The article talks about one of the most provocative and refreshing movements of 20th century, the age of avant-garde art — Dada. It starts with the flashback to the beginning of it all in 1920, when the war was over and different versions of avant-gardism were still spreading in the world, in Russia and Germany, and, of course, the center of it all was Paris. Tristan Tzara, the head of the Dada movement, was drawn to Paris to seek for attention and his plan was to create «Dadaglobe», an anthology of avant-garde art with a great number of contributions from artists in Europe and in Americas, all over the world. At first it went smoothly as he got a load of replies and the first edition was about to be in 10,000 copies going worldwide, drawing heavily desired attention, like most avant-garden art it was extremely dynamic, whirling, explosive and controversial. It all ended with Francis Picabia, another famous and influential figure of the Dada movement, separating from Tristan Tzara and leaving the ongoing work on «Dadaglobe» unfinished.
This unfortunate end gave an opportunity to another century exhibition of ‘Dadaglobe Reconstructed’ in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the materials, drawings and collages of Tristan Tzara and other famous faces of the 20th century like Marcel Duchamp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Constantin Brancusi are gathered together under one roof.
Of course, the work that curators performed to make «Dadaglobe» happen again is unbelievable, there are photographs, letters and a load of artworks that perfectly represents an important period of Tzara’s artistic career. The artist engaged in his project not only Dadaists and did not find any obstacles like national borders while he asked people not only to contribute their works, but also ‘drawings, a book page with text and photographs of themselves’ (Fagaro). A lot of artists altered their photographs and turned it into a Dada-styled portraits and an independent work for art, like Theo van Doesburg’s “Portrait of I.K. Bonset: I Am Against Everything and Everyone” (1921) presented in the journal.
The article argues that Tzara successfully experimented with the newly established network of artist in his interconnected modern world and there were no divisions for him any more, so the exhibition recreates his anthology in its unity, without categories so common to art spaces, like time-periods, cities, etc. It is also how it contributes to a contemporary society, where the media presents a picture with many divisions and disruption, constant chaos and confrontations. The artists and intellectuals of the past thought about the future of an interconnected world and endless possibilities of collaborations and partnerships, they valued the connections they had and was striving to develop new ones, they dreamed of a different society, but the opportunities that artists have today were unimaginable for Dadaists. All in all, the exhibition reminds the artists of the power of art and its distribution and asks for a deeper reflection on a current social and artistic networks compared to the one Tzara attempted to create.
Works cited
Farago, Jason. «A Plan To Spread Dada Worldwide, Revisited At Moma». nytimes.com. 16 June 2016. Web. 7 July 2016.
