Went to the DADA show at the MOMA this afternoon.  I put a bit of work into my post then my blog ate the post – and so I’m just writing a short description.

To me DADA is more an anti-movement than a real art movement – the attempt to take everyday objects and make them into Art seems as artificial as the art it was meant to replace.

I can say this now, 80 years later – but at the time, the DADA artists thought they were doing everyone a favor – and maybe they were.  Except for a couple of works, most of the show is pretty much everyday objects that are made into Anti – Art (like Anti-Matter) by the artist.

But just because a Duchamp pissing pot is symetrical, it does not mean it should be put into a museum – as the DADAist would have it.  The DADA movement was more important, historically, than for what it produced.

I also looked briefly at Douglas Gordon’s Timeline exhibition which was also at the MOMA. From the exhibition notes:

In his most well-known works, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) addresses the familiarity and popularity of moving pictures by manipulating, reframing, and superimposing them to alter viewers’ perceptions. His works provoke feelings of anxiety, recognition, and amnesia with respect to the circumstances of the reception of media today.

This retrospective of Gordon’s work presents thirteen significant works by the artist, including 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), and Play Dead; Real Time (2003).

By forcing new encounters with the familiar and confrontations with the willfully forgotten, Gordon exposes the distance between our dimmed, distorted memories and, perhaps, the truth—emphatically demonstrating that what he sculpts is not only media but time itself.

My take, the show seemed stupid to me – it was trying to take what looked like the 1930’s mimialist paintings and illustrate a relationship that really happens much better in my mind than in film.

I have been to many art openings recently, and with the proliferation of Computer Generated Films, many artists are trying to be deep filmmakers – but more often than not, what I see is noise – something I feel I should look at but really don’t want to.

But why force myself to look at something that’s not attractive or interesting to look at at the first place?    The modern filmmaker can have the same problem as DADA tried to solve – taking the ordinary and making it into art.  In the case of DADA, they took garbage and said it was sublime.  Modern filmmakers like Douglas Gordon are taking the ordinary and trying to super-impose some fake meaning – a meaning that looks artificial – the same way the DADA stuff looked to me. 

Give me something real – and natural and interesting to look at – not these Pseudo Movies.