Lesson 20

Polite Dada and coffee-table Surrealism

On the night of February the fifth one hundred years ago, in Spiegelgasse 1, Zurich, a group of provocateurs took to the stage and danced and roared “Dada, Dada, Dada!“

The Cabaret Voltaire was a melting pot of nationalities and genres, it was provocative, subversive, iconoclastic and innovative, which dissolved the boundaries between life and art. This anti art movement reeled about the violence and immorality of the First World War, they blame the middle classes and their apathy for allowing this tragedy to continue. They set out to wake them up.

As Hans Arp ironically put it, “In Zurich in 1915 losing interest in the slaughterhouses of war we turned to the Fine Arts“.

This is the historic avant-garde to which surrealism, Pop Art, Fluxus, mail art, Punk and, one could say, the whole of Post Modernism is indebted. It seems that most exhibitions I see these days look as if they are essentially Dadaist. Marcel Duchamp’s influence on ‘conceptual art’ and on a young British art generation is widely recognised (though rarely is his sexual content referenced). However, there are many other Dadaist strategies, practices and performances that have 21st century equivalents.

Dada’s influence on contemporary practice is now recognised, but it was not always this way. In the 60’s and 70’s Dada was marginalised. Dada did not seem to fit into the art history of Modernism; in fact, to me it seemed to be the antithesis of the high modernist practise of, say, Minimalism. It is only in a Post Modern context that Dada’s contribution can be clearly seen; only in hindsight does Dada become central to contemporary practice.

It should be of little surprise that Dada’s art strategies that were somehow seen as outside the mainstream of Modernism are now taken up in a Post Modern context. History is always revised in terms of contemporary needs. History always serves the present.

Everything has a history. Beyond Cubism and beyond any of the Modernist forms, Dada seems to be the biggest revolution and influential force in art today. For me along with Surrealism, Dada’s iconoclasm never easily fitted with Modernist ideology, yet historians did not seem to question Dada’s place in the development of Modernism, though some treated it as some minor aberration or inconvenience.

It is no coincidence that strategies of Dada are now common to most artists vocabulary. Unfortunately this is Dada shorn of its political context, shorn of its reason for being, shorn of its inventiveness and iconoclasm. Dada’s diverse forms and styles came out of a particular context, it innovated forms and ways of making art that addressed the issues of that time, the social and political context. The popularity of Duchamp’s apolitical “art games” is no surprise, but to simply appropriate Dadaist forms and styles, for me, misses the point. Much of Dada was highly political, from opposing the First World War to the anti-fascist work of George Grosz and John Heartfield in Hanover.

In Lesson 7 I stated that all innovations in art (and indeed science) happened in the first half of the 20th century and since then, this 20th century lexicon of forms and styles has simply been appropriated in the second part of the 20th century and the 21st century, sheared of its original meaning and history, with a change of meanings and context. This is Cultural Cannibalism which is often simply employed for stylistic effect, the original political ambience that brought these styles and forms into existence ignored and it’s original meaning being nullified.

Other than Dada there are many deviants from Modernism, artists outside that zeitgeist – such as Pierre Bonnard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Salvador Dali and others – were considered old fashioned and some even reactionary in their day. Art was always pluralist, and these artists represent an individualism and in their different ways a non-adherence to formal Modernist principals. Today there seems to be a level playing field with the ideological battles of the 20th century forgotten, art forms that were ideologically antagonistic when they were first originated now exist side by side. The old ideological arguments forgiven. In the 1960’s at the height of minimalism it would have seemed totally reactionary if you had have liked Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth, yet many of us art students did and were considered old fashioned, conservative, unsophisticated. If not as primitive as monkeys.

Within this Post-Modernist ethos it seems inevitable that the bits of 20th century art that were not Modernist are picked up. What is missing with our current crop of latter-day Dadaists is the lack of a deep anger or cynicism and the initial force of a World War (or any conflict and there are currently quite a few to pick from) that would give the work a political impetus and significance. Either that or a bourgeois to blame, a bourgeois to be offended by seeing their aesthetic sensibility trashed.

Maybe Post Modernism is to blame, and with the coming together of high and popular cultures, art is no longer is just the province of the middle classes. So it is with difficulty that we criticise or offend the bourgeois using art as a weapon as they no longer ‘own’ this culture. It is no longer ‘their’ art.

The 1980’s showed a revival in the powerful political Dadaist works of John Heartfield. At the time, I recall criticisms that his work was just Agit-prop but the longevity of his work would seem to suggest this is incorrect or is it that Fascism is still with us and has not been defeated: that is, the context of his art remains the same. John Heartfield continues to be influential, and artists working with photoshop and montage are indebted to him [though many would not realise that Heartfield invented photomontage!]. Not only did Dada spring from a social responsibility felt by many artists concerning the First World War but Dada later matured as an art form in the social context, particularly in Berlin and Hanover and became a significant political force of resistance.

In the Saatchi ‘Sensation‘ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997 which purported to shock, we have Dada robbed of political consciousness and bite. Thatcher’s children are not revolutionaries or protesters, they are by and large conformists. Here much was polite Dada and coffee-table Surrealism.This is Dada as absurdist entertainment, Dada as an aesthetic. Dada as the market currency of the day. More recently, the World Turned Upside Down exhibition ‘Sculpture and the Absurd‘ at the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, which supposedly examined the influence of Buster Keaton on contemporary art, was more readily a demonstration of the influence of Dadaist forms in contemporary practice. However, though there is gravitas to much of Keaton’s performances, Dada used the absurd and irrational and their innovative art forms as a political tool and not simply for humour or whimsy. This exhibition was the novel, the fashionable, art to cheat boredom, Dada as entertainment. Fun Dada.

Is it possible to shock today. We have the Chapman Brothers choosing sexually unpleasant and disturbing images, intentionally without any redeeming qualities, and their defacing reprints of Goya etchings which, like Punk kids who flaunted swastika tattoos to upset the adults who had little concept or understanding as to the ramifications and meaning of the swastika. There is graffiti art, but not all vandalism is iconoclastic, and so much of this un-inventive, unoriginal, conformist graffiti art is market orientated. And we have the powerful and committed hooliganism of Pussy Riot and the vandalism of Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, smashing Han dynasty urns (not Ming vases) thereby trashing part of China’s heritage, as it was the Han dynasty that created the social and cultural identity of China.

It has been said that “Ai Weiwei has no right to destroy or deface the work of others. The Taliban destroyed ancient sculptures and that was rightly denounced as a tragic crime against world art and culture. There is no reason for the world to applaud Weiwei’s destruction of ancient pottery. His acts are a crass publicity stunt and an insult to the original artist and the people who love these priceless artefacts. There is no high-minded art-babble that can disguise this stunt or fool people into thinking it is anything other than a contemptible crime.” For many such iconoclasm mirrors the Red Guard’s destruction of countless millions of works of art and literature from the Imperial past during the cultural revolution. Are the Taliban and Isis the true iconoclasts of today? Of course nobody would call such destruction and terrorism art. But like the Taliban and the Islamic State, Dada shocked for a reason, wishing to transform society. With today’s art, much is shock for shocks sake.

What would we think of a British artist who smashes the Portland vase?

At Coventry we had a student who founded the ‘Freedom to be Yourself‘ movement. Being noted for his ‘Naked Protest’ by removing his clothes in public, this usually ended up with him running hell for leather through the streets of London with the police in hot pursuit, claiming that the resulting chase was part of the ‘performance’. He appeared in court many times, and he was the first defendant to stand trail naked in court. He even spent 5 months in solitary confinement for his art. Although charged with being a public nuisance and a danger to public morals, he got off all charges. For a short time he became famous – if not infamous  – being sought out and interviewed by the media. There he was naked on breakfast television with Naturists discussing nudity. But he had little in common with Naturists; he had none of the wholesome philosophy of Naturism. His nudity was a simple and direct way of angering the establishment, of bringing them out into the open. Later, as mentioned in the New Yorker, in a skimpy dress he vandalised a Rembrandt self portrait in the National Gallery with a pound sign squeezed from a yellow acrylic tube, shouting – “Society is mentally ill! Destroy society, long live humanity!” Along with many others, I was not too pleased, feeling that the target was inappropriate as Rembrandt died destitute and was not a symbol of plutocracy. Like terrorism, I thought such acts were counter productive, as nobody remembers the reason for the protest and only the violent act is remembered. But such acts will bring notoriety.

You might regard the Dadaist political aims as unachievable through art, but the forms that such resistance generated are intimately connected to the intentions and that history. To separate these forms and processes from the forces that gave birth to them seems vacuous. Current art practice though influenced by Dada is not a practice of resistance. This Neo-Dada is popular and commonplace. The market decides the canon. The YBA’s of the 90’s were Thatcher’s children, Thatcher’s artists who did not have the problems with capitalism or the art market that the art students of the 1960’s had. However, there were artists in the 1960’s such as John Latham and Stuart Brisley who employed what could be regarded as Dadaist strategies when such practices were not mainstream or popular. Stuart Brisley took the studio practice into the social context, taking decision-making out of the studio into the gallery and, significantly, you could not buy or sell these performances. This was performance as the political act in the social context. Performance art no longer has this fundamental political aspect and in many cases it has become or is seen as a mix of theatre and the visual arts and consequently non-confrontational.

Here is a positive example of protest and graffiti art – Jill Posner recorded feminist graffiti in her book ‘Spray it Loud’, showing women spraying captions on large street billboards or wittily changing existing ones to a completely different meaning, drawing attention to advertising which was regarded as racist, pro-military and sexist. This was intelligent, ingenious graffiti using sharp comments, such as the work mentioned in Emmanuel Cooper’s book, the Sexual Perspective, where an advertisement for beds on which a naked woman lay partly covered by a sheet, with the slogan ‘We can improve your night-life’ had the addition ‘Join Lesbian United’.

To see Dada’s popularity and it’s nullification, the title of the website ‘Kids of Dada’ says it all. If pluralism means an end to the ‘new’, does it also mean that we cannot be iconoclastic any more? Will pluralism just soak this up and simply feed the appetite for diversity? Is there no longer the possibility of being blasphemous and no more pornography?

Is it still possible to be obscene? Is it possible to shock? Or has our society, outside the hermetically sealed art world, become more prudish, more prurient than Post Modernism might indicate?

 

Exercise, Lesson 20: Be tendentious.

This will necessitate some sort of political act or act of vandalism and could mean being offensive, obscene, blasphemous, confrontational, iconoclastic, irreverent, or asking difficult questions, making a statement or being didactic. Do not worry whether what you do is art or not, that is somebody else’s problem.