems. This last tendency is best illustrated in The Museum of Clear Ideas, Hall's 1993 book, in which one poem is framed as his explanation the game of baseball to Kurt Schwitters, the Dada collagist...