The poop: The premise behind this collection of academic essays is that women have been marginalized to the fringes of Dada history. While it's quite possible that women have been undervalued throughout art history, it is also true that there is sometimes good reason for this and it has nothing to do with patriarchal politics or prejudice. Such is the case with Dada--at least that's my conclusion after reading *Women in Dada.* Although the authors generally make the case that women made some interesting contributions to Dada, they are, at best, minor contributions, and, for the most part, do belong among the footnotes of a history of the movement.
Indeed, some of the artists and writers discussed had, by the authors' own admission, only the briefest and most tangential involvement with Dada, which of itself explains why they've been marginalized in the conventional telling of Dada history.
The scoop: *Women in Dada* is a book worth reading if you're seriously interested in either Dada or woman/gender studies, but probably not for the casual reader of either. This collection bears all the trademarks of post-graduate school critical writing: interpretations teased and sometimes tortured beyond all reasonable assumptions into the semblance of something new for the purpose of saying something new, furthering an agenda, advancing a personal philosophy, etc., in other words, Derridean-style deconstruction without apology. The constant re-interpretation of old material is what academic writing has always been about--part of the vicious publish-or-perish cycle--and, ostensibly, what keeps art and literature by those long dead relevant to our time.
These subsequent re-interpretations can be interesting, illuminating (or annoying) and serve to prove that art and literature can be thought of as a kind of eternal Rorschach that tells us more about ourselves in our reaction to a work than it does the original artist or his/her original intent--a jumping-off place for original creation based on contemporary reactions.
For me, this book was most rewarding by my reading it as a sort of negative of the negative of the untold history of Dada that the authors were trying to provide--a restoring of the original Dada picture by means of where the shadow history borders on that of the major figures of Dada, who are all well-represented here.
If that makes sense. If not, try this: you get a lot of info about Duchamp, Picabia, Schwitters, Arp, Ball, etc, even if they aren't the main focus of these essays.
Also--this book is nicely formatted, well-made, and generously illustrated throughout, altho the plates are in money-saving black-and-white.
So, let me close in Dada-fashion by saying, and not irrelevantly, I trust: Unconventional on criticize broken decides life.....reenacted!
