Dada: Art about war

"Dada," at the National Gallery, is an exhibit about war, about how artists respond to seeing death, dismemberment, gassing, debilitating mental illness, and more death.

From the show's first gallery, which includes documentary photographs of armaments and film footage of World War I, the show rejects cliched, faux art history. Dadaists were not primarily devoted to showing that anything could be art, or that the anyone could 'act-out' artistically by, say, wearing pink pajamas to a museum. Dada was about finding a sane response to trauma. Dada was the world's first anti-war movement. Dada changed the world.

In the course of two floors that take a visitor through six cities and 450 objects, curator Leah Dickerman never strays far form her central tenet: Dada was an artistic response to World War I; that the art we know as dadaist would not have been possible if artists had not experienced the horrors of what happened when modern war collided with centuries-old fighting techniques.

Of course, saying it that way doesn't do justice to the grotesqueness to which Dada responded -- most of which is documented in dadaist art. So: Dada is about a man's lower leg being blown off by a mortar shell and it is about the wooden stump placed on a leg as a replacement. The casualty rate in World War I was 57 percent. Over eight million men were killed, and another 23 million suffered casualties. Sixty-seven percent of Germans who fought in the war were killed or wounded, including Max Ernst. His collage of a semi-human machine flying above a battlefield as two orderlies carry away a wounded soldier is not a mere formalist exercise.

Dada is about the the guy who drives an ambulance so close to the front that he sees hundreds of bodies turned into pieces. It is about the widespread use of poisonous gases on the battlefield (or, as the British called them, "accessories") that turned the surface of the skin into a moonscape of blisters, or blinded you. An estimated 85,000 troops were killed with gas, another 1.2 million wounded. The gas mask and amputations in Rudolf Schlichter's Dada Rooftop Studio are not (solely) feats of imagination.

It is about a European capitalist system under which business was in bed with the military was in bed with the politicians -- a system that created a triangulation by which the less-connected were sent into trenches to die for, uh, well, what was World War I about again? Otto Dix meditated on this in Memory of the Mirrored Halls in Brussels.

"Dada" is a terrific exhibition about a terrible time. Just as important: It is a celebration of the power artists have to portray horrors, as well as a celebration of the voice they have in condemning the circumstances that produced those horrors. On view in Washington at a time when our nation is questioning the Bush administration's conduct before and during war in Iraq, it is a rare -- very rare -- instance of an exhibition at our National Gallery of Art bumping up against the news of the day.

Each day this week MAN will feature a post about Dada. If other blogs pick up the show, I'll share some links on Friday.

Related: The exhibit website. Leah Dickerman's exhibition catalogue (35% off). If you're interested in 20th century art, you have to own this one. Above, right: A soldier being gassed.