Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1964. Charles Sheeler, Living Room of New York Apartment of Louise and Walter Arensberg (East Wall from Above), 1919. Man Ray, Flying Dutchman, 1920. Francis Picabia, Le Fiance, c. 1916-17. Marcel Duchamp, Place Card for Carl Van Vechten, 1917. Charles Demuth, Spring, c. 1921. Joseph Stella, Collage, Number 21, c. 1920. Beatrice Wood, Dieu Protege les Amants (God Protects Lovers), 1917. Clara Tice, Insect Frolic, 1923. Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of Duchamp, 1923.

dada invades new york at the whitney museum by Alan Moore "Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York" at the Whitney Museum is a feast of objects made by both the big fish of the movement and the smaller fry. There are treats for fans, surprises for connoisseurs and cognitive bedazzlement and healthy bewilderment for newcomers to the complex and manic Dada movement--which while best known for its manifestations in Zurich, Berlin and Paris, also constituted New York's first real claim on the 20th-century art vanguard. The Whitney installation is flashy and exciting, with the space cut up in eccentric diagonals. At the center of the show is a life-size recreation of the salon of super-patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg, who during 1914-20 served as hosts to the New York Dada group and a stream of charmed, outraged or simply drunken guests. Plugged into a giant black- and-white photo-mural of two walls of the Arensburg salon, showing the couples' art collection "in situ" (it is now housed at the Philadelphia Museum), are several of the art works themselves, including Henri Matisse's uncomfortable Mlle. Yvonne Landsberg (1914), a radical schematic, almost insect-like defamiliarization of the human form. With this heart-of-the-show ersatz salon-- even the wood-plank floor is recreated--the curators quite literally attempt to mount a museum exhibition in the fictional space of the archive--a space of remnant texts, manuscripts and photo albums displayed in vitrines, along with vintage drawings, paintings and sculptures, as well as reproductions and later recreations done by the artists themselves. Yet this is a bloodless space, evoking ghosts who experienced, created and lived in a way now very remote. This conceit of installation belongs to Francis Naumann, the curator of "Mischief." An avid and generous scholar of Dada, Naumann has devoted himself to building this archival space, a monumental and dusty heart of a show which makes an art historian's argument that will probably be lost on most visitors--that the Arensberg circle was the real center of New York Dada. (The other arguable center of New York Dada is the circle of Alfred Stieglitz at his gallery 291, and his magazine Camera Work. ) But the show makes other forceful visual arguments. The most comprehensive is for the importance of Man Ray as a painter, a curatorial intention baldly broached by mounting Man Ray's early works opposite major paintings by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Man Ray was last seen this well in New York at his New York Cultural Center retrospective in 1974. Since then the dish on his work has been: great photographer, bad painter; his readymades are second rate, eclipsed by the master. In "Mischief," hoever, Man Ray comes across as a painter of daring originality. Before expatriating to Paris in 1921 he had forged a fully elaborated mode of geometric abstraction using the hand-denying technique of air brush. Man Ray did not so much "derive" from Duchamp as he folded Duchamp's ideas into the production of paintings and photographs, something the Frenchman refused to do. Man Ray made the actual art objects his friend would not, a body of painting that is brave, inventive and ceaselessly original. Man Ray's painting Flying Dutchman (1920), in which bright white peaked shapes ride above an area striped black and yellow, strikingly resembles `50s color abstraction. It was modeled after Man Ray's photograph of sheets on a clothesline. The loose handling of brushed paint seems unusual; this work is a brilliant inexplicable blind alley, uncapitalized within the artist's oeuvre both in style and method. I'd love to believe Man Ray was thinking of Albert Pinkham Ryder (d. 1917), very much a presence in the American art world of Dada's day. (The painting hangs by a vintage photograph which needs low light; a mixed-medium historical exhibition like this can be an unhappy compromise between visibility and protection.) Francis Picabia ia is presented as an artist insistently working out a set of machine- derived icons. Here he is at heart an abstract painter, an ancestor first of Halley, then Salle. The small size of most of Picabia's machine paintings surprised me, their iconic aspect more striking given their dinkiness. Picabia it seems intended his machines to be coequal with the universal and spiritual forms of abstract painting, and thereby to present the machine as the "very soul" of human life. Duchamp's pieces in this show seem dull, occluded by their canonical sheen. But a work I've never seen, placecard portraits he'd made for his birthday banquet, was positioned near the end of an alleyway of inventive, diverse Dada portraits. These 1917 placecards, double-sided line drawings (rather ostentatiously framed to enclose a square), were excitingly inscrutable. They elicited from me the famous "hunh?" reaction of one who just a moment before thought he knew what was going on. These works that appear abstract are very clearly drawn by some plan; they're slight, appealing and totally cryptic--in short, they're Duchamps. (Naumann told me later that the drawings held up to the light show the full name of the party guest. They are displayed in the cryptography section of the show.) Duchamp is present in "Mischief" partly in prosthesis--his Large Glass, Fountain, and many other works represented by reproductions. With so many Duchamp works present only in replica, graphic reproduction and object multiples are a major theme of the show. The movement of Dada work from conception to reproduction provides delectation for bibliophiles and connoisseurs of print media. Reproduction as a condition of the artwork is important to Warhol and to the neo-Dadas of Fluxus. But the question of reproduction--present in the Dada moment and later in the museumification of Dada--is not directly addressed. But this is a historical, not a theoretical show. The best thing about "Mischief," is its broad view beyond the canon, and behind those historians' paper screens called art movements. With the long-term critical emphasis upon the genius Duchamp, and the re-evaluation of artistic process and ontology of the artwork which his Dada entailed, the broader aspects of the moment have been ignored. This exhibition begins to correct that, recuperating fascinating minor figures without denigrating the majors. The mainstream consideration of New York Dada could not have a better start. This is truly a secret history, of a "New York chaos" obscured by the more orderly narratives of American painting, like "Precisionism," and Surrealism under the generalship of Andre Breton. The Dada catalyst went to work on the currents comprising American modernism--not as another formal system but as a regime of experiment, not as a hypothesized ideal esthetic realm, or even as an estheticization (or "artistification") of modern life, but as a way of being an artist within modern life itself, and using modern life as at once the materials and object of art. Dada meant discovery and an innovatory spirit that in its exuberance and rush recalls the nearly contemporary Russian moment--except that it is without social purpose and broad participation. (New York Dada as "capitalist constructivism" . . .) So, how did Dada play out with the American modernists? It hyped up their practice, spurring them to free play with Cubist pictorial conventions. Charles Demuth's painting Spring (ca. 1921) may be a trompe l'oeil painting of fabric samples laid out upon a table--it is also an overt and total abstraction. In his Business (1921), a graphic progression, like on a desk calendar, is superimposed over the image of a Pennsylvania factory. John Covert literalizes the planes of Cubist abstraction, producing formally inventive shallow reliefs in a kind of intarsia of Cubist space. Joseph Stella's Prestidigitator (1916), a tiny painting on glass, returns the machinist abstraction to a realm of pictorial space, depicting a cone that rains brilliant colors. This "playing out" process is crucial to the notion of American Dada as one in a procession of styles, and accordingly the Dada-inflected works of Demuth, Stella, Stuart Davis and Charles Sheeler are well- known to students of American modernism. But Dada is disfigured when considered only as a style of visual art. It is an inadequate label, as ill-fitting as "post- modernism," and does as little to explain an attitude toward cultural production that foregrounded poetry and disallowed reason and representation. Still, as Dada has worked its way through modernist and post-modernist art, it increasingly makes sense to talk about the inventory and thematics of Dada form. The ubiquitous springs, strings, waves and spirals, the planes opaque and transparent-- these are pictorial motifs shared by many artists. One of several sensitive watercolors by Beatrice Wood, Dieu protege les amants (God Protects Lovers, 1917), is very revealing about the "style" of Dada painting as Wood, who had only recently turned to painting under the tutelage of Duchamp, smoothly incorporates broken planes and serpentine strings of letters into her spare composition. It is the women artists of Dada who provide the most surprises as they step out of the shadows in "Mischief." With total disregard for the orthodoxies of a male-dominated modernist artworld of serious painting and sculpture (as in the oft-heard critic's phrase "our men of art"), they produced work with heterodox content and radical technique. Clara Tice, a long-forgotten caricaturist, whose cartoons of free-spirited nude females offended bourgeois morals and delighted Greenwich Village, is present as an overt sign of the bright strain of sexual adventure that was so much a part of the times. The poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is one of the great revelations of the show, producing work in anything-but-traditional media. Her best- known sculptures look like cocktails and the underside of toilets. Baroness Elsa's exquisite woven/beaded/painted portrait of Berenice Abbott (owned by MOMA) is included here, as is a fascinating group of objects once owned by Jane Heap of the Little Review (not in the catalogue). The Dada women emerge at the discursive beginning of "Mischief" as the show's narrative opens with a gallery of portraits. This mini-show sets up the central argument of the exhibition, that Dada is in large measure a set of communiques exchanged between members of a coterie. Within this gallery hang Picabia's well-known mechanical portraits of Marius de Zayas and Alfred Stieglitz, as well as de Zayas' lesser known "absolute caricatures," abstract portraits evolved from the impact of analytic Cubism upon de Zayas' practice of theatrical caricature. The little-known Katherine Rhoads work Mental Reactions in 291 magazine of April 1915 is included as part of this discourse. Also included in the portrait section are the cannily naive watercolors of Beatrice Wood, the exotic, insect-like visages emerging from the Baroness Elsa's "beadwork" portraits, and two portraits by Florine Stettheimer of Duchamp that in this show seem exceptionally incisive and revealing. Stettheimer depicts Duchamp once as a floating head, radiating vibes like Kahlil Gibran, and again as two slim, rubbery figures, one reclining twisted and enthroned, and the other spiralling exuberantly aloft as Rrose Selavy in a pink cocktail dress. (The claim by her biographer that Stettheimer was a better painter than O'Keeffe struck me as extreme, but her eloquent presence in this exhibition easily certifies her as the capital history painter of the elite avant-garde.) In the portrait section, of course, Duchamp is shown cross-dressed in Man Ray's famous photo of Rose Selavy (1921). This identification, bold and insouciantly radical in the then heterosexist New York art world, marks at least one explicitly political arena for New York Dada--the sexual. In this brief review I have ignored the infamous "Dada attitude," be it hilarious or ironic. Instead I formalize and valorize the movement's remains, a tack that led French students to shoot up two of Man Ray's works in a 1958 Paris exhibition. But if Dada and it's partisans resisted museumification, we are today primarily engaged with these works as formal sources, reflected in innumerable subsequent artists' productions. Naumann's curation nods to this resistance by evoking the Arensberg salon as privileged site, exhumed from the archive, a zone of discourse and display, not of worshipful spectation. This intention, not mere antiquarianism, is the real significance of recreating a social space within the museum. Not all of this art is revealed to the eye; it also has to be read, and it has to be thought through. Towards this end, "Making Mischief" brings together works that, like all artworks of a moment and style, illuminate and comment upon one another. It is an extraordinary address to the eye and the intellect alike, opening possibilities of relation and increased understanding--or perhaps a more enlightened incomprehension. Catalogue: Making Mischeif: Dada Invades New York, Francis Naumann & Beth Venn, eds. (Whitney/Abrams, 1966). The guts of this book is a 100+ page chronology; it also includes breif essays by Rosalid Krauss, Steven Watson, and several other scholars. ALAN MOORE is a New York critic and art historian.