New York Dada: 1915-1923.

Molly Nesbit

For almost twenty years now, those of us interested in New York Dada have used Francis Naumann's articles as a baseline of primary research. One has had to be a researcher in order to cull them from the old Artforums and Dada/Surrealisms and Archives of American Art Journals and the Bulletin of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but the results added up to more than old chestnuts newly named or surprises in the form of facts. Naumann has been exploring the corners of what is left of the world of New York Dada, unearthing the connections between the people, locating works of art, chasing down rent and immigration papers, sifting through the magazines and criticism. From all this he has been pulling the stories of New York Dada; his book now collects them together and tells them to everybody, on the model of John Rewald's History of Impressionism. The work is reproduced well, much of it in color.(1) There are many new things to be seen, like the photograph of Marcel Duchamp, fully clothed, feigning sleep while sitting on a toilet in a gleaming tile bathroom. This is a book to own.

New York Dada was not a particularly coherent avant-garde movement, even considering its stake in deliberate incoherence. It consisted of various European artists, most of them attached at one time or another to Cubism, coming to New York to sit out the war: Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Albert Gleizes and his wife Juliette Roche, Jean Crotti and his wife Yvonne. They were joined by writers like Henri-Pierre Roche and the composer Edgar Varese. They refound one another or in some cases met one another in New York and were scooped up into an amorphous but generally well-traveled and Harvard-educated group of Americans who had allied themselves with the advances of modern art and poetry. For some of these Americans it was a matter of society, for others it was more like a religion. For all of them it was fun.

New York Dada was a series of stories of parties and liaisons and work done mainly in private. There were short runs of little magazines and a few hardy Modern-art galleries and the first show of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, where Duchamp's Fountain was not shown. The Independents, as it was called, was something of a watershed for the art being made by these people, but perhaps more important to Dada in New York was the departure of the Europeans as America declared war and then as the war ended. With their departure, a link with Dada in Europe was activated and there was an odd exchange of energies across the Atlantic. America had its Dada magazines and sent contributions to the European ones and at this point the story does follow the more established art-movement narratives, business got done, friendships failed, mainstream critics carped, and new commercial opportunities took the place of old ones. There were pronouncements; there was publicity. But in the early days of New York Dada this was not the case. Those were the formative years.

Naumann tells the story of the early days in biographical chapters and as a story of both men and women artists. It is a pity that those who were not artists do not also have their chapters: Louise Arensberg, Henry McBride, Carl Van Vechten, Fania Marinoff, William Ivins, Jr., all had a more important part in things here than Naumann's book indicates. But happily Naumann does present all of these activities as having important female players, with women as active, contributing Dada artists, not seconds. The way in which the women worked in the private spaces of pre-Independents-show Dada helped them all to take the Cubist nude to another place--not simply genital, but generally sexual, not a matter of a break with the classical, but a matter of mobile modern women. Naumann's book mostly documents the sexual relations or offers them as part of an iconographical reading. His book makes it clear, however, that Dada in America took male and female sexuality into the picture in ways that had everything to do with the parties and the talk that framed the pictures in the first place. The parties depended upon the mix of the mainly French Europeans and the well-traveled Americans. So did the sense of sexuality that became Dada.

Sex found its way into their lives and their pictures and their words. Sex, not gender, was part of the modern advance. Sex came with a cultural difference. For the French and the Americans did not meet so simply, just as they still do not. America and France do not now and as far as I know have not ever lived according to the same libidinal economy. In the early 20th century, the terms of the libidinal economies were shifting everywhere, quickened by the war: the black jazzmen, the doughboys, the Latin lovers, and the advertisers all put forward markedly new strains of desire on both sides of the Atlantic. Dada was drawn into this general reconstitution of desire, a detached desire in fact, and it complicated matters further by putting sex into its own moneyed, cosmopolitan gray zone of pleasure, neither American nor French. Naumann can see and describe the sex on all of these levels, but he will not give it an analysis. For that he will be criticized. And yet his hesitation enables him to avoid the pitfalls of banal Freudianism, identity tagging, and the wish to make sex fall into categories. No Dada would see sex to be an intellectual matter. For a Dada, sex was a movement, never a conclusion, certainly not a point of view. There was no point. But then, Dada was famously pointless.

Naumann's book modestly opens the doors to this. It takes the serious study of Dada out of specialist publications and puts it back in public circulation. Perhaps Dada will refind its fun. Perhaps this sense can speak better from a distance. Perhaps we shall now hear the screams. Perhaps we can all use its example to do and say something else.

Molly Nesbit teaches art history at Vassar College.