Dada Exhibition at MOMA

August has ended and September has come. I haven’t had any problem with my registration this semester. Perhaps I should say I haven’t had any problem “yet”; but I try to be more hopeful.

Let’s start with a Dada exhibition at MOMA. It is up on the sixth floor and runs through September 11th. So there is not much time if you want to check it out. I was there last week and I really liked it. After the National Gallery of Art, MOMA is the first museum in the U.S. to concentrate exclusively on Dada. There are works of more than fifty avant-garde artists. Among them I liked the best Le Petit Désert (The Little Desert, 1920) a drawing by George Ribemont-Dessgaignes; it points out the importance of chance and accident in life by showing a set of Domino Bones. I liked also the Entr’acte (1924) a Dada film by Rene Clair.

I recently saw Grizzly Man (2005) a documentary by Werner Herzog about Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, grizzly bear activists who were killed by a bear in October 2003 in one of their annual trips to Alaska. The accident was a tragic one but what interests me is Herzog’s choice to make a documentary about this and his opinion about Timothy. Timothy Treadwell taped almost all of his trips to Alaska in order to educate the public about the grizzly bears and their inhabitance. His eye-catching shots are basically the whole film. Herzog thinks of Timothy not only as an environmental activist but also and more importantly he sees him as a filmmaker.

I also saw The Illusionist (2006) directed by Neil Burger and I also saw The Devil Wears Prada (2006) directed by David Frankel because I had read the book by Lauren Weisberger. I didn’t like them much but summer movies are usually like this.

Melekler Kahvesi, Summer 2006, A Coffee Shop in Istanbul
where we had our fortune told while playing Dominos.
Very Dada-ish indeed.