Dada, National Gallery of Art, February 19-May 14

Went to see the dada exhibition at the National Gallery East Building yesterday. It's quite a show, arranged into rooms based on the cities where the dada movement was active: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, and Paris. The gallery has managed to bring together hundreds of posters, paintings, and objects, including Sophie Taeuber's marionettes, Prussian Archangel, and lots of Man Ray.

It was interesting to see how the dadaists, especially those in Berlin, were reacting not just to the first world war, but specifically to the treatment of wounded and maimed veterans. Many, many prints, paintings, and objects deal with prosthetics, with amputation, with disfigurement. Of the many timely aspects of the show--and there were many--this one was eerily timely.

Lots of dada must have been "better" live, because so much of it was performance. For example, the poems with words, or sound poems, sound funny in the recordings, and they were reportedly uproariously funny when performed. Unfortunately, the museum didn't have any of that on film (or video). I guess it was even before the advent of the talkie. I would also have loved to have seen the puppet show that used the marionettes to spoof Freud and Jung.

The highlight of the show may be the automated playing of the disconcerting Le Ballet mécanique by the "robot band"--made up of 16 grand pianos, four bass drums, three xylophones, and a series of alarms and bells. It's strangely musical and yet cacophonous at the same time. Parts of the ballet sound like machinegun fire, parts like construction, parts like the workings of a factory.

My one random thought about the show is that the greatest pop cultural impact of dada must be Monthy Python's Flying Circus. Monty Python is really, really dada. (Think sound poems.)