dada @ moma

First off, let me apologize to Talya, because I basically narrated my viewpoints on the exhibit to her at MoMA, except when she was pretending she didn't know me so that I could vibe this one girl. Sorry, Talya: you've heard all this before. Of course, if anyone has known me for long enough, they probably know what I'm going to say at all times anyways.

For the most part, I enjoyed the exhibit, but that statement comes with such a bundle of qualifications that maybe "enjoy" is not the right verb. In the history of Art, or my selective appreciation thereof, dada strikes me as definitively "Important" but extremely dated, like the first Jeff Beck album, or The Jazz Singer.

Seemingly a large part of the art was based on the ideas like "automatic writing," primitivism, and accessing a "random" and inspired mental state, where I suppose one would be closer to inspiration. How much this has to do with Freud, it is hard to say, but it seems ironic and unnecessary to me to attempt to replicate the aesthetic of the unconscious/primitive/childlike by a conscious disavowal of one's higher faculties, because we are never without our unconscious in the first place. Making art by trying to ape the unconscious, or "reach" the unconscious, misses the insight that all art is *already* a partial product of unconscious processes, sublimations, and displacements.

Actually, though, "automatic writing" and leaving art "to the laws of chance" (as one canvas boldly proclaims) is almost an evasion of the unconscious mind, because, as anyone who has played Ouija knows, there is no such thing as a completely uninformed movement. In this way, dada repeats the mistakes of prior art, which only thought it was about mimesis/representation, and actually was betraying unconscious impulses--- by proclaiming to be random, dada leaves itself open to the same unintentional (here, we could take a Freudian or Jungian tack) concepts which determined previous art, while presuming to avoid those traps.

Additionally, Dada comes across as especially cliquey and mannered, which is always "liberating" in a mass culture, but is not especially endearing in retrospect.

Mostly, though, it is hard for me to get excited about those moments in the unfolding of any art's dialectic, when someone realizes that some convention of the art has become meaningless, or can be transcended or done away with. For example, putting a toilet in an art gallery was, at one point, a bold stroke that questioned the authority of the definition of art, called out the bourgeois standards of taste, manufacturedness, etc... however, no piece in the entire exhibit felt more like an artifact. Moreover, there would then be no *second urinal*. To now put a urinal in an art gallery would be laughable. The idea, as a crucial manifestation of a moment in Art's unfolding, obliterates its own value in-itself, remaining a contribution only as concept, not as a piece of art.

Another example of this is the facile juxtapositions which comprised most of the collages: the sense of the absurd stops being interesting or clever after surprisingly little time. Putting John Rockefeller's head on top of the body of a woman in a bathing suit is fine, but what else? It just doesn't endure as a mode of thought, especially given the more complicated modulations the Absurd Juxtaposition has gone through in the intervening decades. It seems so quaint. Yet an important realization about the content of art, which would be of value to later movements, had been arrived at.

My favorite pieces were nearly all of the Max Ernsts, the Marcel Duchamp glass, the George Grosz paintings, all of the films, some of the simple colored-squares in the Zurich room (Jean Arp and Sophie someone-or-other), and the Hausmann paintings (but not his collages). I feel like these had more of the quality of the aesthetic than of the prank or envelope-pushing.

I mean, surely someone has to push the envelope, but it is often the fate of the pioneer to be eclipsed in his/her own radicalism, and to become a figure or thumbnail on a timeline, rather than to endure.