There was a man on stage with a paper bag on his head, waving a stick about. There was a judge who tried people for lunatic “crimes”. There was Mr Wobbly Hand. It was all rather strange, but also terribly funny. This was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 where the dada movement began. No, wait – it was the TV comedy show Vic Reeves Big Night Out, which ran from 1990 to 1991, and also featured Les with his fear of chives, Morrissey the Consumer Monkey and a game show called Read the Anthony Trollope Novel.
Now comes news that Reeves is to restage the antics of the original dadaists at the Cabaret Voltaire, including re-creating one of their most bizarre performances. I almost wrote “surreal performances”, but that would be putting the lobster telephone before the bottle rack. Anyway, it’s all part of a BBC4 programme, Gaga for Dada, that he is presenting on his favourite art movement.
It is great casting, and a reminder of how arty the comedy of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer always was. The duo have long walked the line between funny-peculiar and funny-haha – the same line walked by dadaists. And yet they are oh so very British. There were no British dadaists between 1916 and 1920, when this movement was at its peak. Dada spread from Zurich to Paris, Berlin, Cologne, even to New York – but it gave London a miss. When dada finally hit the UK in the 1970s, it took the form of punk rock. Only in the late 80s did it reach the British art world.
Reeves and Mortimer are the comedy contemporaries of the Young British Artists, who were creating their peculiarly British art of shock and surprise in the 1990s. When Bob Mortimer was the Man With a Stick, Damien Hirst was pickling a shark. When The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer was on telly, Rachel Whiteread’s concrete house was winning the Turner prize, Sarah Lucas was putting two fried eggs and a kebab on a table and Martin Creed was sending a piece of balled up paper to the director of the Tate.
What did all this art and comedy of the 90s have in common with dada? An impulse to make the world strange, to make it new. Modern art is the art of the unfamiliar. In the Pompidou Centre in Paris last week I noticed a shadow on a white wall that looked like the claws of an alien crab monster. It was cast by a curvy, wooden object that seems gratuitous to 21st-century eyes, but in 1917 was instantly recognisable as an everyday hat rack removed from its original purpose and turned into a perplexing sculpture.
The work in question is Marcel Duchamp’s Porte-Chapeaux, a dadaist object whose difference from all the normal non-art stuff around it hangs by an actual thread. Suspended from the ceiling, casting its enigmatic shadow, this is a piece of the world “chosen” by the artist – as Duchamp defined his readymade method – and made strange. So strange it confounds us after all these years.The sitcom House of Fools proved Reeves and Mortimer are still making strange art, too – just don’t call it “surreal”. It’s dada. Or perhaps, when dada’s 100th anniversary this year transforms the word into cliche, comics will have to define themselves as pataphysical followers of Alfred Jarry. But that’s another uphill bicycle race.
