I finally got around to seeing the DADA exhibit at MoMA Yesterday.

This is the only picture I was allowed to take.

The guard said, “No pictures on the 6th floor.”
I said, “even if I don’t use a flash?”
He said, “Yeah, they don’t like people taking pictures of new exhibitions.”
I said, “OK.”

When you think of Dada you probably think of smart dudes in bowler hats making bad-assed art jokes.

Or maybe you think of paintings with a mannered hysteria about them—pictures of meaty-looking dudes with their legs blown off, maybe with some collaged bits of gears thrown in.

It was WWI, after all, and people were dying horrible deaths all around so I guess I can forgive Otto Dix for painting the way he did, but still they look pretty bad.

Duchamp’s art looks good: all these strange deadpan objects—like a freaky looking wine bottle holder—sending off their bad vibes throughout the gallery space. Yikes, readymades are creepy!

I like how little work Duchamp made in his lifetime—it makes me feel OK that I’m not producing a lot of work at the moment. Although I can’t play chess and Duchamp was a very good chess-player.

But still, Duchamp is pretty ice-cold and after a while you think, “I don’t care about this coat rack.”

Though, what you forget about with Dada is how lovely some of it is. How esthetic.

Man, I was really blown away by Jean Arp. Why hadn’t I thought about Arp? I think about Tuttle all the time and Jean Arp was doing Tuttle long before Tuttle. Some people called him “Hans.”

Look at this thing:

He would do some automatic drawings of shapes and then send those off to a carpenter to be cut out in wood and then he’d screw them together and paint them. Pretty good plan, I’d say. There are a few of these in the show. I love how gentle and unassuming they are. But also kind of tough and sloppy. He also made some great paintings and collages.

Kurt Schwitters is great too. I’ll take Kurt Schwitters over Rauschenberg. Yeah, I said it. I mean, wasn’t that Combine show at the Met disappointing? Didn’t you think, “Eh, these are kind of pompous. Who needs ‘em?”

Anyway, the biggest revelation of the Dada show was finding the work of Sophie Taeuber. Who the hell is Sophie Taeuber? I guess she was married to Jean “Hans” Arp. She made some really great needlepoint “paintings”:

I don’t remember if this one was in the show. Taeuber also did a series of small wood sculptures that are fantastic. Here is one of them:

I think she might have made these cool marionettes in the show too.

So Sophie Taeuber is great.

Here’s her picture:

Here’s a very cool picture of Jean Arp:

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 3:28 pm and is filed under art.