by MICHAEL WHITE

ON DISPLAY IN the fascinating exhibition Dadaglobe Reconstructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (to 18th September)1 is a work by Marcel Duchamp with the exhortatory title To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (Fig.70). By offering a specific set of instructions, Duchamp aspired to ‘eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient’, as Peter Bürger noted.2 Notably, Bürger’s main examples include Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to make a Dadaist poem’ and André Breton’s account of the process of automatic writing in the Manifesto of Surrealism.The work of art is no longer an object of contemplation but a stimulus to activity, even if that activity is as seemingly useless as Duchamp’s title suggests. There never was a declaration of ‘How to make a Dada exhibition’, but Dadaglobe Reconstructed uses a set of instructions as its organising principle, and in doing so raises fundamental questions about the status of the Dada work of art.

In late 1920, the poet Tristan Tzara, who had moved from Zürich to Paris that year, began sending out letters (Fig.71) inviting contributions to a compendium called Dadaglobe that he planned to publish in an edition of 10,000 copies. He recruited fifty potential contributors from ten countries. Intriguingly, Tzara did not ask just for illustrations of existing works but instead listed four categories of submissions: ‘Please send 3 or 4 black and white drawings and 2 or 3 photos of your works. One drawing can be colourful, but containing no more than 2 or 3 colours. In place of the colour drawing you can design a book page with or without text. Would you please also send a clear photo of your head (not body), which you can alter freely, although it should retain clarity.’ (catalogue, p.40).

As Germaine Everling, whose address Tzara used for his correspondence, recalled, the response was an ‘avalanche of letters’ (p.44). By early 1921, Tzara began the process of selecting over one hundred images and a similar number of texts for what was intended to be the greatest Dada work of all. For complex reasons, which are explained in the meticulously researched catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, Dadaglobe fizzled out during the course of the year and was soon forgotten as Dada itself rapidly unravelled.

Despite the demise of Dadaglobe, Tzara did not let the works themselves gather dust but frequently lent them for illustration in other publications or to exhibitions. Several have become among the most famous works of Dada, although their origin in Dadaglobe has been obscured. In 1937 Tzara loaned Alfred Barr some forty works for his exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, including many Dadaglobe works. Max Ernst’s The Punching Ball, or the Immortality of Buonarroti (cat. no.78; Fig.72) and The Chinese Nightingale (no.71), Johannes Baargeld’s Venus at the King’s Game (no.15) and Francis Picabia’s Rastadada Painting (no.116), all of which are included in the exhibition under review. This makes Dadaglobe Reconstructed a very big small show. Most of the objects are modest in scale, given that they needed to be sent by post. At the same time, by reconstructing what would have been Dada’s magnum opus, Dadaglobe Reconstructed invites us to reconsider Dada as a whole, in ways as profound as the Dada travelling exhibition of 2005–06 which was its catalyst.3

The 2005–06 exhibition prompted the Museum of Modern Art to catalogue the Dada works in its collection.4 Adrian Sudhalter noticed the recurrence of certain marks and numbers on the reverse of many of these, and by examining Tzara’s papers in Paris she was able to tally the marks with Tzara’s Dadaglobe checklists. She has since found almost all of the Dadaglobe works, many of which were hiding in plain sight in the collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Kunsthaus Zürich, while others had found their way into private hands following the sale of Tzara’s collection in 1968.

The catalogue contains an important essay by Sudhalter (‘How to Make a Dada Anthology’) that provides the most comprehensive account of Dadaglobe to date and sets the project in a variety of highly illuminating contexts. The catalogue also features a 160-page printed reconstruction of Dadaglobe, supported by a wealth of documents including correspondence and the works themselves (many illustrated verso as well as recto), along with a discussion of photo-mechanical printing processes. Here we are as close as possible to the realisation of Tzara’s grand project.

The works made for Dadaglobe do not appear in the same order on the museum’s walls as they do in either the printed reconstruction or in Tzara’s checklists, which can be consulted in a digital display in the exhibition; it is not ‘reconstructive’ in that sense. Different organising principles have been sought to determine how we should understand the art works apart from their appearance in the publication. In its previous installation at the Kunsthaus Zürich, geography was used as a structuring device. Works were gathered according to their contributors’ nationality in three blocks, Allied Powers, Central Powers and neutral countries, emphasising the way that Dadaglobe brought together artists from across those powerful divides. In New York, with more space, a more complicated structure has been conceived. The four requests in Tzara’s letter soliciting works have been used to assemble the works into loose groups: original drawings, photographs of existing works, a design for a book page and a ‘clear photo of your head (not body)’.

The first room begins with a wonderful example of the creative response to the last of Tzara’s solicitations, a Portrait of Sophie Taeuber with her Dada Head (no.151; Fig.73). In it, the artist posed behind her sculpture so that only a portion of the left side of her face remained visible, which was further concealed by a veil. The photograph of her ‘head’ is very clear, assuming this refers to the sculpture and not to her person, an example of the perversity of Dada logic and also the immediate confusion of Tzara’s categories, this being a photograph both of a work and of its maker. The fact that the exhibition includes the object itself, loaned from Centre Pompidou, Paris, allows us to study how it is represented in the photograph and the kinds of decisions Taeuber made when setting up this image. Scale, angle and lighting all play a role, as does the placement of the word DADA, written on the right-hand side of the sculpture so that, on the vertical axis of the photograph, it falls at the very centre and lines up horizontally with the artist’s eye.

This shows how well someone like Taeuber understood the implications of Tzara’s project. These were artists who were not only thinking about the dissemination of their practice by means of mechanical reproduction, but also about the implications of those means for the production of the works themselves. Hannah Höch sent Tzara details of her monumental photomontage Cut with the kitchen knife, no doubt aware that in reproduction it would be too small to see properly. However, in doing so she effectively created new works, which were submitted with new titles, Kultur in Staat and Weltrevolution. The latter is a particularly fascinating example as it features a part of the photomontage Höch later reworked. Here we have an example of a reproduction that has become an original. Returning to Duchamp, his submission to Tzara included photographs of both To Be Looked At … and the painting Bride of 1912. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to compare the original works to their reproductions, whereby, in the context of the exhibition, the photograph becomes the primary artefact and the original a document used to contextualise it. The significance of this for later practice can be judged by visitors who go from Dadaglobe Reconstructed to the permanent collection displays and visit the ‘Dada’ room, where a copy of the notes Duchamp published in 1934 as the so-called Green Box is on view. There they will see further reproductions of To Be Looked At …and Bride, demonstrating how Duchamp’s engagement with Dada practices set in motion later meditations of profound consequence on the interplay between original and reproduction.

A well-known feature of the Green Box is its seeming randomness, which has left readers seeking meaning in it by making new permutations of its notes, diagrams and images. As Sudhalter explains, Tzara was determined that Dadaglobe would not betray any obvious editorial control (pp.56–57), and some of Tzara’s decisions concerning placement were simply determined by the demands of printing, others by chance. There is nothing to suggest that the works were arranged in the exhibition in a similar fashion, but the fact that the curators worked with a ‘ready-made’ checklist raises some interesting questions about creating Dada exhibitions and the potential legacy of this exhibition.

Dadaglobe Reconstructed has taken works intended for a publication, not for an exhibition, and made a compelling display. If one were selecting a Dada show, not all of them would be on the shortlist, despite the appearance of many key works. The exhibition looks very different to the ‘Dada’ room in the Museum, dominated as it is by Duchamp’s ready-mades and the large mechanomorphic paintings by Francis Picabia and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. There are numerous artists in Dadaglobe Reconstructed who are little known, such as Aldo Fiozzi and Otto Griebel; other works are of poor quality, such as the photographic portraits by Raoul Hausmann which, due to post-War shortages, were badly developed. By adhering to Tzara’s principles, the curators of Dadaglobe Reconstructed have embraced Dada’s assault on the tyranny of good taste, and paid due regard to the spirit of Dada as an inclusive community, the idea of the group that overrides some of the difficulty of ‘making sense’ of the works.

On display at the end of the exhibition is a copy of the journal New York Dada, published in the spring of 1921, containing an announcement by Tzara of the impending appearance of Dadaglobe, an act that may have in fact precipitated its demise (p.64). The announcement follows Tzara’s declaration to the editors in the USA that ‘You ask for authorisation to name your periodical Dada. But Dada belongs to everybody’. Despite its non-materialisation, Dadaglobe sparked a wave of interactions and the making of numerous extraordinary objects. Its realisation as a publication and an exhibition in 2016, one hundred years on from the adoption of the name Dada, does not feel like the closing of a chapter, although it is the culmination of a major piece of research. The history of Dada has not been completed but opened out to a new story, one where Dada has been released from its accepted position in a chain of ‘movements’ comprised of canonical objects, and even from its previously accepted geographical boundaries. Instead this exhibition makes it far more clearly visible as a strategy, an activity, or even a mentality, speaking across time and place.

1 The exhibition was previously shown at Kunsthaus Zürich (5th February to 1st May 2016). Catalogue: Dadaglobe Reconstructed. Edited by Adrian Sudhalter. 304 pp. incl. 277 col. + b. & w. ills. (Scheidegger & Spiess, Zürich, 2016), £40 (HB). ISBN 978–3–906269-05–4.

2 P. Bürger: Theory of the Avant-Garde, transl. M. Shaw, Minneapolis 1984, p.53.

3 Ibid., p.53.

4 The exhibition was shown in Paris, Washington and New York and was reviewed in this Magazine, 148 (2006), pp.505–06.