The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (October Books)

The artist Francis Picabia -- notorious dandy bon vivant painter poet filmmaker and polemicist -- has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabias work in Paris during the Dada years art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabias eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade -- Marcel Duchamps anti-art invention which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabias hands Baker argues the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabias readymade opened art not just to the commodity but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices claiming them for art history -- and naming them -- for the first time: Dada Drawing Dada Painting Dada Photography Dada Abstraction Dada Cinema Dada Montage. Along the way Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabias polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called suggestively The Young Girl) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia Andr Breton Tristan Tzara James Joyce Friedrich Nietzsche Jacques Derrida Gilles Deleuze and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again Dada has never looked like art history.