Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art

Erikson, John D. Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Ch. 2, "In the Land of Jazz, Skyscrapers, and Machines: New York Dada," covers Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, and the genesis of machine imagery in their work, as well as touching on their ambivalence toward it. Ch. 7, "Dada Art and the Dynamics of the Uninhabitable Space," begins with a general discussion of the effect that the technology to mass produce images and objects had on the meaning of art and then proceeds to link that to machine imagery in Dada (see W. Benjamin). JDE differentiates between dehumanizing industry, concerned with equipment and created to produce consumer goods, and the human-created mechanical, which for Picabia and Duchamp symbolised transformation, metamorphosis, energy, and sexual function.