Dada's Girl
Although we think of
photomontage primarily as a medium of the combative period of modernism--Dada,
Surrealism, Constructivism--its use goes back well into the 19 th
century, and was routine in turn-of-the-century pop culture in postcards and
prints. Hannah Höch said she discovered its possibilities when she saw a kitsch
tableau of German military glory; the idealized soldier had her landlord's face
pasted on. Höch and her then lover Raoul Hausmann formed one branch of the
Berlin Dada group, which came to appear the more aesthetic one, as
distinguished from the more political wing represented by John Heartfield and
George Grosz. All of them began to make montages around 1918, and for a few
years made works that are at least superficially very similar: explosions of
newspaper photographs and lines of type across a white field. They were angry
and wanted to break something--the state, the banks, the industries--but had to
restrict themselves to the materials of the print media that served and
reflected those institutions.
Höch has
long been best known for one of her first works, Cut with a Kitchen Knife
Dada through the last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany , 1919-20.
You can see all the anger and exhilaration of the period in this large piece
(nearly 3 feet by 4), full of wheels and crowds and heads whose eyes have been
replaced by other things, its yellowed newsprint color jazzed by a patch of
blue in the upper left, its improvisatorial speed of execution shown by how the
glued surfaces have rippled. Its drift is apparent right away: Dada versus the
anti-Dada of all the generals and exploiters. Looking more closely, however,
you notice a subtler feminist subtheme. Greta Garbo, Käthe Kollwitz, and other
emancipated women are significantly portrayed, and at the lower right is a map
of Europe in which the countries that have given women the right to vote appear
in white. It is on the edge of this map that Höch has stuck a tiny portrait of
herself.
Most surveys of photomontage reproduce this work and
perhaps one or two others by Höch from the early 1920s, but she continued
working in the medium into the 1970s (she died in 1978), continually expanding
her style and enlarging the terrain of the medium. As Hausmann's work grew more
formal and Heartfield became the most effective agitprop artist in Europe, Höch
became more playful. At the same time that she was engaging in her blistering
Dada stuff, for example, she was making delicate work based on embroidery
patterns that is both unashamedly feminine and the perfect riposte to the
masculine machine-fixation of the time, which in fact it resembles in its
dynamism. It is also more purely abstract than anything anyone else was doing.
What is striking about the ensemble of her works on display (more than 100
pieces) is her freedom. Others from Heartfield to Max Ernst built their
montages and collages on a classic stagelike ground, with centralized figures,
a place for them to stand, and a backdrop behind them. Höch pointedly or
cavalierly toyed with this concept and eventually dispensed with it altogether.
While others parodied, she invented. She flung scale, gravity, continuity, and
illusionism around at will. Even her most labor-intensive works manage to look
spontaneous and somehow carefree.
She cuts
up faces and bodies and fits together parts mismatched in size, color, and
style, like a Dr. Frankenstein bent on demonstrating through surgery the folly
of beauty culture. In her "Ethnographic Museum" series she arranges mergers of
African and Asian sculpture and Western body parts, asking: "Who's the
primitive now?" Her politics are always present but always lowercase, even her
angriest works apparently suffused with insouciant fun. So you might get the
idea that her views on the Nazis were muted--she did remain in an obscure
semirural corner of Berlin through the war, after all. But while her work
wouldn't be anybody's idea of propaganda, it is nevertheless acute. Her Nazi,
The Little P (1931), has slick hair and a prowlike nose over the open
mouth of an infant--the bawling, spittle-webbed orifice is convincingly that of
a party-rally orator. Her German Girl (1930), meanwhile, has bangs
instead of brains, and a cute little topknot like a pinhead's.
In the darkest years of the war, though, Höch
was plunging into a world of pure form and color. As the decades pass it
becomes harder and harder to figure out what a given shape or texture in her
montages might originally have represented. During the 1940s she shed the last
bits of hard-edged Weimar sensibility and enacted a version of Surrealism
entirely her own, dense with Ernst-like bugs and birds and creepy Matta-ish
plant forms. But the following decade, even this gave way to works of pure
nonrepresentational electricity, so bursting and swooping they make you want to
use words like "painterly" and "gestural"--oxymoronically, they seem to be a
kind of Abstract Expressionism built from little, carefully scissored bits of
magazine photographs. They can sometimes appear unfocused in their intensity,
like too many sounds turning into white noise. But then she could still turn
out beautifully restrained work such as the significantly titled 1955 Glue
Drawing , a single 1920s "New Vision" photograph of oil pools, taken apart
and reassembled with dramatic spaces. The source is completely present and made
greater; the violence done to it is in the service of its original intent: an
ode to the ellipse.
Some critics have said that
this is a big show for a "minor" artist. It is true that if you were editing
the show to make a point you could omit as much as two-thirds of it. It is also
true that montage is often considered a minor form, lacking the heroism of
painting and sculpture and even photography. After all, what is it but
recycling? But the show's size is one of its greatest assets--it is seldom that
an exhibition so thoroughly documents the artist's changes and leaps over the
decades, like a time-lapse film. It is also striking how contemporary to us
much of Höch's work feels, in its sexual politics, its humor, its gleeful
appropriation of anything and everything at hand--indeed, in its refusal of
grandeur. Photomontage thumbs its nose at the pretension of the artist playing
God, the blank canvas his world. It is the art of making do, of fashioning
something personal from the incessant bombardment of images to which we are
subjected. Höch in her modest way told the spectacle where to get off, and set
about reconfiguring it with her scissors.
