When Words (and Images) Collide : With private jokes and silent snickers, ‘Dada and Surrealist’ exhibit speaks in a language all its own

Virtually everybody in these parts drives more than they want to. This necessity creates a lot of down time waiting at traffic signals which, at least, offers a chance for reflection.

I was tooling back from the County Museum of Art after looking at its new exhibition, “The Dada and Surrealist Word-Image,” when a piece of felicitous serendipity in the real world seemed to unlock the whole show. The vehicle in front of mine was a Toyota pickup.

The show, which runs through Aug. 27, is an exceptionally nice assembly of 72 small works by artists as renowned as Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and Rene Magritte, plus others as interestingly obscure as Robert Desnos and Georges Hugnet. Icons of the period on view include such familiar images as Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa and Magritte’s “This is Not a Pipe.”

One can pleasurably view it all without a thought in his head, but the show has been planned to put one there--several, in fact.

Organized by associate curator Judi Freeman, the exercise comes with a slim catalogue containing her perfectly straightforward essay plus another by John Welchman, a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego.

That is where the trouble starts.

Welchman is evidently a votary of the current academic and literary fashion for criticism, which he calls “post-structuralist.” These folks are into analyzing the relationship between words and the things they stand for plus the social and political context that brings them together. They often conclude that verbal language and picture language are used by the social power structure as tools to manipulate poor little rubes like us.

All of this will sound familiar to anyone who has seen the current “Forest of Signs” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which deals with today’s version of the same idea. The LACMA show can be seen as providing part of the historical background.

Welchman, like most such critics, has some interesting if predictable ideas. But they are couched in such cryptic and abstract jargon that the interpreter of the exhibition winds up needing an interpreter.

Meanwhile, I am stuck in coagulated traffic behind a Toyota pickup truck. Staring wearily at the tail-ends of other cars is not usually much fun. You find yourself wishing auto manufacturers would design more interesting endings. Some kindly drivers try to spiff up their boring backsides with bumper stickers and vanity license plates that are only fitfully amusing.

But this Toyota pickup reflected one of the rare poetic successes among these attempts to counter rear-end ennui. The owner of this rig had put his spray can to work erasing four flanking letters until all that was left--smack in the middle--was a nice cheerful YO.

At first, YO seems less a word than a sound. Artists in the word-image exhibition used written language the same way. Miro put “Ah!” and “HoO” into one painting. Most of the words in the artworks are in French or German, and often they are fragments, so for English speakers they are just sounds. Artists of the period were still interested in the the French Symbolist poets’ idea of making art that mixed sensations usually separated--the vision of painting, the sound of music, the texture and bulk of sculpture, the spatial depth of architecture. Significantly, a number of the artists--such as Robert Desnos--are better known as poets. He refers to the poet Paul Eluard in one work, and Duchamp refers to the poet Guillame Appolinaire in another.

Despite turgid catalogue rhetoric, the general feel of this show is lighthearted and playful. We know that not because we necessarily understand the language, but because we hear its music and see its letters as expressive shapes in painting like any others. There is no mistaking the lyricism of Miro’s handwriting or the ironic authority of an embossed brass plate in a Duchamp.

YO! The tailgate hails us back to the real world. Right. Like the tailgate maker, these artists wanted the feel of everyday life in their art, its chaos, cheerful vulgarity and anonymous mystery. Collage was the best way to capture that. Kurt Schwitters incorporated old tram tickets, Raoul Hausmann got the clout of newspaper headlines, Georges Hugnet played with sexual kinks in paste-ups from adverts that suggest eros-for-sale and ransom notes.

YO! Isn’t that a way of saying hi in current argot? Don’t you conjure the rippled, sweaty image of Sly Stallone? It’s definitely the first-person singular of the Spanish language. The tailgate is a way of turning a common mass-produced object into something personal. It does so by changing something familiar into something enigmatic. In the same way, the artists slow and focus our gnat-like attention span by turning the commonplace into the mysterious. But to what end? The tailgate wants to impress the guys with its macho--a toughness that comes from an ironic vandalization of a symbol of corporate authority. What once belonged to Toyota now belongs to YO. It wants to impress the girls with its wit and nonchalance. And there is no way to separate the meanings of the sound-word-image. It’s all one statement right down to it’s fat, assertive lettering. YO, bro.

Likewise, the exhibition reeks with laconic antisocial cool, private jokes directed at The Boys and sexual innuendo that swaggers and snickers at the same time.

Duchamp’s mustachioed reproduction of the Mona Lisa mordantly vandalizes the world’s most revered symbol of Great Art and the feminine mystique. He turns La Gionconda into an ordinary bimbo with his title, “L.H.O.O.Q.,” which means “Elle .a chaud au cul,” or “She has a hot . . .” oh dear. Well, speaking of tailgates. . . .

Francis Picabia used words to make a clear comparison between mechanical pumps and women. He paints one and labels it “Voila La Femme” (There Is the Woman).

Picabia paints some spermy shapes and calls it “The Ivy Unique Eunuch.” In “The Pine Family,” the obscure Ithell Colquhoun shows three truncated and castrated torsos. Magritte was interested in a whole arsenal of ideas about the differences between illusion and reality, but they often took the form of labeling a tree “nude woman,” an empty mirror “sad woman,” or a brick wall “woman’s body.”

The sexual obsessions of these artists form a kind of interpretive crossroad that wanders off variously. We can think about simple chauvinism or return to classic cliches about artists as sensitive souls with larger-than-average doses of the traits of both genders, but that doesn’t seem to bear on this theoretical exhibition.

What does seem pertinent is the realization that metaphor can cut both ways. If a severed tree branch can symbolize castration, then castration can symbolize something else. In the big picture, the dilemma of the modern artist has been that history lopped off his traditional function.

Before the 20th Century, the artist’s job was to portray and celebrate his society’s beatific vision--tribal artists celebrated ancestral spirits, Greek artists trumpeted godlike humans, Christian artists worshiped the Holy Trinity and Renaissance artists promoted class power.

Advertising swiped the beatific vision in modern consumer society. (It also cribs most of its fresh ideas from the fine arts, but that’s another issue.) The gorgeous illusion of a paradise of products may be vulgar and silly, but it is our version of heaven. We consume it on the telly with the rapt enchantment of pilgrims before a cathedral’s stained glass. We adhere to its laws like converts. If I have no body odor, the Blessed Lady will love me. If I drink light beer, I will be a Herculean Hero.

Anybody who scorns advertising as an artistic and cultural force is just not paying attention. At best, it’s gorgeous, powerful stuff.

Meanwhile, so-called fine artists, rendered impotent by this phenomenon, have cast about for a way to regain their chops. Clearly the artists of LACMA’s word-image and MOCA’s “Signs” exhibitions are trying to wrest the Grail of word-plus-image back from advertising--which is its most brilliant practitioner and probably its originator.

But why then? And why now? This may seem a bit far-fetched, but the incorporation of the French language into art came at a time when French was to begin losing its cachet as the language with cultural clout.

Could it be that the artists intuitively annexed it as an act of preservation? Could it be that modern art--despite its reputation as revolutionary and advanced--is at least in part an agent of tradition? Of course it is.

If Dada and Surrealist art loaded French onto its Noah’s Ark of cultural prestige, then wouldn’t it make sense that the artists of “A Forest of Signs” are doing the same for English?

Seems absurd. The English language is vibrant, the second language of the whole world, spoken by more people than any other tongue, ever.

I’m beginning to wonder if the guy in the Toyota lives on my block. He keeps staying in front. Can’t pass for traffic. Turn on the radio. Humph. “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” Change the station. You can’t just listen to that show; you have to watch it. Seems imperative.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe all languages are becoming second languages to the lingua franca of our time, that riveting combination of words and pictures that speaks louder than all of them. Maybe word-works fine art--despite contrary motives--will finally act as reminder of a more gracious time when written and spoken languages by themselves were marks of cultural attainment.

The first time you saw “Ma Jolie” lettered into a Picasso painting, didn’t a thought waft shadowy across the back of the mind, and didn’t it say, “Gee, if a genius like Picasso uses French in his painting it must really be a classy language”?

* CURATOR’S VIEW

An interview with Judi Freeman of LACMA. Page 83