Dadadadada

The ghost of an almost forgotten art movement came to life in Manhattan last week. At the urging of a 57th Street gallery owner, 65-year-old Artist Marcel Duchamp* had set up the first major exhibit of Dada ever held in the U.S. The result was a collection of 300 of the most sardonic jokes ever perpetrated on art.

Going Nowhere. Dada got its start in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I with a group of rebellious young artists who thought the world was going nowhere. They were tired of war, booms and depressions, had no faith in religion and despised the self-conscious modern art of the cubists and futurists. As a protest, they made up their minds to be as disorderly as possible, and defiantly named their movement by simply plunging a knife into a French dictionary. The knife point came to rest at a wildly appropriate word: "Dada," the French word for hobbyhorse.

Making fun of everything around them, the Dadaists printed weird books and magazines with nonsense titles such as The Blind Man and Rongwrong. There was an ear-splitting kettledrum music to which devotees shrieked verses in gibberish; they built powerfully useless machines, wrote ridiculous "chemical" and "static" poems. Their art was a lunatic satire on all advance-guard art: "modern" pictures of women with matchstick faces, cut-out heads filled with grinding gears and cogs. And when they held an exhibition, they were likely to walk around with white gloves but without ties, meow like cats, carefully count the pearls of visiting dowagers, and invite the boys from the bar next door in for a fight.

Dada was not all meaningless. It developed bold new techniques of poster art, laid some obvious groundwork for surrealism. But inevitably the movement was a victim of its own excesses. During the middle '20s, Dada suddenly died out and surrealism took its place.

Eternal Spirit. For last week's show, Old Dada-Daddy Marcel Duchamp had hung some of Dada's best humor and bitterest protest. There was a carved wooden head festooned with watchworks, metric rule and alligator wallet, a sickly pink portrait of a man with blotched face and four combs for hair, a gutter collage of torn ticket stubs, discarded buttons, hairpins and old newspapers. A phonograph beeped out Dada sounds, a metronome with a staring eye pasted to the blade ticked away methodically, and every visitor had to pass Marcel Duchamp's own contribution to the show: a porcelain urinal over the doorway decorated with a sprig of mistletoe.

Manhattan gallery-goers flocked to the show, and Marcel Duchamp thought they took it quite well. "Dada is not passe," he insisted. "The Dada spirit is eternal. Our art will always exist as a concrete expression of freedom." And he could feel that the visitors "understood immediately." Understanding or not, most people had trouble deciding if it was safe to pick up Duchamp's catalogue for the show. Duchamp had them printed on huge ( 2 ft. by 3 ft.) sheets of tissue, crumpled them into balls and packed them in a wastebasket. People with long memories half expected that the crumpled balls would explode with a bang if touched. None has--so far.

*Whose famed Nude Descending a Staircase was the sensation of Manhattan's 1913 Armory Show, the first big U.S. exhibition of modern art.

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