Dada
HAVING last week reviewed the constructivist displays in the 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition at Whitechapel, I turn now to the `dadaist' con- tributions, so called because they revive the tone, the spirit and some of the ideas from that series of manifestations and its antece- dents. One group (Catleugh—Hull—Thornton) showing their painting and sculpture present a Futurist-cum-Vorticist statement (we Love : 1,132 m.p.h., a 40-inch bust, etc.; WE HATE: The teachings of Christ, the English way of life, etc.) in the mixed and asymmetrical typography of Dadaism and need reminding that Mafeking, with other Victorian strongholds, has been re- lieved. Alison and Peter Smithson have built an elegant but in an enclosure as a sign of Man's need for shelter and living space and Eduardo Paolozzi has stocked it with some real objets trouves (a season ticket from Bal- ham, bicycle wheels, etc.) and some extremely pretty and sophisticated hand-made ones with an ancient, dug-up look as symbols for human needs, the mixture of the two types being a strange meeting between the proletarian and the aristocratic. One is reminded of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters who retrieved every sort of street litter and made from it collages; they had a forceful and natural directness while Paolozzi's huge 'collage' is somehow precious and History of Arty.
Another display (Hamilton—McHale- Voelcker) teases the eye amusingly with a series of illusions and offers us an anthology of modern visual experiences from the cinema, publicity and so on, while Holloway, Del Renzio and Alloway are apprentices to pre- sent that current sorcery, Communications Research, and offer it as means to reuniting art and architecture. Both these teams present their ideas in that peculiar mid-Atlantic lingo, a kind of intellectual Peter Cheyney, as much dependent upon the vocabulary of American technology for their effect as British pop singers are on the short 'a.' The romanticism of these exhibits finds its promised land in the United States where conditions are as remote from ours as a Bedouin camp was from the Romantic.Paris of the 1820s. Their heroes are the mass-media and advertising experts, the pulp-magazine writers and Professor Wiener. Flirtation with the highest mathematics mixed with Popular Science and Science Fiction re- sults not in science but scientism, science as myth and not as actuality. This latest romanti- cism is tied to sociology and group-psychology and leaves the same irritating impression as an earlier show of popular art at this gallery— Black Eyes and Lemonade—of a sophisti- cated toying with unsophisticated responses.
BASIL TAYLOR
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