Opinion
Andre Breton, Dada’s
Taciturn Target
THE DAILY PIC: MoMA's Dadaglobe show gets at Dada's strong, silent core.
THE
DAILY PIC (#1585): “Dadaglobe Reconstructed” is precisely the kind of show that
the Museum of Modern Art should be doing, and very often has done of late.
Memories of “Bjork” have pretty much been erased by an absurdly full roster of
utterly unpandering projects.
For “Dadaglobe,”
curators have labored to unearth a vast trove of material once intended for
what was supposed to have been the ultimate anthology of the Dada movement. The
book was planned in detail by the Romanian avant-gardist Tristan Tzara, in
Paris around 1921, but a lack of funds torpedoed it late in the process. All
that remains are Tzara’s detailed records and the art works themselves that
he’d meant to include, which MoMA has tracked down in surprisingly large
numbers.
Today’s Pic is one
of my favorite objects from the Tzara project, and from the MoMA show, because
it does such a perfect job of summing up modern art’s love of the new, and its
disdain for those who resist it. An unknown photographer has captured a
dandified André Breton, not long
before he helped found the Surrealist movement, at the great Dada festival in
Paris in 1920. For the occasion, Breton has put on a placard designed by Francis Picabia, bearing
a target-like abstraction and the words “For you to like something, you have to
have already seen and heard it for ages, you bunch of morons.”
Among other things,
the placard’s concentric circles make an important point that we’ve lost sight
of: Abstraction, in its first years, always came with an edge of Dada absurdity
to it – and maybe still ought to, if it’s to keep its original heft. Jasper Johns, another
target-maker, knew this; Kenneth
Noland should have. Perhaps the utter sobriety of early
pro-abstract manifestos was meant to counteract any remaining odor of Dada.
I can’t help
feeling that Breton is quite literally and deliberately making himself a target
of jokes, with the text that he bears as the disdainful rebuttal of a voiceless
martyr. (The sacrificial effect is helped by the fact that he has centered the
target on his gonads.)
Breton’s silence
makes sense of another element in the photo, and in Tzara’s entire book
project, that I’m not sure has been much noticed.
He is holding a
copy of the very letter that Tzara sent out to solicit contributions to his Dadaglobe anthology. The sheet bears a carefully designed
letterhead that reads MoUvEmEnT DADA, with the alternating large-and-small type
that I’ve echoed here. The thing is, for any native French speaker who looks at
this photo, or even at the Dada letterhead itself, the large capitals, along
with the disappearingly small letters between them, can only make that mouvement read as muet – “silent” or “mute.”
Dada was a noisy
movement, for sure, and its artists enjoyed making a ruckus. But for all its
deliberate absurdity, it had a space of focus and concentration at its core –
as witnessed by the close-mouthed withdrawal of Breton in this portrait.
Dada pretended to
be all about anti-art, but its artists knew perfectly well that in the process
they were engaged in making great art, in the same lineage as
Leonardo and Rembrandt and other makers of the telling and silent tableau.
For a
full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
Follow artnet
News on Facebook.
