The Artwork Caught by the Tail* GEORGE BAKER If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail. —Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada 1918 The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death. To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn’t die is money, it just leaves on trips. —Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada, 1920 Je m’appelle Dada He is staring at us, smiling, his face emerging like an exclamation point from the gap separating his first from his last name. “Francis Picabia,” he writes, and the letters are blunt and childish, projecting gaudily off the canvas with the stiff pride of an advertisement, or the incontinence of a finger painting. (The shriek of the commodity and the babble of the infant: Dada always heard these sounds as one and the same.) And so here is Picabia. He is staring at us, smiling, a face with- out a body, or rather, a face that has lost its body, a portrait of the artist under the knife. Decimated. Decapitated. But not quite acephalic, to use a Bataillean term: rather the reverse. Here we don’t have the body without a head, but heads without bodies, for there is more than one. Picabia may be the only face that meets our gaze, but there is also Metzinger, at the top and to the right. And there, just below * This essay was written in the fall of 1999 to serve as a catalog essay for the exhibition Worthless (Invaluable): The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art, curated by Carlos Basualdo at the Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia. To date, the catalog has not been published. The material presented here is drawn from my dissertation on Francis Picabia and Paris Dada. It has benefited from close critical readings at the hands of Rachel Haidu, Rhea Anastas, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. For reasons far exceeding the date of its composition, it is dedicated to Rosalind Krauss. OCTOBER 97, Summer 2001, pp. 51–90. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 52 OCTOBER Francis Picabia. L’oeil cacodylate. 1921. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Artwork Caught by the Tail 53 him, is Cocteau. And there is Gabrielle. And there is Marcel. All so many heads floating free of their bodies, they roll through the space of this painting, turning now this way and now that—backward, forward, sideways, and upside-down—dis- persed products of the art of collage practiced in the key of castration. “At the heart of our projects,” as Louis Aragon later described Dada’s activities in 1921, “there was always the gleam of the guillotine.”1 These heads, however, had companions. For the heads were joined, not to bodies, but to words. To signatures. So that along with Picabia, there is Germaine. And there is Tristan, and Man Ray, and Georges. And there is Isadora, and Pierre, and Marthe, and Clément, and Suzanne, and Marguerite, and Benjamin. And there is Jean, and Hania, and Renata, and Léo, and Michel, and René, and Paul, and Alice, and Marie, and Roland, and Serge, and Céline, and Valentine, and François. Faces and names. Heads and signatures. Photographs and language. These are the signs offered up by Picabia’s 1921 painting L’oeil cacodylate. These are the signs offered up by a painting that seems somehow to be newly about the logic of the sign, about the full infiltration of the space of painting by a procession of deracinated signs. For here images, painted images, are in short supply. Picabia provides an eye, a cartoonish, figurative punch line—far from the geometric rigor that characterized the artist’s increasingly abstract “mechanomorphs”—to accompany the painting’s written title. But that is about it. And painted images aren’t the only thing suddenly missing. Hair seems to have become a scarce commodity. Picabia has retained his, of course—this was a mane that would accompany him to the grave. But look at Gabrielle. She seems to have given up her locks in return for the plunging blade of her décolletage, its point functioning as the flip side of the jagged, ghostly peaks left by the excision of any trace of hair from the photograph- ic image of her face. And look at Cocteau. He too seems to exist as a face without a summit, his hair manifestly occluded by the “crown of melancholy” scrawled across his image. And look at Marcel. In his case, as always, the loss has become real, literal, as Duchamp places two images of himself on Picabia’s painting, two images focused—to a greater or lesser degree—on his gleaming scalp. Amid the panoply of personages and signs within L’oeil cacodylate, Duchamp presents himself as bald. Something like an allegorical image forms here, for me at least. Its point was tongue-in-cheek, deeply hermetic, perhaps unreadable, even to the majority of the collective that worked to create this painting. Its meaning seems driven home by the one image that manifestly contradicts Duchamp’s hairlessness, or at least (literally) redirects it: the photograph by Man Ray of a woman smoking a ciga- rette, positioned directly below Duchamp’s face. Taken from a radically oblique angle, the one nameless image in L’oeil cacodylate reads as reversed, the woman’s hair—excessive and thick—splayed out in a tangle as the image’s ground, her chin 1. Louis Aragon, Projet d’histoire littéraire contemporain [1923] (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 105. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 54 OCTOBER substituting itself for the bald pinnacle shared by the other portraits, a summit extended by the appendage of a rigid cigarette. We see something like a body flipped and dehumanized, a face becoming an object—a phallic one, yes, but also one with painterly connotations. More or less dead center in Picabia’s painting, we see something like a face transformed, solidified into a cipher for the infamous “stick with the hairs on its end” that is the painter’s brush. Such a reading is perhaps easier to project onto the image now, with many years remove, as Dada’s later progeny have decoded the body in this way with increasing frequency, from Nam June Paik’s Zen for Head to Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting to Janine Antoni’s Loving Care. But such an allegory of painting and its renunciation, or—what amounts to the same thing—painting and its cor- porealization, had its own horizon of expectation at the moment of the historical avant-garde. And it had its own horizon of expectation among the Dadaists, among Picabia’s friends. For it had been in 1910 that Roland Dorgelès had taken the step of attaching a loaded brush to a donkey’s tail, allowing it to swish and sway, and submitting the resulting painting to that year’s Salon des Indépendants under the pseudonym Boronali.2 Dorgelès’s action attained immediate currency among the European avant-garde, spawning a Russian exhibit in 1912 entitled “The Donkey’s Tail,” or inspiring the young Max Ernst at the same moment to dash off a drawing with roughly the same title. And it was a blague that the Dadaists began to incorporate into more and more of their own actions. We find oblique reference to it at the moment of the emergence of Duchamp’s readymades, in the flur- ry of written responses produced to protest the rejection of Fountain from the Independents Exhibition of 1917. “I suppose monkeys hated to lose their tail,” the Dadaists intoned, in the opening lines of their defense. “Necessary, useful and an ornament, monkey imagination could not stretch to a tailless exis- tence (and frankly, do you see the 2. On the Dorgelès episode, see David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 9–11, and D. Grojnowski, “L’Ane qui peint avec sa queue: Boronali au Salon des Indépendants,” Actes de recherche en sciences sociales 88 (June 1991), pp. 41–47, cited in Cottington, p. 198. Nam June Paik. Zen for Head. 1962. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2001.97.1.51 by guest on 28 September 2021 The Artwork Caught by the Tail 55 biological beauty of our loss of them?), yet now that we are used to it, we get on pretty well without them.” Evolution would be invoked, from monkey to man, but also implicitly from painting to the readymade, from the stick with bristles to the head with hairs, from the paintbrush to the intellect, as the writer concluded, “But evolution is not pleasing to the monkey race; ‘there is a death in every change,’ and we monkeys do not love death as we should.”3 Later, Man Ray would enter the fray, announcing that such a dynamic was definitive for Dada: “Dada is a state of mind. It consists largely of negations. It is the tail of every other move- ment.”4 And Picabia, more than any of the others, would make this dynamic his own, make his own, that is, both the radicality and the rear-guard nature of Dorgelès’s sneering prank.