The Scions and Portents of Dada

By ROBERT HUGHES

After surrealism, new channels for the creative mind

There was a time, long past, when modern art was thought dangerous. Its subversive reputation rested on two movements, Dada and surrealism. From them, most subsequent avant-gardes have sprung. Cubist paintings by Georges Braque now look about as threatening as a pastoral scene by Nicolas Poussin. But most of the "radical" gestures in these dying years of the avant-garde have emerged from Dada or surrealist precedents. The swarm of prototypes is so thick that when a Los Angeles body artist, a few years ago, created an "event" by shooting a pistol at a jet aircraft passing over Venice Beach, not even that lonely gesture of narcissistic aggression could be called original. Had not Andre Breton, the pope of surrealism, announced 50 years ago that the ultimate surrealist acte gratuit would be to fire a revolver at random into a crowd on the street?

The Dadaists and surrealists were the last of the real avantgarde, not because they were "great" artists but because they were the last men to believe that art and poetry could change the objective conditions of life. Dada promised, in the words of its mercurial chatterbox poet, Tristan Tzara, "to destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization; to sow demoralization everywhere." A surrealist declaration, issued in Paris in 1925, announced: "Surrealism ... is a means of total liberation of the mind and of everything resembling it. We are determined to create a revolution."

The revolution surrealiste did not take place, however. Surrealist man, that monster begotten by imagination upon history, failed to emerge. The scandal of the provocations died. The poetry (some of it) survived. The paintings went into museums and were hung in the houses of the rich. But there is an immense pathos and beauty in the relics, the artifacts. They are the fragments of a hope that post-modern art has lost, and may never find again.

Hence the special interest of the huge, rambling, scholarly show on view at London's Hayward Gallery until the end of March. Containing about 1,000 items --paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings, objects, polemics, documents--it was organized by a team headed by the distinguished English art critic David Sylvester, under the title "Dada and Surrealism Reviewed." It attempts to treat Dada and surrealism on their own terms (those of dandyism, revolt, love, dream and myth) rather than judge them by official "painterly" standards. As a result the show goes further into the labyrinth than any retrospective for years on writers like Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and Antonin Artaud, and such painters as Dali, Ernst, Miro, Magritte and Alberto Giacometti.

Surrealism was too volatile and too hard to define to be a system. As a viable "movement," it lasted from the end of the first World War to the end of the second--a span of nearly three decades. Like its ancestor Dada, surrealism was brought to term by young refugees in the cafes of neutral Zurich during World War I, in a clamor of theatrical high jinks, concrete-poetry recitals, chance-based collages and mock rituals. Surrealism became a common ground for bourgeois intellectuals agonized by the futility of their expected social roles. But it smacks of artificiality to confine either Dada or surrealism too closely to any group or period. Some of Picasso's paintings, from 1913 onward, are regarded as major surrealist icons by virtue of their aggressive, oneiric distortions, though he was never in any formal way a member of the movement.

Magpie-like, the surrealist imagination was apt to claim whatever it wanted from history, and the London exhibition records this in a number of showcases whose contents punctuate the august and predictable flow of Mirds, Dalis, Ernsts.

They contain raw material: alchemical treatises and Renaissance architectural tomes, anatomical figures and worn kachina dolls. New Hebrides masks, pulp novels, turn-of-the-century store cata logues from which Ernst cut the engravings for his haunted collages -- the vast flea market of the dreaming mind, here emblematically reduced like a ship in a bottle.

In great detail, the show is a dramatic reminder of how vital a contribution Dada and surrealism made to the modernist imagination. No painting or poetry had been so resolutely and bitterly antiauthoritarian. Dada was the child of trauma; the first World War, that cultural chasm, had revealed -- in the sheer incapacity of words to convey its degree of lethal absurdity -- the extent to which language itself was owned by the officer classes of Europe.

One did not have to be a combatant (and few of the Dadaists were) to see that.

The task, then, was to free language from its weight of inherited content, in the hope of freeing life itself. Chance, ambiguity, insult, nonsense, anything would serve, if it promised to break the crust. Above all, there was irony: the indifference of Duchamp, --the attacks on the social jugular perpetrated by German Dadaists like George Grosz and John Heartfield, and Picabia's drawings, which make mock of the cult of the machine. When this battery of anarchic techniques moved to Paris in the '20s, colliding with a long but temporarily dormant tradition of romanticism, surrealism was the result.

The essence of the surrealist enterprise -- like that of the 19th century romantics -- was to open new channels for the creative mind. It produced, above all, an art of subject matter -- a trait transmitted to its American offspring, abstract expressionism. "Beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be at all," ran Breton's famous description of the surrealist ideal. Much of the power of surrealist rhetoric does not survive translation: its use of blasphemy, for instance, and its passionate anticlericalism were authentically shocking within France's Catholic tradition, but resemble a charade when plucked from that context. But the freeing of imagination by the surrealists remains a tremendous achievement. Be yond the froth -- the ideological absurdities, the rampant narcissism, the window display and chic decor -- surrealism remains one of the century's noblest proposals of liberty.

--Robert Hughes

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