dada - book - 2010 - Mimi's Dada Catifesto

Mimi’s Dada Catifesto
Shelley Jackson
Clarion Books
2010
45 pages

Hi there, I picked up a copy of Mimi’s Dada Catifesto from Raven Used Books, in Northampton, Massachusets.  

Mimi is a poor alley cat living in a top hat in an unnamed European city (presumably Zurich during WWI).  Mimi has companionship in her life, her best friend is a pigeon named Lazlo, and she shares the top hat with newlywed cockroaches.  Mimi’s dream, however, is to find an owner and a home, albeit one that suits her particular creative sensibilities.

Mimi stumbles, one evening, into a cafe (something like the Cabaret Voltaire) where there’s a raucous performance being given by the Dada artists. This cat immediately became attracted to the Dadaist’s anarchistic attitude, ethos, and approach to art.  Mimi had particularly come to admire Mr. Dada, the most extreme and outrageous of the Dadaists, and likely intended by Jackson as a representation of Tristan Tzara (or could be a composite of a number of those artists).  The book then follows Mimi’s attempts to appeal to Mr. Dada, in the hopes of becoming his pet, through strewing trash around his flat as a series of readymade sculptures, through loudly screeching as a poetic performance,

 

and through incessantly strange behavior.  Mr Dada rejects Mimi at first, but overtime he acknowledges the cat as a consummate Dadaist via the realization of how relentlessly irritating she was.  The final page of Jackson’s narrative displays Mr. Dada snuggling with Mimi after adopting her as his pet.

Mimi’s Dada Catifesto is a children’s book about the Dada movement (one of my favourite topics in counterculture).  It presents to children a simple narrative which encapsulates all of the basic ideas of the interwar avant-garde art movement.  Each page is covered by full-page illustrations in pastiche of the various Dada styles, and thus the book also encapsulates all of the Dada’s aesthetic forms.  Some illustrations emulate George Grosz particular drawing style:

Many of the illustrations recall the photo-montage or collage styles of Raoul Haussman and Hannah Hoch:  

While Mimi is often adorably represented as a realistic tabby cat, rendered in a quasi-expressionist style.

Jackson also inserted activities into the book to teach children about high modernist art, and especially about the chaos of Dada.  The book recalls how Dada historian Richard Sheppard put the art of children as an influential factor on the original Dada movement, but it also plausibly makes the cat into the quintessential Dadaist.