This exhibit features 13 works related to Dadaism and Surrealism that explore themes of self-immolation, identity negation, semiotics, chance, and the uncanny. Key works included are Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau and Hans Bellmer's La Poupée, shown side by side to contrast their formal and conceptual relationships. Also featured are Marcel Duchamp's readymades Bottle Rack, Bicycle Wheel, and In Advance of a Broken Arm, which question notions of fixed meaning and objecthood. Duchamp's unfinished work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is centered among the readymades to depict perpetual desire and contingency.

1. Connor Rensimer
Matthew Noble-Olson
Dada & Surrealism
8 May 2015
Patterns Formed in Flux
! United under the banner of synchronous disharmony, the thirteen works–all
Dadaist save one documentation of a surrealist piece–I have curated were thematically
chosen as products or referents of self-immolation, the negation of unitary being
(regarding identity and “things in themselves”), Semiotics, contingency, chance, and the
uncanny. For the sake of rejecting the solely self-referential production and reception of
Bourgeois art, Dadaism predominantly was concerned with injecting life back into art,
and vice versa. What that entailed generally was an evaluation and destruction of
pictorial conventions in favor of new modalities of expression, in part stimulated by and
responding to the emerging technologies contributing to progress in city life, and
unfathomable death tolls on the battle fronts. However, as comes natural to all life, we
find conflicting drives and forces amongst the individuals comprising the geographic
cells of Dada. There never is any real adherence to manifesto rhetoric, but that is in
good form because, as Richter notes, “Dada’s only program was to have no
program” (34). It is by this decentralized principle that Dada possessed no unique
aesthetic, but rather introduced three formal innovations–the ready-made, the
photomontage, and the diagram–which reflected their artistic ethic to destroy capital-A
“Art” as well as many other social, cultural, and economic institutions, which they see
perpetuating a small-mindedness that makes art elitist and separated from life.

2. ! At the entrance of the exhibit, viewers must traverse through a rectilinear hallway
with walls jutting perpendicularly halfway across, obstructing from sight the main gallery.
After weaving around the obstructions they are met with the face of a wall standing
twenty feet from the opening into the main gallery, centered and connecting the floor to
the ceiling, leaving equal walking space on each side to the rest of the exhibit. Hung
upon and occupying the entire space of this center wall, printed in large format, are
photographs of Kurt Schwitters’ “Merzbau” (1923-33) and Hans Bellmer’s “La
Poupée” (1936). They are positioned side by side in equal proportion, in order to stress
and contrast their formal and conceptual relationship. With regard to both, photographic
representation is all that is left, which merely spurs a different type of interaction than if
they existed in their original context, but alas it is only possible to conceive of their being
paired in this gallery context by means of photography. So, whatever experiential
significance is lost from how they originally stood is simply displaced by other qualities.
This very act of reification, through newly situating or inscribing art or mundane objects,
is part and parcel of Dada, particularly Duchamp’s and Man Ray’s, practice.
! Merzbau, perhaps the earliest example of installation art condemned to site
specificity, subsumes the viewer with cacophonous geometry, whereas La Poupée, a
free-standing figure in the round, reaches out, visually confronting and accommodating
its surrounds, as would an animate spectator. Bellmer produced a number of these
chimeric doll figures which he situated in domestic interiors and idyllic natural
environments and then photographically documented them in their vulnerable languor.
Along with Merzbau, the Doll produces an uncanny atmosphere by means of literally
mutilating the familiar, what Freud referred to as “unheimliche,” which translates to the

3. “opposite of what is familiar”; La Poupée doing so in relation to the body and Merzbau to
the domestic interior. The expressed mutilation in both highlight the trauma of
mechanized warfare and the dangers associated with urban life amidst industrial and
political tumult. Perhaps the most profound shared characteristic between the two is the
expression of the Death Drive, “the task of which is to lead organic life back into the
inanimate state" (Freud, 380). Bellmer’s doll rests in an indecisive space between the
animate and inanimate: a cynical, pessimistic state which asserts that our bodies are
merely fragile phenomenological meat vessels rotting in their temporal finitude.
! Residing in the main room of the gallery, organized in a right triangle formation
around Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23),
are three readymades chosen by Duchamp: Bottle Rack (1914), Bicycle Wheel (1913),
and In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915). Bicycle Wheel and Bottle Rack stand freely
while In Advance of a Broken Arm is suspended from the ceiling. The readymades, one
of the three aforementioned artistic innovations of Dadaism, are mundane commodified
objects “chosen” by the artist (Duchamp) and anointed the status of fine art, simply by
means of verbal pronouncement, symbolic and authorial inscription, and shifting
physical context. Duchamp’s most revelatory statement with the readymades is that all
meaning and being is perspectival and relational. He effectively mocks any notion of
affixed meaning with regard to the properties and categorical being of objects. By
Duchampian logic, the objects chosen for the exhibit are not inherently what they are
perceived to be, but merely molded by language and physically altered with regard to
function, out of necessity. Removed from their functional context and symbolically
inscribed anew, they may be categorized as art objects. Perpetual change is implied

4. through this logic, resultantly circumventing objecthood and undermining the aesthetic
delectation of elitist Art, effectively "inducing conceptual vertigo by demonstrating that
matter may no longer be seized upon as the guarantor of meaning" (Joselit, 234). The
title of Duchamp’s readymade shovel, In Advance of a Broken Arm, is referential to the
narrative convention of the “climactic moment” in historical painting, such as seen in
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, demonstrating the semiotic plasticity of the
modern commodity.
! Past Duchamp’s plain readymades preside two “assisted readymades,” With
Hidden Noise by Duchamp, and Gift by Man Ray. Going beyond willing the objects into
the category of art, Duchamp and Man Ray altered their physical characteristics to
facilitate and emphasize their uselessness, more assertively divorcing use-value from
representation. In Gift, Man Ray simply selected a clothing iron upon which he applied a
more violent character in the form of a row of nails. Just the same way that a frozen
lamb leg might be used in the place of a baseball bat as a murder weapon, the clothing
iron acquires a higher degree of lethality, breaking free from its functional fixedness.
With Hidden Noise, a bundle of nautical twine containing an unknown object added by
Walter Arensberg per Duchamp’s instruction, encased between two tightly screwed
plates, celebrates the artist’s ignorance of his work’s contents. The variable of the
unknown and content introduced from the outside–lightly suggesting an interplay with
chance incited through human interaction–questions authorial autonomy by calling
attention to ways in which the artist is not entirely consciously aware, or solely
responsible, for the formal and conceptual outcomes of their work. Encased in the tomb

5. of nautical twine, the unknown object produces an “atmosphere of death, knowing’s
disappearance, the birth of that world we call sacred” (Bataille, 83).
! Positioned furthest at the the end of the corridor is Duchamp’s panoramic
painting, Tu M’ (1918), a semiotic inventory of his readymades. For example, the
Bicycle Wheel is symbolically represented in the form of a warped shadow. Of particular
import is Duchamp’s declaration that color is itself a readymade, which his employment
of commercial color swatches in a spatially projecting and diminishing array denotes.
His conception of “prime words,” represented in the title Tu M’ (“you” and “me”),
stresses that these words possess an infinite spectrum of relational meaning given their
dependence on a speaking subject.
! Centered amidst the array of readymades is The Bride Stripped Bare By Her
Bachelors, Even (1923), also known as The Large Glass, neither solely a painting or a
sculpture, which Duchamp declared was "definitively unfinished" at the moment of its
departure to its original showing at the Brooklyn Museum. It was subsequently shattered
while in transit, thus, according to Duchamp, consummating his prophetic vision,
suggesting conscious contingency. He also courted chance by means of leaving the
Glass resting beneath an open window in his Brooklyn studio, allowing dust from the
outside to settle along the frame, which he intentionally imbedded into the corners,
imbuing the object with the indexical signification of urban detritus. All willing, as
demonstrated by the Glass’ eventual conception, is neither free, nor entirely
predetermined, but rather a phenomenon occurring in a vast singularity of power
relations in a state of becoming. It chronicles the state of perpetual desire involving the
bride, depicted in the upper panel, and the circle of nine bachelors dwelling in the lower

6. left corner. The Glass is thus an emblematic window of consciousness and unknowing,
contingency and scientific deliberation.
! Lining the walls along each side of Tu M’, are the three dada diagrams–Voyage
(1915) by Guillaume Apollinaire, a photograph of Duchamp’s lost Unhappy Readymade
(1914), and jointly Elle and Femme (1915) by Marius de Zayas and Francis Picabia–and
one photomontage, Cut With the Kitchen Knife Through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar
Republic (1919) by Hannah Hoch. Shared amongst the diagrams is an insistence on
dissolving the barrier between typographic text and image, expressed through a
mechanic lyricism. By virtue of its fluid hybridity, “the diagrammatic or abstract machine
does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is
yet to come, a new type of reality” (Deleuze and Guattari, 142), through the production
of an interstitial space which emphasizes the pure relationality between things, standing
as the inverse of the semiotic/material rift exposed by the readymades. In Voyage,
Apollinaire organizes the poem’s text on the plane so as to figuratively mirror the literal
meaning of the text, effectively suggesting the subjective pictorial associations of the
train and the idyllic landscape through which it travels. Unhappy Readymade, a gift from
Duchamp to his sister and her spouse, in true Duchampian fashion, was accompanied
with instructions for the benefactors to fulfill in order for the work to achieve its fullest
intentionally chance-fueled potential. The mathematical diagrams printed on the pages
of the book were ultimately subjected to the whims of nature’s unbidden weather
system, by means of which its superficiality was unpredictably assailed and altered,
further removing the traces of the author and ushering forth an illogical generative
component.

7. ! Hannah Hoch’s Cut pointedly attacks the aestheticized politics of Fascism,
counteracting attempts to influence ideological solidarity through propaganda vehicles.
Utilizing photographic mediations of reality, the photomontage functions, much like
cubism, as a locus for perspectival simultaneity and rupture. Cut as such serves as a
thorough symbolic and iconic manifestation of the historical and cultural context within
which she lived.
! In conclusion, this exhibition, constituting thirteen works representative of the
formal and conceptual innovations of the Dadaists, and one Surrealist, should hopefully
inspire a sense of the harmony in discord, patterns formed in flux, and the semiotic
mobility of art, all of which required an immolation of self in service of injecting art back
into reality, and reality to art. Quoting W. Weidlé, Richter concludes, “‘Creation survives
in fragments under the ruins of a world for which we can no longer find
expression’” (L’Immortalité des Muses). Hauntingly beautiful this statement may be, it
contradicts what the Dadaists and Surrealists had proven through passionate and
calculated articulations of contingency, imagination, and the unconscious: that reality is
generative and fugitive, and thus the horizon of ideological meaning may be suspended
and actively altered.
Inventory:
1. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau (1923-1933)

8. 2. Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (1936)
3. Marcel Duchamp:
• The Large Glass (1915-1923)
• Bottle Rack (1914)
• Bicycle Wheel (1913)
• Tu M’ (1918)
• Unhappy Readymade (1914)
• With Hidden Noise (1916)
• In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915)
10. Marius de Zayas and Francis Picabia, Femme and Violà Elle (1915)
11. Man Ray, Gift (1921)
12. Guillaume Apollinaire, Voyage (1915)
13. Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar
Republic (1919)
Works cited:
! Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art p. 34.
! Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id", in On Metapsychology (Middlesex, 1987),
! p. 380.
! David Joselit, Dada’s Diagrams, p. 234.
! Georges Bataille, Unknowing and its Consequences, p. 83.
! Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 146.