Can a urinal be art?
This is a debate that raged–not during the recent Robert Mapplethorpe, federal-funding-of-the-arts controversy, or in the counterculture struggles of the 1960s and ’70s or as part of whatever it was that the Beats were up to.
The artistic row and objet that caused it burst upon the American cultural scene in 1917. The inspiration of artist-provocateur Marcel Duchamp, it was a weapon in a brief, madcap and splendidly outrageous war upon the art and all other establishments of the time. Duchamp, Man Ray and other practitioners called it simply “Dada.”
And it’s come back, urinal and all, in a fascinating and quite heady exhibition, “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York,” on view through Feb. 23 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
What does “Dada” mean?
It’s a colloquial French term for hobby horse.
What does that have to do with art, society and culture?
As Duchamp would have replied, “exactly.”
The roots of modern art lie in the work and genius of Paul Cezanne, the mad whorls and colors of the Fauvists and the nightmarish phantasms of the pre-World War I Russian and German expressionists.
But Dada, as much a philosophy (or anti-philosophy) as artistic discipline, took irreverence and unconventionalism a vast leap forward–if it can said to have had any direction at all.
Dada was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916–an oasis of staid calm in the midst of a world gone mad with slaughter and war. Dada’s parents were a Romanian-born poet named Tristan Tzara, who took the word at random from a French dictionary; German writer Hugo Ball; Alsatian painter Jean Arp; and a few other intellectuals.
Their credo as such was that the essential goodness of man had been corrupted by modern and especially, militaristic society, and they created an art form–indeed, an art revolution–intended to shock and bewilder and make that society take a hard look at the absurdity of itself. If you will, it countered absurdity with absurdity.
As liberating and delightful as it was provocative and irritating, Dada quickly spread to Paris and New York–and later, post-war Germany.
It died out in Paris in 1922–replaced by so much else in that city’s cultural reflowering in that decade. It lasted in New York until 1925, with Man Ray observing that New York was in itself too crazy for something like Dada to long survive in it.
As the more than 200 artifacts and works in this show illustrate, nearly all that Dada left behind was some marvelous art–and in a sense, all that came after.
Duchamp’s urinal was simply that. He upended it, so that it sat on its back, and bestowed upon it the lofty title “Fountain,” as well as the artistic signature–a pseudonym–“R. Mutt,” inspired by the comic strip and vaudeville act “Mutt and Jeff.”
New York’s avant garde Society of Independent Artists had a policy of accepting any artist’s work for exhibition as long as the artist had paid the society’s $1 initiation fee and $5 annual dues.
The Society’s board of directors drew the line at “Fountain,” however. One of them, “Ashcan” school painter George Bellows, argued (prophetically, in terms of today’s “art”): “You mean to say, if a man sent in horse manure glued to a canvas that we would have to accept it?”
Duchamp countered that a urinal was a common, ordinary object used by millions of Americans every day without any of them taking offense.
One art critic opined, “The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated in the brain of man.”
Much closer to the mark was the comment of American painter Marsden Hartley: “Life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be treated other than with the spirit of comedy in comprehension.”
Art entrepreneur and hypster Alfred Stieglitz eventually exhibited “Fountain” in his “291 Gallery,” where he also introduced the world to the genius of the painter who became his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Though “going Dada” became a synonym for general daffiness, Hartley suggested that all Americans apply its whims, notions and lunacies to their daily lives. And in the 1920s, many did.
Dada found many outlets, including poetry, the stage and films, especially those of photographer Paul Strand. In music, such crazed pieces as Erik Satie’s ballet “Parade,” which had sets designed by Picasso and employs typewriters and gunshots as part of the music, could be construed as Dadaist.
But Dada lives on mostly in its visual art, a bizarre and wonderful wealth of which appears in this show.
Along with “Fountain,” there’s displayed here another work of Duchamp’s that occasioned even more controversy–his fractionated, quasi Cubist “Nude Descending a Staircase,” that incensed critics at New York’s now legendary 1913 “Armory Show” of shockingly modern art.
Duchamp’s principal co-conspirator in New York and Paris was American-born artistic revolutionary Man Ray. He is remembered mostly for his extraordinary modern photography and antic and amorous lifestyle, but he wished ardently to be thought of as a painter and sculptor.
If none of his canvasses proved as singular as his photographs, some of his paintings were strikingly successful. Among such in this show is Ray’s brutally powerful depiction of mass struggle, “War.”
Jollier is Walter Pach’s riposte to critics of “Nude Descending”–an Aubrey Beardsley-like rendering of two naked, masked women, their hands decorously covering their intimate areas, posed on a carpeted staircase. The title: “Prudes Descending a Staircase.”
Among the most delightful–indeed, darling–pieces in this show are the light, airy but penetrating sketches and paintings of socialite turned bohemian Beatrice Wood. Among the more fanciful–and suggestive–are “Soiree (Evening Party),” “Dieu Protege Amants (God Protects Lovers)” and the very womanly “Pour Toi–Psychologie (For You–Psychology).”
Wood, a lovely and most fashionably dressed lady, appears in a photograph here posed with Duchamp and fellow Dadaist Francis Picabia. Where? Where else? Coney Island.
Dadaism was as much a matter of personalities and lifestyles as it was artistic expression. Some, like the impish and seemingly deranged Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, quite possibly had no talent at all, but loomed large on the Dadaist landscape simply because of her persona.
As the world raced through the manic hedonism of the ’20s, on to the Great Depression and worse, it’s easy to see how something as deliberately trivial as Dadaism might be cast aside.
An attempt was made to revive it in the New York and Paris cultural renaissance of the 1950s, but it just didn’t catch on.
Still, its spirit lives on in so many ways. In William Wegman’s Weimaraners, for example, or almost any haut couture fashion show.
And, as many a congressman will proclaim, there are still artists who think urinals are art–though they take it much too seriously.
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THE FACTS
`Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York’
When: Through Feb. 23
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York
Admission: $8 adults, $6 senior citizens and students
Call: 212-570-3676
