Dado's 50th

The stoic banking center of Zurich is the only city in stolid Switzerland that can claim to have fostered an art movement. Ironically, it was dadaism, which purported to prize meaninglessness over meaning. The movement was born one day in 1916 in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, where a couple of artistic types flipped open a dictionary and chose the first word that struck their eye.

It was dada, meaning hobbyhorse in French.

The classic dada art work was an ordinary urinal that Marcel Duchamp put in an exhibition and entitled Fountain. It typified the cynical frustration that grew out of World War I, and the movement satirized all the other artistic isms of the time.

Last week staid old Zurich celebrated dada's 50th anniversary. Over a thou sand gathered where the Cabaret Voltaire once stood (and Lenin once lived).

Megaphones blared "Dada is all!" A brass band blasted off-key. And, heaven forfend, even the mayor, Emil Landolt, showed up to solemnly read a dada poem: "Switzerland is Dada. /Dada is nothing. /Superfluous mountains keep Switzerland from achieving concrete Dadaism. /Level the mountains."

He then unveiled a marble plaque to mark the site of dada's birth and an abstract navel designed by one of dada's founders, Jean Arp, for contemplation.

Affixed to a wall, the marble belly but ton, an omphalos with oomph, looks like a poached ostrich egg with the yel low plucked out. Leaflets shaped like navels showered from rooftops. As the crowd finally repaired to a popular cafe for disrepair, the mayor turned to a bystander and whispered: "I just don't understand why this thing had so much success."

* Plaque reads: "In this house on February 5, 1916, the Cabaret Voltaire opened and the dada movement was founded."

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