Dada: Zurich.

Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, eau-de-cologne New York, Paris, edited through Leah Dickerman, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and modern York, D.A.P., 2005; 519 pages, $65

The Dada Seminars, edited by way of Leah Dickerman and Matthew s Witkovsky, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and of the present day York, D.A.P., 2005; 308 pages, $45

Anyone who has tried to map abroad the range of activities that were branded as Dada in the World War I era knows to what degree elusive this avant-garde movement can be. For starters, there's the sheer elasticity of the period of time Dada, which was used by dint of myriad artists (as a noun, adjective and, above all, a pair of incantatory syllables) to arouse everything from child's play to war, from a strange form of philosophy to political anarchy. Then there's the considerable diversity of artistic and literary activities--drawing, painting, collage, assemblage, photography, photomontage, film, performance, interventions, verse plays, manifestos and sound verse not to mention the meta-genre that we would now call conceptual art. Further complicating matters is geopolitical diversity, since artists rallied subordinate to the banner of Dada in from one side of to the other half a dozen countries.

No awed curiosity so many curators have for for a like reason long persisted in viewing Dada end the lens of Surrealism. at all times since Alfred Barr's landmark point out "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism" exhibited at the Museum of present Art in 1936, the connections have been hard to resist. This treatment gives Dada dual capitals (Zurich and Paris) as well as a primary language (French) character (an obsession with chance and automatic or unconscious processes) and cast of characters (Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Max Ernst Andre Breton and confreres) It also gives Dada a clear teleology as Surrealism appears to have codified a certain number of of the discoveries, or cleaned up about of the mess, made on its predecessor.

on the other hand as many art historians have begun to recognize, viewing Dada as a predecessor to Surrealism usually means taming the many-headed beast, while decoupling the sum of two units allows for a wider reading of Dada's contributions to contemporary art. Francis Naumann took a major grade in this direction by staging an important just discovered York Dada show at the Whitney Museum in 1996 Now, Leah Dickerman, associate curator at the National Gallery of Art, has gone level further by overseeing the first major international measure and estimate of Dada for an American museum, featuring roughly 400 works by way of 50 artists [see article this issue]. What's more, Dickerman has edited an ambitious English-language catalogue and co-edited a collection of critical essays, The Dada Seminars, which together give an account of a major addition to scholarship in the field.

In the couple books, Dickerman fruitfully approaches Dada not as a change with an identifiable style for a like reason much as a matrix--or, to use her favorite expression, a "crucible"--from which many common art practices emerged. As she writes in the catalogue introduction, "Looking at Dada across the work of various artists from six cities of production, as this work allows us to do, makes clear the extent to which it coheres instead around a fix of strategies--abstraction, collage, montage, the readymade, the incorporation of chance and forms of automatization--so foundational for the stillness of the century that today we have to be in agony to recognize their historical novelty." She elsewhere adds "media pranks" to the list, recognizing the way in which Dada artists used bills newspapers and other vehicles of mass communication to one as well as the other create and provoke their audience.

Following Dickerman's introduction, which is individual of the most clear-minded overviews united could hope for, come essays according to several art historians on Dada's mien in Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, eau-de-cologne New York and Paris. Along the way, the part revisits the origin stories behind explanation innovations, including the Rayograph (which May Ray claimed to have discovered on accident in his darkroom in Paris however which may in fact have result to him after he saw Christian Schad's work) and photomontage (which Hannah Hoch Raoul Hausmann and George Grosz may have all had a hand in). Meanwhile, the chapter onward New York Dada presents new evidence to help settle the perennial question: Who created God? A bend of plumbing pipes mounted forward a miter box, God (1917) was attributed to Morton Schamberg (who photographed the work) for many years, until Naumann, for starters, gave Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven the credit.

Not in the same manner fast, says Michael Taylor, new art curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the work is housed. According to latter chemical analysis, Taylor reports, the plumbing trap was coated with the same silver metallic paint that Schamberg used for his machinist paintings, "confirming his active participation in the making of God" Taylor quick rests his case, although you can be certain it will not be the final word. common begins to wonder whether the lack of clear attribution was itself a Dada shenanigan, designed to alert a sacrilegious-sounding debate over the origin of God