“Dada,” the major exhibition of summer 2006 at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, asks viewers to revisit one of culture’s major rhetorical questions, “What is art?”  Most of the works at MoMA require similar consideration. “Dada,” however, pointedly asks its audience to reconsider the normal, to challenge the reception of an idea or object with a simple switch of a name, “to choose” to believe that nothing is concrete and that everything can be art.

Marcel Duchamp wrote in the journal Blind Man that it did not matter whether or not he made his works, the importance was in the act of choosing.  In a moment of what some see as brilliance and others as gimmick, head curator Anne Umland allows the viewer choice of entrance into the exhibit, enabling the audience to experience a little bit of Dada themselves.  Regardless which entrance is selected, audiences are greeted with chaos that is quickly sorted by geographic designation and curatorial commentary.  The producers of the MoMA show approached Dada ideology with a heavy-hand, liberally peppering the artwork with explanation.  In one sense, the work is enlivened by these details.  However, spending time on the reading significantly detracts from the visual digestion of the works themselves.  Uptown from MoMa, the Whitney Museum of American Art devotes its top floor to a retrospective on Edward Hopper.  The museum is noticeably less populated, and the little glossing the curators provide enhances the relationship between the viewer and the works.  The audio tour that accompanies the Hopper exhibit highlights brush strokes and chiaroscuro.  The gentle voices of poets, critics, and Hopper’s friends invite the audience to melt away into his mysterious sunsets.  At MoMA, the recordings of curators and scholars barely point out the subtleties of the work, but rather stress how these things were important in local and global communities at the time of the movement.  The result is an extreme bird’s eye view of Dada, removing the art almost excessively, creating a show that is more educational than pleasurable.  Of course, Dada emphasized these ideologies via both visual production and manifesto, so it seems important to, literally, read the writing on the walls before attempting to understand the art.

That Dada emphasizes repetition and mass production in its ideology acts almost as an explanatory afterthought to Christo’s Gates (New York, 1979-2005).  It seems now that the questions countless tourists and New Yorkers alike asked concerning the composition of art and their interaction with/within it are answered via Dada’s ideology and works.  Concepts of undermining authority by changing the meaning of an object, as made famous by Duchamp’s Fountain in 1917 allows skeptics to see each “gate” as a space for freedom and movement within the seemingly rigid constructions of society.  If Dada can help us to understand such contemporary works, it seems a shame that the curators do not trust the viewers to think of Dada in modern terms.

In retrospect, it seems that the distance placed between the viewer and the art due to curatorial mediation also acts as a buffer between the audience and the movement’s anti-war focus.  Highlighted by Francis Picabia’s mechanical drawings, these were a group of people skeptical of the power of technology and machines.  Yet, as the curators point out, “many American artists embraced a machine aesthetic in an effort to develop a distinctly American modernism.”  A similar paradox occurs today: there is a fear of technology’s ability to end privacy, yet we are a culture that could not survive without the use of cellular phones, hand-helds, and the internet.   Instead of embracing these congruent attitudes, the exhibit presents the Dadaist’s sentiments like relics, ideas that died with the end of World War I. This is not the case. Distrust, angst, and anti-establishment feelings are all ways to describe liberal public reaction, especially in New York City, to contemporary American politics of the early twenty-first century.  To downplay those reactions in such a volatile exhibit is to dumb-down both the artists and the audience.

 
Another problem concerning Dada ideology does not find its roots in curatorial management but rather with the artists themselves.  As if in a game, the artists would lay down doctrine only to tweak it to suit their own sensibilities.  In his chance collages, Hans Arp tore up paper and let the pieces drop onto a larger paper canvas, gluing the squares down where they fell. Smears and smudges, however, suggest the artist moved the pieces once they had landed.  Leah Dickerman writes in the museum catalogue “the delicate balance seen in the finished works suggests that Arp exerted much greater control.”  The premise of chance is undermined by the artist’s own aesthetic preference.  Since the world was not in harmony, represented by the free placement of the square, Arp had to intercede and put things right.