Photo by angela n. | CC BY 2.0
It was big news last week (eons ago in Trumpland): the Guggenheim Museum in New York turned down the Trumps’ request to borrow Vincent Van Gogh’s 1888 painting “Landscape With Snow,” offering instead to install a functioning solid gold toilet in their White House family quarters.
The offered object, Maurizio Cattelan’s “America,” is a piece of twenty-first century conceptual art, but the reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 (porcelain) urinal, an icon of the early twentieth century dada movement, is hard to miss, especially in light of the Trumps’ request and the Guggenheim’s response.
Dadaist iconoclasm reflected the political orientation of a leftwing avant-garde intent on shocking and, as far as possible, overturning bourgeois values and expectations. The surrealist movement that followed closely on its heels, and that involved many of the same people, entertained similar objectives.
In the dream world that surrealist artists evoked, things sometimes turn into their opposite. Dialecticians, like Hegel and Marx, identified similar transformations.
It is therefore both fitting and unsettling that the most dada president imaginable, the political equivalent of a porcelain urinal, would catalyze the emergence of a surreal world order, replete with diplomatic, military, and environmental policies in which departures from received norms, so far from moving humankind closer to a realm of freedom, equality and solidarity,…