MAN Q&A: Leah Dickerman, Part Two

Don't miss: FAMSF's new Courbet, here.

The National Gallery of Art's Dada show opens at MoMA this weekend. I talked with curator Leah Dickerman about the show. Part one is here.

MAN: How was the show different in Paris?

LD: It was framed very differently in Paris. I actually think the two installations were very cool both in their own sense, but they were very, very different. At the Pompidou it filled the 20,000-square-foot sixth floor space, the entire space. We installed it on a chessboard-like grid, with little mini-squares, each of which was a mini exhibition. There were 42 squares, and once you were in you could wander through. There’s something very Dadaist about the logic of that in the sense that it’s this strict structure, but by being so strict, it produces a liberating play. They added 1,000 works to the exhibit through two key loans Jacque Doucet Bibliotecque, and a private collection of documentary materials. It added this huge amount of paper to the show.

MAN: Was the show received differently there than here?

LD: When you read reviews of the Paris show they were very positive, but they tended not to talk about history as much because in some ways history wasn’t as evident. It wasn’t as clear as who was talking to whom in what city and what  the topography of these conversations was. There wasn’t the framing of the World War I film, which I wanted in an effort to place the exhibition at the intersection of war and the birth of a media culture. I noticed in the reviews that there were these lines that dada is an intellectual movement meaning not about art… and I Think that all that paper [that was in the Paris show] took away from how radical dada was in terms of artistic practice.

MAN: One of the real great things about the show for me was its treatment of Max Ernst. In the Met’s recent Ernst retro his Dadaist accomplishments were almost skipped over; we almost went right from Ernst the young man to Ernst the surrealist.

LD: Yes… When you separate Ernst’s dada career, you see this fascination with print culture that ties him to other Dadaists and the way he’s playing with this diverse print field. The whole debasement of his material comes through.

MAN: So one of the differences between Washington and Paris was the World War I film with which the show opened?

LD: I did feel like I was making a show for Washington in many ways. In France you can assume an audience understands WWI because they lived it. In the United States, World War Two fills our consciousness. The moral lines were clear and with WWI the pathos of it has been forgotten in the U.S. Partly because we were speaking to an American audience and partly because it was Washington, I Felt like we needed to inform viewers with the WWI opening.

I think the art is tough, and I wanted people to be engaged with it. I wanted people to understand the sense of urgency that these artists felt. I was also struck by how tough the images in this film footage were. This was film footage that was largely designed to be shown in newsreels and the images we get of war today are so sanitized. They’re even hesitant to show us images of flag-draped coffins!