Where’s my Dada?

It was, and it was not, the best time to take a break from the last-minute race to clean the loft for incoming summer renters. There was still much to do—from cleaning out the pantry to filing a year’s worth of paperwork, still stacked in not-so-neat piles on my desk.

Corralling the many projects of my mercurial, creative family to clear a path for another family, with needs of its own (for order, perhaps?) was taxing my spirit, as well as my corpus.

A cold sore threatened to inflame my nose into a blazing Rudolphian red-light, announcing my stress level to the world. “Watch out,” it wanted to say, “frazzled mom coming through!” I tamed it with modern medicine, abandoning much-longed-for alcohol, and cutting down on sugar and caffeine. But I digress. What about Dada?

This day had been noted on my calendar for a month now. Dada at MOMA. A date inspired by Dale, a fellow writer from the Upper Delaware Writers Collective. Dada, that chaotic art form from the early twentieth century, then lunch, her treat.

A phone call from Dale on the morning of our date threatened to plunge me back to the depths of disorder—my own daily Dada-ist life. But she was only begging an hour’s grace to recover from a particularly strenuous workweek.

Finally, there we were, entering the serene grace of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. We went straight to the top, now the sixth floor of the formerly, relatively squat, three-story building on West 53rd Street. As this was a members-only preview day for the Dada show, the crowd was relatively thin. There was room to move about and only a respectful hum of conversation.

Since Dadaism took many forms—film, puppetry, sound collage as well as visual collage—the hum was just an undertone to other auditory sensations.

I am no art scholar. What I know of art comes from living with it and seeing it. Seeing it in the context of a museum is one of my joys—scholars have already done my homework for me. So it was with Dada.

The curator’s note at the entry to the gallery gave me a perspective I did not have for Dada: as a response to war.

The First World War. That was the missing link in my consciousness. When I thought of it at all, I thought of surrealism as the antidote to Victorianism—that ornately embroidered gilt age.

But it was much more than that. Artists of the early 1920s were deeply distrustful of the “reasonable” governments that had plunged the whole world into bloody war. If form and logic had led us to that, only disordered minds could make sense of the world.

The parallels to our present day are clear. We are fed CIA “intelligence” that is cooked from the get-go, to rationalize a war that spells doom for those who must fight it, and for innocents in the midst of it—with no good end in sight.

But the difference, culturally, is vast. Surrealism has permeated our culture. Advertising is the new Dada. MTV and the Internet have pounded our psyches with disjointed images for decades now.

Our modern lives have taken on their own surrealist flavor. We no longer live the post-war 1950’s life that was our supposed legacy. The nuclear family of Mom and Dad and Dick and Jane and Spot—blasted like a mushroom cloud.

In my circle of friends, the life I lead is almost normal, with a house in the country, an apartment in the city, and not one of us employed in the conventional, corporate way.

But even outside my circle, most Americans are living in blended families, working two or three jobs while trying to keep up with kids’ soccer games and homework assignments.

Given an assignment recently in writers’ group, to write a Dada poem, I faltered.

We were supposed to take a random selection of words from a pile and glue them to the page as they came, without logic or order to assist us. The result wasn’t bad. Some were funny, some thought provoking, some just odd. But to me, the process was wholly unsatisfying. With chaos the norm, I want my words to help me find order.

How will this new generation of artists respond to our times? What will they find to startle and amaze us?