March, 2008

Berlin Dada, Revolutionary Action and Photomontage: Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausman

The Berlin Dada group formed shortly after the conclusion of World War I as a radical anti-art movement, whose goal was to undermine and revolutionize the old, traditional, bourgeois society that they perceived as being responsible for the horrors of World War I. Berlin Dada was a political movement. They believed that modern man, because of his rationality, was faced with warfare, upheaval and perils due to his rationality and desire for “progress”. Through confrontational agitation tactics and the dissemination of revolutionary ideas, they sought to shake mainstream society out of its complacency and shock them into radical transformation. Hannah Hoch was the only female member of the Berlin Dada group. Her membership was secured through her love relationship with Raoul Hausmann; in contrast to the Surrealist group, she was not expected to play the role of muse or femme-enfant, but rather to be an outspoken participant in public spectacle. Hausmann tried to press upon her the importance of activism and agitation, particularly within the framework of feminist revolution, but this was a role she did not relish, likely because her temperament was not suited for it. Despite the fact that she was one of the most gifted Berlin Dadaists, she was marginalized within the group and did not receive the recognition that her male counterparts enjoyed.

Hoch was one of the first practitioners of the subversive photomontage technique, a presumably iconoclastic anti-art activity that involved incorporating found objects and pre-existing images from popular, mass-produced sources, such as newspapers and journals. These images, often reproduced en masse and disseminated, were meant to shock and subvert through illogical juxtapositions and social criticism. As a result, they would serve the revolutionary purpose of shaking society out of its blind, unquestioning complacency, and waking them up to the necessity of social change. By appropriating pre-existing images and objects and combining them in an illogical and contradictory fashion, the Dadaists denied the artistic concepts of originality and aesthetic concerns. When two or more Dadaists collaborated on a photomontage or collage, formal unity was denied; this generally resulted in the desired clash disparate of ideas and forms. Hannah Hoch, however never fully accepted the Dadaist “anti-art” position. She became a master of the photomontage, and turned it into a true art form that was at once socially critical, politically subversive, poetic, and visually pleasing. In addition to her refusal to embrace Dada’s iconoclasm, she never felt comfortable participating in the Dada practice of the radical public spectacle. This contributed to the turmoil and tension she experienced in her six-year long relationship with Hausmann, who constantly pushed her to think and act more like a Dadaist agitator.

As artists, Hausmann and Hoch had very different approaches. Hausmann was first and foremost a revolutionary. Dada photomontage was to him nothing more than a subversive act. It was a means to and end, with the desired outcome being to attack the societal institutions of patriarchy and bourgeois progress. His style was blunt, direct, and aggressive. As a theorist and ideologue, he was just as comfortable (if not more comfortable) using words, either written, spoken, or collaged as he was working with images. Hausmann’s combined text and images on the left side of Dada Cordial, a collaborative effort between the two, are confrontational and hostile. The nude male figures are juxtaposed bluntly with the phallic mechanical devices to show, quite literally, the masculine patriarch marching boldly and directly toward capital and technological progress. The blocks of text amount to political agitation and a Dada manifesto. One of the nude figures holds a long mechanical object that diagonally reaches to the right hand side of the page. This is the only attempt at unity between the two artists’ contributions. On the right side, in contrast to the Hausmann’s antagonistic words, Hoch’s text block contains an anonymous poem. The words are seductive and persuasive, as is the subtle interplay of organic and mechanical visual forms. The imagery subverts the values of the mechanized bourgeoisie in a playful metaphoric manner; an automobile turned on its side, is rendered useless while its wheels continue to spin. It is apparent that she took pleasure in the formal and pictorial aspects of the montage process, paying attention to layering, formal juxtapositions, and poetic combinations of mechanical and natural forms. As in most of her work, Hoch uses poetry, metaphor, and humor to create social criticism. Compared to Hausmann’s blunt and forceful approach, its subtle qualities call for careful analysis and interpretation.

It seems that Hausmann and Hoch’s approaches to photomontage are reversals of each other. While Hausmann saw the image only as a means to a political end, Hoch saw Dada and the social revolution as an outlet for her need to make art. Hausmann believed in the power of Dada action and imagery to bring about a total subversion and subsequent transformation of mainstream society. Hoch was more pragmatic. While she did not oppose social activism, she remained skeptical as to its effectiveness in bringing about true political outcomes. While she might not have believed the Dada photomontage could directly transform society, she did see it as an expressive vehicle for social and political critiques.

Her criticisms of the hypocrisies of bourgeois German culture and the Weimar government are clearly expressed in Cut with a Kitchen Knife: The Beer Belly Culture, 1919-20. In this complicated collage, Hoch arranges many small fragmented images cut from magazines, illustrated journals, and Dada publications into a playful, cohesive and unified whole that requires careful analysis and interpretation. Her appropriation of images from mass produced popular media reflects everyday life and everyday experience in the early 20th century. These ideas would return thirty-five to forty years later in the Neo-Dada and Pop art movements. The kitchen knife is an instrument of dissection associated with the women’s realm. She metaphorically slices open and analyzes the overfed bourgeoisie and the patriarchs in power. Male authority figures appear trapped, restricted, bloated, and drunk. Small figures, some of indeterminate gender, dance freely about the page, balancing on the spatially confined patriarchs, and generally acting on their whims. These are the figures that represent Dada and its promises of liberation and revolution.

On feminist issues, Hoch was more comfortable communicating her views pictorially than through radical action. Hausmann, on the other hand, was an outspoken feminist whose proclamations about women’s needs to claim freedom over their own minds and bodies and release themselves from the confines of patriarchal institutions sound surprisingly modern for his time. He objected vehemently to prevailing beliefs that women who did not choose to submit to masculine authority within the institution of marriage, i.e. those who remained unmarried and independent, were floozies or whores. His writings and public assertions stated that through revolutionary upheaval, women could rise up from their male-dominated conditioning and fulfill their full human potential. Hausmann wanted Hoch to take a more overt and activist public position regarding her feminism, but she resisted, and this fueled the tension in their relationship.

Hausmann’s views sound refreshingly pro-woman for a man of his day and age, but when we consider his treatment of Hoch, we must ask ourselves how much of this was theoretical, ideological, reactionary talk and how much did he truly take these ideas to heart. He was clearly comfortable writing about feminist revolution and sexual liberation, but when it came to his day-to-day interactions with Hoch, he tried to dominate her and control her actions by telling her what to do. Hausmann had a wife and children that he did not want to leave. Understandably, Hoch wanted him to give up his marriage so that she could have him all to herself in a conventional monogamous relationship. Not wanting to give up a good thing, Hausmann accused Hoch of being conventional minded, unliberated, and unable to pull herself above the male thinking that conditioned her during her paternal upbringing. If she were a truly sexually liberated woman, he felt she would be tolerant of their non-monogamous relationship. It seems that Hausmann was using his ideologies regarding sexual liberation to suit his own needs. One must wonder if he would have promoted sexual liberation to the same extent had it been Hoch who wished to have more than one sexual partner? It is possible that Hausmann was so theoretical in his thinking, that he could understand his own words as abstract concepts, but not as concrete realities. He promoted revolutionary sexual action, but when it came to his own life, he could not let go of one of the world’s oldest sexual conventions: the mistress. He was a feminist in theory, and he supported women’s equality through Dada actions, but he was neither willing nor able to satisfy Hoch’s needs for monogamy and emotional security. On the topics of feminism and their personal relationship, he wanted her to be more radical and activist; she wanted him to be more attentive to her feelings and emotional needs.

Hoch opposed and resisted Hausmann’s demands that she pursue feminism on a more activist level, but her feminist views spoke through in her artful collages. In apparent defiance of Hausmann’s proclamations that that painting was meaningless and that art was dead, Hoch continued her interest in picture making, exploring color montages as an alternative to painting, and even venturing into painting in earnest. Bride and Groom, 1927, an oil and watercolor painting that resembles a collage is not anti-art. It is visually cohesive and alive with potential meaning. This absurd wedding portrait satirizes the ridiculous displays of middle class values and traditional gender roles in a typical bourgeois wedding. It may also speak to more personal issues for Hoch as well. The groom seems mechanized and non-human. He is a mannequin, stiff and unfeeling. Could he be a stand-in for Hausmann, the inattentive ideologue who could not meet Hoch’s emotional needs? The bride has a monstrous baby head on top of her small adult body. Her facial expression conveys both bewilderment and a desire for escape. An assortment of winged objects, suggesting mostly domesticity and reproduction fly in circles around her. They may be there to menace her, or they might provide her with the means to act on a last ditch effort to extricate herself from this institution of bondage before it is too late. One must wonder how her thoughts and feelings regarding Hausmann figure in to this work.

In The Pretty Maidens, 1920, Hoch also proclaims her views on bourgeois culture and the ideals it imposes on the female form. Fragments of model women share the space with advertisements for the BMW, a luxury model machine, suggesting that beautiful women, like beautiful cars are luxury items that can be possessed for a price. The human and the mechanical are fused in a disquieting way; the large diagonal crankshaft alludes to something grotesquely erotic and suggests that a mechanical effort must be used to start the women up, as if they are automobile engines. Their faces are mostly removed, leaving empty space within which advertising space and technological instruments may float. Their identities have been replaced by these 20th century consumable items. Personal identity and individualism are inessential in a consumer society. The commercial images that are reproduced in magazines (both then and today) reflect what we as a society value the most. Whether we admit it or not, popular culture reflects our values more than we are often willing to say. It is interesting to note that these ideas would appear again in the Pop art movement of the 1960s.

Hoch’s images speak loudly of her societal criticisms; it is clear that they are subversive. Why was Hausmann so frustrated with her? Why was she not Dada enough for him? He may have been so caught up in the Dada manifesto that he could not see past its proclamations of spectacle and iconoclasm. He wanted to politicize his relationship with Hoch, and put their sexual liberation on public display. He tried to change who she was and mold her into the revolutionary ideal that he thought she should be. How is this different from typical male dominant relationships? It sounds quite similar to the Galatea fantasy, in which the ideal woman can be created if she does not already exist. Perhaps Hausmann in practice was not the feminist he claimed to be in theory.

He may also have lacked the sensitivity to see the poetry and formal subtlety in Hoch’s work. Photo collage has anti-art beginnings, but for Hoch it became a new artistic medium equivalent to painting. It started out as a rebellious art form, in keeping with the social and political realm it seeks to critique and subvert, but its presence throughout the 20th and 21st centuries confirms that it does not submit to a decree that it anti-artistic. While Hausmann saw the photomontage as a temporary response to a political crisis, Hoch valued it in and of itself as an activity that produced aesthetic results. Throughout her career she used the photomontage in a way that emphasized the importance of the imagination, playful juxtapositions, and the joys of the unexpected or accidental. She saw beyond collage as a tool useful only for agitation. If she wasn’t Dada enough for Hausmann, then perhaps we should just consider her a Surrealist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Hubert, Renee Riese. Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, & Partnership. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. 1994. pp 277-307.