Dada-art for a World Gone Mad

Scan page 8

TIM SUMMERS reviews the art exhibition "Dada and Surrealism Reviewed" at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, SE1 until 27 March This exhibition has brought together exhibits from an international spectrum and provides a unique opportunity to examine and feel the important and related currents of Dada and Surrealism.

There is a heavy irony in seeing the deliberate debunking of the art establishment by the Dadaists now presented as hallowed objects in such a prestigeous display.

If the Dada movement, (famous for its found objects like the urinal displayed by Marcel Duchamp) is now assimilated by the bourgeois order, we can also note how "Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution" (with its explicit support of the Third International) has provided the stock-in-trade dream imagery of advertising ever since.

Carnage

In understanding Dada, we must take the carnage of the First World War as our starting point in order to understand the exasperation that lay behind the phonetic poems, junk art, nihilistic manifestos and seeming childishness that characterised the Dada movement from Paris, New York and Zurich to Berlin; worthy tributes to a 'world gone mad'.

Hugo Ball, writing

Zurich, said:

"When I founded the Cabaret Voltaire, | was convinced that there must be a few young men in Switzerland who like me, wanted not only to enjoy their independence but to prove it."

Different perspectives While the literary-inspired Cabaret Voltaire was presenting its programme of spontaneous onomatopoeic poetry and considered visual incoherence, just over the road Lenin formulated different perspectives for confronting the bourgeois "order"

If Zurich Dada was largely deaf to these, Berlin Dada was not.

The high point of class struggle that characterised post-war Germany had an immediate reflection in the acid social criticism and truculence of the Berlin Dadaists, of which two founder members, John Heartfield and George Grosz were also members of the Communist Party.

While the latter's criticism of Dadaism as a petit-bourgeois folly may well have justification in major respects we should note the development of the periodical Jederman sein eigner Fussball (Each man his own football) towards Die Pleite (The Bankrupt) and In Blutiger Ernst (in Deadly Earnest) as steps along a road leading from early idealistic nihilism towards fashioning a vehicle for working class insurrection.

The Berlin section of the exhibition displays a famous cover drawing by Grosz for Die Pleite showing the bloodhound of Social Democracy, Ernst Noske, raising a glass as a victory toast, surrounded by the bleeding and mutilated bodies of the working class.

For obscure reasons this section of the exhibition as opposed to others, has little or no translation of its captions.

Violent peak

Other works by Grosz, like the outstanding oil paintings "The little wife murderer' and 'Dangerous Street' take CuboFuturism to its most violent peak.

Heartfield's early photomontages developed within the Dada movement were a springboard to the later brilliance of the anti-fascist AIZ magazine covers.

Meanwhile, in Hanover, Kurt Schwitters was developing delicate and refined compositional miniatures from montages of refuse.

These ethereal works were composed of labels, sweet wrappers, tram tickets and paint and cloth textures.

The exhibition gives strong testimony to the level of international artistic crosspollination taking place at the time.

Picabia's "Udnie" flows directly from Italian Futurism at its most flamboyant, while at the other extreme, several works by Picasso are of the most severe and formal of the early classical Cubist period.

High expression

Other early works of Paul Klee and Hans Richter have clear roots in German Expressionism.

The theme of human life seen in mechanical metaphor dominates the plethora of Dadaist writing, and in visual terms, finds a high expression in works by Marcel Duchamp.

His painting 'Bride' is a mechanised staccatto movement of wood-coloured forms, prefiguring the more famous 'Nude Descending a Staircase' His readymades include a bicycle wheel free to rotate above a stool, and the famous urinal entitled 'Fountain'.

Perhaps his most notorious work on display Lisa sporting moustache.

Man Ray's contribution continues this sardonic vein: his "Gift Object" is a household iron with a barbaric extrusion of nails from its work surface and more subtly his row of mundane coathooks is entitled "Trap".

Hybrid

Man Ray's photography is first rate and the exhibition also includes Paul Citroen's "Metropolis" brilliantly photo-montaged city construction of Bauhaus vintage.

The essential link between the Dada and Surrealist movements is Max Ernst; his 'L'elephant Celebes' is a curious hybrid somewhere between an elephant and an industrial vat, while the suggested metamorphosis latent in most of his work finds a sinister expression in "Joie de vivre" where, within a dark Rousseau-esque forest, plants become insects.

Ernst's 'Dadaville' is a sombre cityscape composed of strips of heavy-grained cork. This was an important point of departure for him towards a whole series of city and forest studies rich in Gothic menace.

In his outstanding work "The Illustrious Dreamsmith" (surely an autobiographic title?) threatening bird-like creatures lurk behind evaporating and coalescing forms as in a vision reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch.

The deeply obsessional character plus the technical range of Ernst place his work above the more self-conscious artifice of his successors.

Ominous silence

A central painter of the Surrealist movement is De Chirico, whose images of ominous silence and threat have paved the way for most Surrealist painters since him.

In particular, one can detect his influence on Magritte, Dali and Delvaux. The movement, basing itself on Freud's theories of the subconscious was programmed by Andre Breton towards "pure psychic automation"-scarcely the case in Dali's work for example, but certainly a factor in the calligraphic work of Arshile Gorky, Andre Masson through to Jackson Pollock and American Abstract Expressionism.

The exhibition is too large and demanding on the senses to be navigated without a long break mid-way.

This cautionary note should be taken as a compliment to the exhibition

Scan page 9

Wednesday