Dada does Dallas

The Art Tourist goes back in Modern Time

June 13, 2007

DALLAS – Here is the premise of the show running from June 16 through Sept 18, 2007 at the Dallas Art Museum: a rich lady and her friends in New York in the 1920s started a group called Société Anonyme to introduce the contemporary art of the time to America, at least those Americans in New York. Her friends were Dada — Marcel Duchamp Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters — artists who pushed the concept of anti-art.

The lady was Katherine Drier. And her house was the exhibition space for the Société’s shows.

Duchamp wanted the living-room gallery to look less like a house and more like a gallery, so he put rubber flooring over the hardwood stripes. This, and the collection of artwork that made up the first show, are in the first room of the Dallas exhibition. To give the feel of that show, the curators included reproductions of some of the work that was unavailable, like a glass case with about a dozen standing-up drawings arranged like the spokes on a wheel. The drawings didn’t move, so to see every one, a viewer must walk around in a circle. They are sketchy and remind this Art Tourist of several goofy, contemporary things I've walked around to make sure I saw every clue to the meaning. And I like this piece, the drawings actually progressed and seemed to indicate the passage of time, which is exactly what happened when I walked around the piece. Time in art in 1926. Pretty progressive. I would like to make a smell-art piece to set just outside this white-walled exhibition space, and recreate the smells on the stoop outside Drier’s house in 1926 so we could all get the picture of how long ago this show, these artists, worked.

The newspaper ad for the show was dominated by a beautiful drawing of a pen and it was the artists' idea to gave the impression that the show would be about practical objects and maybe include a giveaway in order to attract visitors. Cleaver marketing.

Some of the work in the show looks a little ratty, a little worse for time: there is a Francis Picabia collage framed in 3-D manner with rails of rough-hewn wood — preview of shaped canvas of the 1970s and Jasper Johns' Device. Drawings called Typo-Plastic made by Stefi Kiesler are the predecessors of computer art. On now-yellowing paper Kiesler created an image using a typewriter to make the marks. There are several Rayographs by Man Ray who used photography as a way to make paintings with black and white. Kurt Schwitters makes sculptures he calls Merz, that are wooden cutouts, painted and assembled and one looks strikingly like a 21st Century Thomas Scully painting. He made rooms and houses full of these assemblages that he called merzbaus that are eerily like contemporary installation art.

I cannot think of anything that artists have done since this time that wasn’t foreshadowed in this show. Maybe Ms. Drier only saved those things that were used well in the future to give to the Yale Art Museum, but seen together in one room today, this assembledge today seems as if she used a time machine to assemble it. At minimum, is a terrific, graphic lesson in Modern Art.

p.s. Regarding permanence. When you make really experimental things, sometimes they look like junk in the future. Like the ghostly fresco of the Last Supper that Da Vinci did in Milan. Sometimes you just have to be there when art is new and contemporary, instead of old and sanctified.

An Art Tourist travels to see art. Notes from the road end up here, and are jaded by living in the contemporary world, making a living and an American education.