Dada and Hannah Hoch

During the summer I was sent a brief to be getting on with, to hand in at the start of my art foundation course this September. The brief was to write a short review about a piece of work created during the dada period. It had been a long time since I had considrered dada and I enjoyed getting my teeth into art history again. It was an incredibly important period for modern art and researching the  movement (or non- movement!)  was the perfect platform from which to continue my jouney of discovery and exploration of contemporary art.
A bit I wrote about dada- ( for my own reference -sorry!-yawn )

Dada was born out of the confusion of cultural revolution. The artists involved were against the declining state of society due to World War One. A society that had progressed technology to be so capable which then used this new technology to inflict such horrors of war. These artists opposed nationalism, patriotism and imperialism and viewed art with contempt. They were anti-society , and anti -art.
Dadaists was more concerned with social poverty than aesthetic considerations. They detested the recent expressionist movement’s idea of art as a vehicle of inspiration or a way to connect with a divine realm. To them artistic traditions such as thoseof perspective, represented western capitalism, a consequentialist, logical attitude which they felt had led to war. They believed realism was apathetic, merely imitating the world around them and not reforming it.
"Art should get a sound thrashing."- Richard Hulsenbeck.
Dada questioned art’s responsibility in light of World War I, and demonstrated that art had to engage with the modern world. The artists used controversial subject matter to change mainstream traditions. Pictures were made, gathered from the stuff of modern life itself. Collages were arranged apparently haphazardly, assemblages, posters and photomontages, made from arrays of texts and images collected from the wreckage of modern life.Their images re-ordered reality and thus metaphorically re-ordered society.
Photomontage was developed collectively by the Berlin Dada group and involved pasting photographs from mass media together to create a picture. As it was essentially cutting and pasting and required no 'special skills', it succeeded in overthrowing the status of artist as specialist. It is said that German soldiers had created photomontages during the war, combining pictures of themselves with magazine images send home as postcards. 

Below is my 500 word essay about my chosen piece of work, a photomontage by Hannah Hoch.I chose to write about this one because I throughout my research I kept on coming back to it- it drew me in....

'Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany'

- Hannah Hoch

Hannah Hoch was part of the Berlin Dada group . Her work titled 'Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany ' is a magnificent example of photomontage that epitomizes dada attitude towards the horrors of World War I and what they saw as the absurdity surrounding it. The piece is a is a critique of Weimar Germany and the chaos of a sexist, war obsessed society. The title refers to a 'beer belly culture' which invokes gluttony, abundance and also jokingly references the German national love of beer. The word 'kitchen' hints at the traditional view of women in society. A woman, the artist, created the work using a 'knife', to cut up the images that were used to make the montage, metaphorically fragmenting the sections of society and undermining the cultural values.

The piece combines found materials, magazines, catalogues, newspaper, clipped and rearranged to make a new statement about life and art. It contains wheels, gears and machine imagery, representing the machinery of culture perhaps, or of the government, or that of Dada itself.

“Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry into the world of art " -Hannah Hoch

Included in the picture are the faces of a variety of influential people. There is Walter Rathenauan, an industrialist, politician and writer, the German minister of defense Gustav Noske, the heads of Lenin and Dadist Johannes Baader and German communist party leader Karl Radek. A picture of her on-off lover Ronald Hausmann is in there nestled amongst the other fragmented images and some text that reads “Invest your money in Dada” and “He he, young man…Dada is not an art trend”. There's an image of Einstein , as Carl Einstein was the nephew of Albert Einstein, and a well known and influential art critic and theorist in his own day. Karl Liebknecht, a German communist party leader who was jailed, tortured and assassinated in January 1919 is shown saying ‘Join Dada'. He is best known for his opposition to World War I.

The head of German Expressionist, artist Kathe Kalwitz appears, pierced by a spear and floating above the body of dancer Niddi Impekoven. Another head belonging to the President of the Weimar Republic , Friedrich Ebert is placed on the body of a topless dancer. Ebert was a German politician of the social democratic republic party which supported WW1. After the war he served as president of Germany. Hoch was using the piece to demean men and demonstrate a reversal of power. The artist is highlighting the new role of women in post war Germany and championing women as a vehicle for change. Yet despite dada expressing support of her views, Hoch was the only female artist to participate in the first international dada fair in 1920.

Once again breaking from conformity, Hannah Hoch includes a photograph of her face into the picture where the artist's signature would usually be. And there, as a parting shot, in the bottom right of the picture is a map that shows the counties in the world where women had the right to vote, demonstrating once again that Hoch is contemplating the role of women in society. 

-Emma Yates (August 2011)