New York Dada is the last of the small relay magazines and the one that retrospectively names the earlier New York activity as Dada. Issued by Duchamp and Man Ray as a single number in 1921, it gathers The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and the Fountain affair under that name while reconnecting them to the wider international network. It is less a fresh beginning than a late act of naming.
Its key page is the Stieglitz advertisement with the commands “WATCH YOUR STEP!” and “CUT OUT DADYNAMIC STUFF!”. Read against Höch’s Da-Dandy, those slogans begin to sound like a pointed warning to someone who has stepped too close to a private code, especially since “cut out” resonates so directly with photomontage itself. Beneath the slogans, the angled prose turns out to have been lifted from a 1909 French language manual, showing that the page’s apparent nonsense is actually a carefully composed relay of appropriation, rebuke, and concealment.