DADA is Back
Richard Kostelanetz
The most radical quality of the mammoth DADA exhibition that occupied the entire top floor of the Pompidou in Paris through January 9th, which will come this year to both the National Gallery (February 18th-May 14th) and MoMA (June 18th – September 11th), is the predominance of small-format items–magazines, books, exhibition announcements, even hand-written letters among the participants–that have never been seen before, certainly not in one place. Middle-aged me needed to don my reading glasses and get "real close" not only to read the captions but, literally, to "see" most of the art. Since I personally prefer to read small words not standing up but sitting down, I wish this museum provided high chairs with backs. Revealing how much Dada was not commonly known before, this impressive show establishes that this anarchic-libertarian-antiwar movement was for both literature and visual art every bit as important a movement in high modernism as authoritarian Surrealism, which always had better publicists and thus more exhibitions.
The first fault noticed by this American was the slighting of New York Dada, which is confined to one section amounting to perhaps two percent of the entire space. Dollars to croissants, can we bet that the representation of American Dada will be improved in the two installations here? Secondly, the exhibition is a disordered mess lacking any order or, implicitly, installation intelligence which reflects an odd curatorial reluctance, if not a refusal, to decide, several decades later, that one object or one artist might be more important than another.
This principle of the de facto mess also informs the French exhibition catalog, twelve inches high by nine inches wide, over a thousand pages in length, printed on thin paper, oddly feeling more like a telephone directory than the customary art-museum catalog. Not unlike other thick directories, this book is organized alphabetically, so that, say, the 54 page "Bibliographie" appears after a single page about "Berlin Club Dada" and before another single page (wholly in French) about The Blindman, a magazine whose two issues appeared in New York in 1917. Superficially complete as the whopping bibliography might seem, I found it messy too, typically including something of mine only slightly relevant but missing a 1968 essay on Dada and the Future of Literature, which can be found not only in the bibliography on my website but in a routine Google search of "Richard Kostelanetz dada."
Again, much like the exhibition, the most valuable quality of the catalog (40 Euros in Paris) is the huge number of illustrations, mostly black and white, of art and literature not seen in one place before, beginning with choice pages from the Dada publications. However, what’s missing from the captions, oddly, are measurements (no inches, no centimeters) so that I know only from seeing the exhibition itself that the issues of the legendary New York Art periodicals 291 and 391 were, to my surprise, almost the size of a newspaper tabloid. For the American venues the National Gallery has already published a different, more conventional catalogue, likewise large and expensive ($65), wholly in English, printed on heavier paper, with the typical content of extended scholarly essays and many color illustrations mostly of visual art, implicitly demoting Dada into just-another-art episode.
This long-awaited exhibition is incidentally generating a wealth of new Dada publications. Among the more successful is Marc Dachy’s Dada: La révolte de l’art (Gallimard), which Abrams will reprint here in English translation, hopefully with all the informative illustrations of the original. In his chapter on "Dada Diaspora," Dachy devotes more attention to activities in Holland, Barcelona, Tokyo and, yes, New York, than are thus far evident in the big show, at least as witnessed in Paris.
Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, NNDB.com, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories.
