One recurring motif of European high art in the twentieth century is to see that it is never ‘too high’. The pulls at the core identity of European modernity came from a variety of sources – the Word Wars, Marxism-Leninism and its various mutations in Stalinism-Communism, the rise of America, the passing away of an old European power elite in the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire inside Europe and the decimation of the British Empire outside, the breakdown of a self-assuring value system that was organised Christianity, the growth and transformation of the major European cities into powerful if lonely sites of seamless personal preoccupation, the birth and proliferation of cinema and visual art etc. Individually and collectively all the above have been extensively discussed but it is always an attractive proposition to locate those issues in the self-reflexive proclivity of contemporary art and their often contested and consummate genealogies.

One major aspect of Europe’s gradual peeling away of its high art affectations, its boorish Enlightenment logic was to make way for popular culture, for prevailing and zeitgeist kitsch and even schlock. This meant that the great artistes of Europe, especially in the first half of the last century lived and grappled with their wider implications having their artistic sensibilities tested by the plethora of imagery and text that was borrowed from mass cultural sources. And, on significant moments in this assimilation came figures who had a seminal influence on the history of art.

So, long before the snow-haired Jackson Pollock dragged nude models across a floor full of paint and Roy Lichtenstein painted BMWs with acrylic, French iconoclast Marcel Duchamp had redefined what came to be known as pop art. Now, Dadaumpop, an exhibition of 27 Italian artists at the ICSSR Tagore Centre is a witness to the way that contemporary artists react to Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism — the influential and provocative anti-art movement in the 1920s, whose manifesto, boldly mentions its deep scepticism about what we call the normative logic and condition for art. As Marcel Janco recalled in one of the earlier writings on the Dada Movement: “We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the tabula rasa. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order.”

And this nihilistic intention found traction in the work of one of its chief agent provocateur, Duchamp. As Igor Zanti, the curator of the multi-city exhibition writes in the exhibition pamphlet: “Sometimes Duchamp’s act has been called Dada, although this description is limitative since the French artist is, from all points of view, the true initiator of what we call contemporary art, his is the benchmark that enables us to declare that such dissimilar works as the unmade well-used bed of the bad girl Tracey Amin, or the performances of Vito Acconci or Andy Warhol’s Brillo Bixes, are good works. …This exhibition originates from a desire to understand what the Duchampian and Dadaistic legacies are that can be found in Italian neo-pop and also the need to find a definition and historicization to this artistic reality.”

Of course, there is no great rebellion or provocation in the works under Dadaumpop. The exhibition is more about the style and the coolness factor rather than taking the genre of pop-art forward.

In two significant ways, pop art changed in the last few decades – the undeniable influence of graphic novels and the superhero cult and the recurrent and sometimes unthinking use of fluorescent acrylic (found here in the works of Angelo Volpe, Andy, Cristina Stifanic, David Mancosu etc). Also, the ubiquity of advertisements and commercial imagery is palpable as in two works that work on an Ikea Sofa (Fabrizio Braghieri) and a Moet and Chandon Champaign bottle that is titled Monet and Chandon (Andrea Francolino). Two other works mock traffic signals (Drunk by Gianfranco Pulitano) and bathroom signs (One way and no Through Road by Masi) —iconography from everyday life. 

There is just one cutting edge installation — the Intelligent Bridge, by Florraine in which, a manufactured brain is stapled to two imaginary countries on two sides with the brain being the bridge. The installation extends to a series of pictures which show what appears to be a real brain being chopped, sliced and diced on a chef’s table to be put into test tubes and arranged neatly, almost in military discipline, in a half-circle.

There is also a sweet Bollwyood connect in which Mr Bachchan, SRK and Anil Kapoor are depicted as Superhero paper dolls, drawn in Japanese Manga style and made of airy, vacuous cubic cardboard boxes. An interesting cultural leap of imagination doubtlessly.

Interestingly one of the entries in the feedback register loudly condemned the exhibition as philistine and meaningless. The complainant protests that this is not art. The point is, it isn’t. And that’s the fun of it. The gentleman’s angry repute is perhaps a blithe reminder that how much may have changed since Duchamp made art out of an inverted urinal and naming it Fountain, but the atavistic logic about art and its function is endemic to high art and its proponents, postmodernism notwithstanding.  

This exhibition is hence important, if not eye-popping.