Associate Professor George Baker's new book, The Artwork Caught By The Tail, reexamines Dada via the less known Francis Picabia. Baker's research reveals how Picabia was responsible not only for the beginning of the Dada movement but also the heart of Dada's approach: to not merely rail against convention but to use language and images -- sometimes even literally employing the work of fellow Dadaists -- to construct new methods and meanings. Baker's detailed and imaginative analysis of key artworks opens up new understandings of the aesthetics of Dada. Through Baker's book, Picabia is given his much deserved due while the history of Dada's international influence is brought to life in an enlightening way.

BookZone: In an interview, ("Painting... at the Service of the Mind" with James Johnson Sweeney, 1946) Marcel Duchamp once cited Francis Picabia as having "more intelligence than most of our contemporaries," as others at the time were only "either for or against Cezanne." Duchamp felt that there was "no thought of anything beyond the physical side of painting." The Dadaists, of course, were striving to move beyond traditional art forms. Why do you think Picabia and his art became marginalized over time?

Baker: For decades in the wake of its breakthrough during and after the first World War, all of Dada was marginalized by art history and the museums. This was the case because of the fact that Dada stood against some of the mainstream currents of Modernism itself: self-reflexive and autonomous painting and sculpture, or the formalism that came to characterize Modernism -- its medium-specific concerns with abstract art and form. This is what Dada broke with and what it stood against. And so Dada fell outside the purview of the triumph of Modernism, it placed itself beyond the pale of what most considered the key forms of cultural achievement in the twentieth century, and the Dada artists were ignored by the field of art history through the 1920s, '30s, '40s, '50s. It was not until Modernism began to break down in the 1960s as a dominant force in advanced culture that people started to look again at Dada. It was at that point when interest in someone like Marcel Duchamp started to grow.

Now, Dada's general orientation doesn't exactly explain all of the reasons why someone like Picabia wasn't valued by art history or by the museum. Picabia was an incredibly complex, and contradictory, figure. While Picabia presided over the birth of the movement in a variety of ways, he was one of the first figures to repudiate Dada (in 1921, only one year after Paris Dada began). While Dada stood against more traditional mediums like painting, Picabia never stopped painting. Instead, he took seriously someone like André Breton's challenge to "go further in the realm of bad taste than anyone else of my era," and he produced "bad" paintings, a decades-long project of the devaluation of painting by continuing it in something like an undead, zombie--insincere and inauthentic--mode. Marcel Duchamp, who invented new strategies of working with something he called the "readymade," had an identifiable way of working--we might even say a kind of identifiable "style"--while Picabia never resolved himself to one way of working. He changed his style every two to three years. He would go from being an abstract painter for a number of years to being a figurative painter; he would make collages out of trash and then return to the Old Masters; he would take up seemingly Fascist aesthetics of social realism and then look at European forms of Abstract Expressionism. With this, Picabia became a difficult bone to swallow for the field of art history -- an enigma, a problem, almost an embarrassment. He did everything possible to be "wrong," to provoke this kind of inability to assimilate his work. He has been a problem for art history.

BookZone: Most of what is written about Dada remarks upon Dada's anti-art stance: Dada as anti-art; Dada as ultimately being against Dada. Your book turns that notion around by showing how Dada reflected so much more. It was a departure from conventional art making and depiction; a commentary on the commodification of art and of art as a form of money; money as mere concept; and even as you also suggested, the beginning of Abstraction. Certainly the spirit of those ideas has carried on through various eras of art history and continues even today. I was wondering if you could you comment on this a bit?

Baker: My book is an effort to reverse the situation that I just described. It's an attempt to come up with new criteria within which Dada would suddenly be seen as central to the development of art in the twentieth century; not a marginal revolt against the way that Modernism worked. To do this, I had to work against the way in which Modernism was conceived by art historians and critics. I had to come up with these new criteria. For me, one of them had to do with thinking not about purely formal or visual terms relating to autonomous art mediums like painting and sculpture, but instead thinking about Dada in terms of a larger human concern with symbolization. In my account, Dada entails a rethinking of how art communicates symbolically--how symbols "work" or could be made to "not work." My gambit, ultimately, is that Dada came up with a certain number of strategies to undo the major symbolic languages and economies of its historical moment. And Dada did not only "destroy"; it also invented new or roused forgotten modes of symbolization, repressed ones. We can still learn from such strategies today. In some sense, Dada for me amounts not so much to anti-art but to a ripping-down and re-imagining of the way in which an economy of communication and symbolization functions. This applies potentially to artistic economies (modernism's concern with mediums and visual form); but it applies as well to language systems, monetary exchanges, patriarchy; all the various realms of symbolic exchange. To trace such strategies, I have to abandon certain entrenched ways of "doing" art history; instead, I get involved in discourses coming from literary criticism and philosophy, from economy and psychoanalysis--from very different fields than the ones that art history has traditionally embraced.

BookZone: Your book explores in great depth the various branches of art that were explored through Dada, including drawing, painting, photography and cinema. Despite the diversity of these disciplines, the one thing that seemed to tie them all together was the concept of the readymade: the juxtapositions of images, objects and wordplay; the transparency and cutting-up of materials. Dada imagery included a lot of disembodied human body parts as well as an ongoing reference to machinery, both of which seemed to be a reaction to World War I, which was going on at the time. How would you describe the atmosphere of those times?

Baker: They were, of course, the worst of times. These were not really "the Banquet Years" anymore, to make reference to Roger Shattuck's well-known book on the first years of modernism in the twentieth century. The war years were desperate, desperate times. And desperate times call for extremisms in various ways in art and in social and political activity. This was surely the case for Dada. Dada was born of the environment and the circumstances of the First World War: for example, it was formed by the fact that artists had to flee their homelands in many cases, the countries that were mobilizing any able-bodied man to fight. Many of the Dadaists fled from countries like Germany to Switzerland, which was a neutral country during these years, in order to escape military service. There was a complex range of reactions to this issue. Someone like Picabia--who was of Cuban-French descent and living in France -- he would at first volunteer for the French Army like the notorious case of his friend, the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire (who was seriously wounded in 1916, and then, perhaps because of this, eventually died from the Spanish Flu in 1918). Fernand Léger fought valiantly in the trenches during the war; Georges Braque did as well; someone like Picasso was a Spaniard living in France, and had purchased his way out of military service in his native country. Most Dadaists dissented from militarism: Picabia only volunteered to drive one of his many cars in the service of one of the French generals and when that became onerous, he trumped up a kind of false mission -- because he was half Cuban -- to go to Cuba and secure sugar as a scarce staple for the French state. But instead, he would almost immediately go AWOL and stop in New York on the way to Cuba, staying there for most of the war years. I don't think any sugar was ever bought; Picabia did experiment a lot with drugs though at this point! He would enter "rehab" toward the end of the war. The mobilizations of armies taking place during these war years, the displacement of populations: this was one of the things that Dada was informed by and reacted against. Dada was insistently internationalist and anti-militarist; it spread self-consciously to different locales that were set apart from the nations at war. For instance, when America finally entered the First World War, Duchamp, who had also been living in New York, fled again. He moved to South America and lived in Argentina for most of the year around 1918.

But of course we could say much more. This war, more than any other war in the twentieth century, was a kind of collective folly. It was a conflict that led to trench warfare where millions of young men lost their lives without much resolution ever coming to pass. It was the first truly modern, "anti-heroic" war--a war of dehumanization, technology, and mass death. The destructions, the death, the privations of war, all of this entered into Dada's concern with the body. You are right, there is much play with fragmentation in Dada works of art. Modernism had already been concerned with fragmentation, say, in Cubist collage. But this was the fragmenting of objects, mostly, a formal affair of still-lifes or traditional painting genres. In Dada, by contrast, we see an immense fragmentation of bodies. This seems to be something that is inescapably linked to the destructions of war and this was another strategy that Dada takes up: mimetically assimilating the destruction and violence of the war. The kind of nationalist fervor of this time, not unlike present times in many ways --Homeland Security, infinite war -- is something that Dada took a very concerted stance against. Its destructions were not built upon air. Dada staged its own destructions against the destructiveness of the time; it amplified the reality of its historical moment and parodied it as well. With its destruction and violence, Dada spit back in the face of the collective madness of the war.

BookZone: Your epilogue is a wonderful sort of readymade. It seems to be a collection of personal notes as well as research notes and quotations strung together like a stream-of-consciousness poem that concludes with a clear reference to the possible meaning behind the word "Dada" itself. What made you decide to end your book this way?

Baker: Well, I was trying to bring the form of the way I write art history into alignment with the forms that I'm trying to write about; to collapse the distance that critics and art historians often take with regard to their objects of study. If you really are to write effectively about works like those of Picabia and the other Dadaists, that distance is not necessarily possible or productive. The Dada work of art itself disallows this; it is for this reason as well that traditional art historical approaches have mostly failed to account for Dada.

The stream-of-consciousness nature of my last chapter was definitely intended. It is not just a concern with randomness or the everyday, it implies a form of "expanded subjectivity," a revolt against the individual narrative and art historical voice. My epilogue actually takes up the form of James Joyce's Ulysses and also quotes from Joyce at times. I wanted to take up Dada strategies of the readymade; to use the readymade myself, to transform the writing of art history in part into a labor of citation and appropriation. These are the quintessential Dada strategies, and they resonate into contemporary art; my epilogue was also deeply influenced by the performance "scripts" written by UCLA art professor Andrea Fraser, texts made up almost entirely of citations. The readymade then allowed me to bring in the voices of the various figures involved with Dada -- Breton, Tzara, etc.--or thinkers who influenced Dada like the philosopher [Friedrich] Nietzsche. I could bring them into my writing not just as deadened objects for analysis, nor as art historical "influences," but as living voices in a dialogue, if a bit of a mad dialogue.

I also wanted to end my book with a "dialogue" of voices--it is almost a Socratic form, although no philosopher would probably want to be associated with this text, the excessive multiplication of voices and views. But my book is probably more about that than almost anything else -- it is about dialogue -- and this seemed the most proper way to amplify the stories that I tell about the dialogue between artists like Picabia and Marcel Duchamp; or between mediums like painting and photography and film; or between poets and painters, visual art and literature. Dialogue was a Dada form: artists and poets speaking to each other and creating a movement that was no longer concerned with the individual, alienated genius alone in the studio or out in the countryside, like Monet at Giverny. Dada was an urban movement. It was about dialogues between collectives and artists working together. It was also about dissonance, the clash of voices, the random montage of images. So I wanted my book not to just invent new criteria to speak about Dada but to follow Dada's own ways of doing this. I wanted the form of my book to reflect the radicality of what a dialogue in art practice entails and what it could be. Thus the cacophony of voices at the end; people speaking to each other seemingly out of nowhere and across the intervening chasm of the years; an art historian who gives up writing from the distanced perspective of the scholar. That is what I was hoping to do with the ending; to make more palpable the claims of the book and my hopes for it. I wanted not just to write "on" Dada, but to write alongside it, and perhaps experience some of its radicality, some of its freedoms, again. And I hope my readers can experience this as well.

Professor George Baker is currently working on a book about contemporary photography and another on Pablo Picasso. He recommends John Richardson's three-volume biography, A Life of Picasso. Baker also recommends any of the books -- Austerlitz or Vertigo or The Emigrants or The Rings of Saturn -- by the German novelist, W. G. Sebald, whom he cites as an influence on the way that the introduction for The Artwork Caught By the Tail was written.