“God and my toothbrush are Dada, and New Yorkers can be Dada too, if they are not already.” Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement

I have to admit it: before visiting the Dada exhibit at the MoMA this rainy weekend, I thought Dada was a guy, ie, an artist guy that the whole movement had been named after.

According to Wikipideia, the origin of the name came about when:

a group of artists assembled in Zürich in 1916 [and] chose [the name for their new movement] at random by stabbing a French-German dictionary with a paper knife, and picking the name that the point landed upon. Dada in French is a child’s word for hobby-horse. In French the colloquialism, c’est mon dada, means it’s my hobby.

So it’s fitting that as the name Dada means many things that the art is all over the map as well.

I’m not going to pretend to be an art critic or historian who can tell one art movement from another. I’m just a girl off the street who felt like ducking into the air-conditioned MoMA on a muggy Saturday to check out a possibly weird exhibit.

And it was pretty weird. Not Whitney Bicentennial-Matthew Barney-Bjork weird, but the essence of Dadaist art is anti-traditional, anti-establishment, and anti-aesthetic. Because it peaked during World War I, there are a lot of anti-war messages, eg, the German government as a man-sized pig in an army uniform dangling from the ceiling. Most poignant to me were the paintings on war by artists who had actually served, like George Grosz and Max Ernst. Amputation is a big theme.

Throughout the exhibit are screens showing a film on a loop. In the film men’s hats blow off and fly around, someone drops a tray of tea cups, and men stroke beards that disappear and reappear. I know: hunh? I sat through some other short films as well. In one some guy gets shot, and during his funeral procession, his coffin gets away and the entire processions chases after it till finally they find it in a field. The coffin is open and hey the guy is alive, and then proceeds to make everyone disappear. There’s more - a jumping ballerina for instance - but I can’t remember it clearly as I was in an A/C induced stupor on and off throughout.

To me it was a fun exhibit because it’s so different. The audio guide - free with your entry - is helpful too.

The exhibit is showing through September 11.

Related posts:

1. MoMa Soaking, Dali Toking
2. Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006
3. Met[roblogging] Museum of Art
4. Damn good coffee!
5. Life As An Artist In NYC Part Two