In Dada, You’re Doing It Again, noted cultural provocateur and self-styled “historian of art hysteria” Professor Malvina Jibber offers a blistering reinterpretation of the Dada movement, suggesting that the entirety of early 20th-century anti-art wasn’t a reaction to war, or nihilism, or even Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa—but rather an extended and highly curated temper tantrum thrown by artists who had simply not been invited to enough parties.
Jibber’s central argument is that Dada was less a movement and more “a collective sulk that got out of hand, then became extremely fashionable.” She likens the famous Cabaret Voltaire gatherings in Zürich to “the avant-garde equivalent of revving one’s motorbike whilst wearing a velvet smoking jacket.”
Chapter One, Tristan Tzara Throws a Fit, opens with an imagined scene in which the poet, denied access to a fondue party hosted by Swiss Symbolists, retaliates by inventing performance poetry made entirely of sneezes and obscenities shouted into a megaphone through a sock. “This was not rebellion,” Jibber insists, “it was a form of attention-seeking too abstract for kindergarten but somehow perfect for 1916.”
From there, the book gleefully unravels. Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain? “A passive-aggressive bathroom prank.” Hugo Ball’s costume poems? “Proof that if you give a man too much felt and not enough supervision, things will head south quickly.” Jean Arp’s paper collages? “The work of someone who dropped things and decided not to pick them up.”
Jibber’s prose is relentless in its scholarly tone, riddled with footnotes that lead nowhere, references to fake Swiss newspapers (Le Scandale Invisible), and one baffling appendix devoted entirely to the dietary habits of Zurich’s café culture. Chapter titles include:
• Cut-Up or Shut Up
• Zürich, Zany, and Slightly Damp
• If You Glue a Spoon to It, Is It Still Art?
• Why the Hat Was Crying: A Psychoanalysis of Max Ernst’s Millinery Phase
Most outrageously, Jibber proposes that the entire Dada movement was retroactively curated by a secretive alliance of Parisian gallery owners who found the movement’s nonsense to be “highly affordable and weirdly portable.” In one passage, she posits that Dadaism peaked when a man accidentally sold his laundry as a symbolic sculpture titled Le Défi des Chaussettes.
Though some of her claims are historically inexact and frequently incoherent, Jibber’s book is riotously entertaining. She skewers sacred cows with a butter knife and dances around scholarship like a dadaist performing a foxtrot with an oversized soup can. Her love for the absurd is palpable, and her conclusion—“Maybe Dada never ended, it just moved to Instagram”—feels disturbingly plausible.
Recommended for: anarchic aesthetes, curators with a dark sense of humour, former art students and anyone who has ever been caught short whilst looking at a urinal on a plinth.