Night Crawler

Outside SOMAR, a large purple cow standing in a flatbed truck asks people to squeeze his udders and two stern-faced women dance on ladders, accompanied by a poem about ancestry and pilgrimage. Inside, a crowd of off-kilter dada-lovers lines up for a photo booth that transforms them, via computer, into Hugo Ball -- one of the artists who originally founded Cabaret Voltaire and dada. (His poetry sounds like this: higo bloiko russula huju/ hollaka hollala/ anlogo bung/ blago bung.)

The gallery is filled with flying prostheses, superimposed murals, a "Geriatric Army" composition, "ready-mades" (à la Marcel Duchamp) like the Wonder Bread "Functional Non-Toaster," film montages, ready-and-waiting typewriters, a one-way turnstile, signed toilet paper squares, and the UnameriCAN Activities table, selling stickers that read, "Fuck Work," "Everyone's a Prostitute," "East Bay Is Pig Latin for BEAST," and "God Is Obsolete," among other slogans. The stage is a combination of everything that is wonderful about dada -- the Velcro Symphony; Hank Hyena's brilliant baby-doll short, Anarchist's Vomit, about an Italian peasant who will do as he pleases or retch in your face; mikl-em's "Dada Poetry Top 40" with K-Tel-style excerpts by dadaists like Tristan Tzara and George Ribemon-Dessaignes; hostess Katy Bell wrapped in saran; host m.i. blue covered in Kaos Kitty's pee; an exacting lesson on the proper way to eat an Oreo cookie; and the cubist cancan of the Devilettes -- and everything that is most awful -- singing off-key as if it were on purpose; a woman who slowly blows up several purple balloons and, after each one, harps on her inattentive lover in poet-voice; the clumsy choreography that no amount of nudity can help (nudity never helps); the poem, "Let us destroy/ Let us be good/ Let us create new forces of gravity ...," recited by Dada Death.

It seems dada makes the most sense just after making the least: When earnest young folk singer Pete Humphrey is bound and gagged in duct tape while his guitar is smashed, then re-emerges on a unicycle wearing a hard hat, a bell, and a baby doll on his head, singing, "I am emotionally unstable!" Or when one of the nonspeaking characters in mikl-em's play The Ill-Fitted Romance of DAda + SFMo[M]MA finally says, "You can't wear an art movement around your neck. ... An art movement must be nurtured." Then you understand why dada, in San Francisco, now.

In 1918, there was a dada manifesto that demanded the introduction of progressive unemployment through the comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity, for, "only by unemployment does it become possible for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience." Here, in San Francisco, as more and more of our artists are caught in the relentless mastication of economy, we need something to force us to re-evaluate our values.

At Dadafest, Kevin Keating did (not) suggest the Super Glue-ing of certain front door locks.

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By Silke Tudor