Top, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (Roue de bicyclette). Bottom, Alfred Stieglitz’s Fountain, a photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture The Fountain. Marcel Duchamp as Belle Haleine: Man Ray’s photograph of Marcel Duchamp in drag.
Dada at MoMA, Duchamp on 14th Street
By Jerry Tallmer
In a very large book with very small type but lots of superbly evocative full-color plates and a wide range of other illustrations, three photos skillfully placed right up front tell in one fell swoop why Dada was born.
The large book (519 pages) is the catalogue of the huge, definitive Dada exhibition (some 450 “objects”) that has now made its way from the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the National Gallery, Washington, D,C,, to our own Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York City.
The three indicative photos are:
• British machine gunners at the Somme, where on July 1, 1916, in the first half-hour, nearly 60,000 of their countrymen were hit and close to 20,000 would die as they rose out of the trenches and tried to cross No Man’s Land, in heavy gear, through barbed wire, under withering fire. In all, the ten-month Battle of Verdun devoured 800,000 lives, British, French, and German.
• A helmeted World War I German soldier atop one horse and leading another, all three – the man and the two horses – grotesquely, absurdly, ridiculously, insanely caparisoned in gas masks.
• A younger World War I German soldier with half his face bandaged, his similarly bandaged left hand in a sling, thanks to the recoil of his own cannon. This soldier is Max Ernst, then an art student from Cologne, soon to help create the Dada movement that, in revulsion of the whole horror and insanity of Slaughterhouse Europe 1914-1918, would thumb its nose at everybody and everything through an art built of non-art and anti-art. Max Ernst would become one of the most famous Dadaists, before going on to the more dream-based Surrealism.
For something more than 80 years now, people have been supplying different origins of the word Dada. It’s this, it’s that, it’s “Yes, yes” in Romanian, it’s French baby-talk for rocking horse … but surely it’s also related to caca, which in French or any other language signifies excrement, i.e., the Dadaists judgment on the whole vast abattoir of lies and death that lay on all sides around them.
Though Dada sprang up more or less spontaneously and simultaneously in a number of cities in Europe, its very first sprouts seem to have been planted when, in 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings opened their subversive Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, a gathering place for poets and artists where one of the stars on opening night – viz. Tom Stoppard’s wickedly clever Travesties – was a mad young Romanian named Tristan Tzara.
Art via anti-art. Whatever you could put your hand to, your brain to, your nose-thumbing irreverence to, could be Dada: paintings, drawings, sculptures, “readymades” (a shovel, a bed, a spinning wheel, a hat rack, a urinal), photographs, motion pictures, musical scores, collages, prints, posters, proclamations, manifestos, letters, boxes, bottles, scrawls, screeds, scribbles …
And of all the nose-thumbers – Hans Arp, Sophie Tauber, Hans Richter, Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausman, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Tristan Tzara, and 30 or 40 others – none would have more jolting, more lasting impact on the great bourgeois public of his and
our times than Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Duchamp, the Frenchman who shocked America awake at the 1913 Armory Show with “Nude Descending a Staircase.” Who shocked more than just America with that readymade (and quite vaginal-looking) urinal labeled “The Fountain.” Whose no less sexual masterpiece, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” —the “Large Glass” shattered by the artist — is too fragile now ever to leave its perch in Philadelphia.
Marcel Duchamp, he who – goodness gracious! – painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa.
It is that serene, challenging, irreverent hair-lipped visage, neither female nor male but both, that stares out at us once again, now, from the cover of the Dada exhibit catalogue – a show and a catalogue subdivided into six cities of Dada origin, 1916-1924: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris. “What we aim to do,” says MoMA’s Anne Umland, curator of the show here (in cooperation with the National Gallery’s Leah Dickerman, the Pompidou’s Laurent Le Bon), “is provide an expanded picture of the international movement that was Dada.”
MoMA lays emphasis on two of those cities, New York and Zurich – neutral zones of refuge during World War I. As you reach the sixth floor there is a double entrance: To the left, “Dada in New York.” To the right, “Dada in Zurich.” Come with me to the left. Better yet, come with me in memory to a building on New York City’s West 14th Street in what must have been the summer of 1959, when I was writing for The Village Voice and Marcel Duchamp was 72 years old:
The apartment (formerly Max Ernst’s) is a four-flight walk-up, and I galloped up the first two landings with a heart already aflutter because for me this was like going to interview Beethoven. “Go slow, go slow,” came a smiling voice from on high, and in a moment there he was, erect, spare, twinkling-eyed, 72, hip-deep in his shirtsleeves among cartons and crates. “We’re moving,” said Marcel Duchamp … I asked him where. “To a warehouse,” the artist said. And then, with instant courtesy, “I mean we’re going to Europe for five months …”
Popular myth has it that Duchamp took a vow, 30 years ago [i.e., 30 years before 1969], never to put his hand to art; that he said he “knew too much” to paint, so why try? On the other hand, I had heard that there would be some new things of his at [his Sidney Janis Gallery] show. “Not new,” said Duchamp when I asked. He puffed on his dead pipe; amber horn-rims dangled from a cord around his neck. “Not new. There are a few pieces of sculpture I made in ’53 or ’54. I don’t call that new. People get the wrong idea about me not painting. It’s true and it’s not true at the same time. But I did not make a vow. That’s all nonsense.”
Then the myth is a myth?
“Yes, a myth.” He stroked his chin, looking me over … “I am ready to paint if I have an idea.” Pause. “But it’s the idea that counts. I am not one of your physiological painters who does it for love of the smell of turpentine.” He glanced over at the fireplace. “We used to have a faucet there on the fireplace a while ago. I considered it a work of art,” he said, “but not public art. Art: what is a work of art? Your whole life, a producing mind, can be a work of art. Even action can be art. Even a grocer can be – can be – an artist.”
The conversation drifted back to the old days, the days of first Dada and then Surrealism, but Duchamp, though certainly not negative about them,
didn’t seem to want to linger there. I suggested that Dada might at any rate come back in style, the times being ripe for it. “Well, yes,” he said. “Perhaps in some of the new generation. Do you know the works of Rauschenberg and Jaspers [Jasper Johns]. Perhaps there, where the intention is not so much just in the technique but … “
I asked if he knew the plays of Ionesco. “Ah, yes, wonderful.” Were they Dada? “Yes, more or less yes – from a distance, yes. You might say that, in a way. But then every man tries to do something different. What today seems to be different may become a habit in five or ten years. The question is, if a thing survives. And the word Dada is for a thing that actually only existed, probably, with Shakespeare, Dante, and the Dadaists themselves. We use the word as shorthand. It’s easier for me to use it so you can know what we mean, hein?” …
I asked Duchamp if he would say anything for publication about the Abstract Impressionists …
“I don’t know. I’m not an art critic. An artist and an art critic are two different things. The point about those young men” – and now he quite openly grinned – “is that they have to make it and yet not know they’re making it. The danger of any new movement is academicism, the adoption of new canons – especially with the addition, now, of money transactions. These things sell nowadays. The Impressionists and the Cubists did not sell. That’s the difference. If it’s a good thing, I don’t know.”
I asked if at least he could, or would, name those he considered the foremost artist of his lifetime. He declined, saying: … “I have really a very derogatory opinion of my times … the fifty years I’ve been seeing paintings. I’m afraid it may go down as a whole era of commercialism. It seems to me we’ve merely moved from esoteric to exoteric, to the public domain. Naming anybody today wouldn’t mean anything. In that case, Mr. Bougereau [Adolphe William Bougereau, 1825-1905, a very bad academic painter] sold for $100,000 in 1910. Where is he now? Who can tell? I have a feeling that if you put something in a lead box and dropped it in the river with a note on it: ‘Open in 500 years, this is a masterpiece’ – and then if you put a toothbrush in there, or a typewriter … That’s where my doubts come. There is no – what do you call it? — no criterion.”
But isn’t there a dynamic, I asked. Weren’t you yourself a dynamic?
“Well, maybe. Occasionally so. Apparently so. But Bougerau also was! … I guess I basically hate every form of society. Men are too competitive. If you want to be a competitive grocer, why then you have to go out and kill your neighbor grocer.
“I once wanted to open a house for lazy people. It’s not so easy as you think. The problem is your mind activity that you cannot stop. You’d be ousted as soon as you worked – and this inner activity is work. The nature of man is that he could not do nothing …
“I might have followed the crowd, I don’t know. What generally happens to an artist who succeeds early is he gets himself a nice wife and five kids and a country house and then he has to paint more and more and compromise more and more and so forth and so forth just to keep everything going. I decided at age 20 that I couldn’t be an organized citizen. I went on a strict economy plan, modest living quarters, no luxuries, to make it last. And it has.”
I said, fumbling around a little: “Then you have to be awfully lucky in your … in your … ”
“Yes,” he said. “When you’re a young man full of sex and everything, you have to be lucky that way. I have been very fortunate in my – encounters. Sure I was lucky. That’s the truth for everybody, you’ve got to be lucky.”
His wife had not put in an appearance during the interview. Now I thought I heard her footsteps on the stairs, and when a door closed at the end of the hall, I rose to go. Extending from and adding leverage to the knob of the door was a simple teaspoon. I fingered it appreciatively. “There,” said Marcel Duchamp, “isn’t that art?”
And it was.
Of inestimable value to anyone interested in Dada per se – not least to Anne Umland in shaping the MoMA exhibit – is a seminal 1951 volume by the painter Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology.
Duchamp, Man Ray, Hans Richter, and others all made or contributed to Dada films, and these will have several showings during the run of the MoMA show, as will George Antheil’s 1924 Le Ballet mécanique.
Dada at MoMA, June 18 through September 11, 2006, is this city’s first in-depth look at this extraordinary movement and era since the “Dada and Surrealism” show assembled by the late William Rubin at MoMA in 1968; before that, a 1953 Dada show at the Sidney Janis Gallery; and before that, a 1936 show installed at MoMA by Alfred Barr.
In 90 years we’ve come a long way from the Somme, or have we? Only Dada can tell.
