LAST STOP, The Museum Of Modern Art
 Dada …June 18-September 11, 2006

The Dada exhibition was previously installed at the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (Oct. 5, 2005-Jan. 9, 2006) and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA (Feb. 19-May 14, 2006). It ended its tour at MoMA in NYC.

I waited with great anticipation for this show to arrive. As a collage artist, I’ve been fascinated by Dada and the Dada artists for years, and have read almost all of the print and online reviews of earlier Dada exhibitions, books about Dada artists, including Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets and Harold Rosenberg’s Art on the Edge. I wish I’d been able to travel to Paris or Washington, D.C. to see the other two installations, because each exhibition was installed in a unique way.

There were almost 450 works by 50 artists at the MoMA, organized into six interconnected spaces, each devoted to one of the cities in which Dada flourished (Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, Paris, and New York). The Dada movement, which lasted only from about 1916 to 1924, included a lot of artists we know well who went on to have successful international art careers apart from Dada: Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and May Ray. 

There were works by artists I knew well, including Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with penciled moustache and goatee titled L.H.O.O.Q. (a vulgarity in French). The work at the MoMA was the size of a postcard.

There were works by artists, which were less familiar. I loved seeing Sophie Trauber’s wood and fabric pieces, installed alongside a lot of Hans Arp’s painted wood works. What fun to get up close and see Trauber’s embroidery and dolls (marionettes) produced so many years before feminist art. 

My first impression of the Dada show as I walked into the galleries was mixed: The installation was clean, bright, spacious – actually pristine. The works looked cool, calm and collected. The second impression, after reflection was: there’s a lot of vintage work here, so much early collage and assemblage – it’s so historic. Third impression: why does everything seem so small – and, why do these works look so familiar - so contemporary? Why isn’t the work shocking? Dada was supposed to be shocking. Note: I didn’t see or hear any of the performance pieces.

According to the history books, the Dada idea was to make something no one had ever seen or experienced before, to shake up contemporary viewers’ expectation of what is or can be art. Sixty years later, contemporary work looks, and, in concept seems, a lot like Dada, just bigger. That’s shocking.

I recently found Charles Simic’s exhibition review online in the New York Review of Books (August 10, 2006). He commented that Dada had and continues to have a huge influence among avant-garde artists and poets. He added (my reaction): one is likely to leave the Dada exhibition at the MoMA convinced that there hasn't been a single new idea in the last eighty years.

A number of other reviews express a similar viewpoint. Dada really was shocking but is shocking no more. That shows how much influence Dada had and still has.

Agree or disagree, but please send your comments to me at nancy@nikkal.com