Dada and the Ailing Vision of Contemporary Art

I visited the Museum of Modern Art yesterday where I saw a rather interesting exhibit devoted to the Dada movement. It reminded one of the vibrancy and excitement of this and other early 20th Century movements in which the artists became theorists and strove to challenge prevailing conceptions of art through the presentation of some relatively unified vision. Of course, with Dada, there is also a great deal of humor. One of the pieces on display was a replica of Duchamp’s famous “assisted readymade” Fountain. As many of you know, he submitted this work pseudonymously to an organization he helped run to test its claim that it would accept anything for exhibition. When it was rejected, Duchamp resigned in protest. The rationale behind the board’s decision? It was merely a piece of plumbing and not a work of art.

[The joke seems lost on Juan Antonio Ramirez who, in his Duchamp, Love and Death, Even, interprets Fountain as a sexually ambiguous piece, neither masculine nor feminine but bisexual. It is masculine insofar as it is a male urinal, feminine insofar as it is "a receptacle for liquid effusions of different kinds: showers, natural waterfalls, perfumes, etc."1 I'm not making this up.]

After being immersed in the visionary and often hilarious work and theory of Dada, I moved on to an exhibit entitled “Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection”. One of the first pieces I saw was a large checkerboard pattern of alternating colors painted by Sean Scully (this is not the one, but very similar). In anticipation of the obvious question, “Why this?” the accompanying plaque explained that Scully did realize the battle for abstraction had already been won but simply wanted to continue it in a “more relaxed, more open, and more confident” manner. This piece, in my mind, managed to demonstrate why, now that the abstraction battle has been won, we ought to have a celebratory drink and move on to new ideas.

The first piece in this exhibit that I found particularly interesting was a sculpture entitled Horsefly. I was disappointed, however, to learn from the accompanying text that in this work sculptor Martin Puryear was interested in “mediating between a feeling of massiveness and fragility to reach a point of extreme vulnerability” I discovered another intriguing work, Susana Solano’s In Search of a Landscape No. 1. Again, I was stung by the discovery of the artist’s vision: “In my life I hardly differentiate the space used from the fleeting places, my own objects from those not mine, other people’s thoughts from my own.” She hardly differentiates her works and thoughts from those of other people? Why does it seem that contemporary art often involves this kind of renunciation of thought?

Gone is the rhetorical courage and sweeping vision of the early 20th Century. How is it that reading the Dada manifestos can manage to breathe such life into works that were already interesting in their own right but the explanations for the two sculptures above (and this is no isolated incident) serve only to deflate the impact of the work? If there is no real vision behind a work it is much better left unexplained. That way, at least it has the chance to succeed aesthetically. But I fear that secular art stripped of such vision could never rise above the level of mere design, doomed to be swallowed up by mass culture without any coherent protest.

1 Ramirez, Juan. Duchamp, Love and Death, Even, Reaktion Books Ltd, p. 59