The Judeo-Chrsitian tradition of redemption, as a worthwhile pursuit, and the complementary concept of utopia is centrally linked to the idea of progress.But is this progress, and all it entails with the pursuit of knowledge merely a pseudo progress, a sham that self-servingly widens the space between a knowledge of good and moral action? The idea of progress ensured a certain confidence in the possibility of redemption, or in the hastening through faith and prayer of the future utopia. Even facing the difficulties and tragedies of life, the individual could tie his fate, his destiny, to a project beyond their individuality, providing significance and purpose to the pleasures and sufferings in their life; and permitting the union of them with others, of the present with the past and with the future – if not in reality at least as a powerful sustaining idea.
---The poet appears out-of-place and lost in this sad environment, which is steeped in shades of dull brown and grey. Forced into the extreme corner of the room, he is trapped between a sloping ceiling and the chair that he leans on, seeking support. The omnipresent sloping line - which may be discerned across the whole image - is a leitmotif underlining the inhospitable, hopeless situation. A noble figure in a banal world – the motif is symbolically heightened by the image of delicate yellow roses in a beer bottle. Dix also used the unusually large picture format to cite the traditional genre of the ruler’s portrait, thus raising Iwar von Lücken to the level of the tragic, sublime figure, despite his social decline. The poet is made to appear a worldly man, conscious of life’s pain; his face is marked by experience, his eyes are tired and sad, and a gesture of supplication is suggested by the hanging right arm with its hand held out towards the viewer.--- Read More:http://www.berlinischegalerie.de/en/collection/fine-arts/highlights/otto-dix.html
In this quest for social revolution positive utopianism demanded the idea of human progress in history and its primacy. This idea was a re-endorsement of the conception of religious redemption, the notion of the leap beyond the horizon of history, and that the travails and sacrifices of previous generations was meaningful and worthwhile; an inextinguishable principle of morality, with reason advancing alongside of it in tandem with an advancing culture in a linear progression.
Self-Portrait before an Advertisement Pillar, Georg Scholz, 1926 Read More:http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/germany_4192.jsp
Although the intelligentsia of Weimar Germany was self identified and ostensibly anti-imperialist in their stated vision and politics, they really for the most part, did not contest the conventional and established orientations of a strong underlying imperialist tendency and some of its associated eugenic philosophy tied to the materialist view of a nation needing more space to grow, to fulfill its messianic destiny and maintain the idea of progress. A people without space was the common refrain from the mid 1920′s, a capturing of the colonialist dimension that Germany did not participate in but was willing to contend for.War, then became transformed from a means to an end into an end in itself, a manifestation of progress: the product of forces beyond human control, whether based on human nature or inherent “culture.”
Even the intellectual romantics seemed to be entranced by this “gaze” of psychic self-gratification where the rational would be guillotined in favor of the irrational where politics and war were supplanted by conflict and human nature. Instead, they seemed fixated on the emanicipatory elements of the political and their Marxism was plagued by the same beliefs in progress, perhaps a more humanized imperialism, but one preoccupied with what they saw as a more “rational” division of the commodities of progress.
Horkheimer's historical pessimism ruins the optimistic conception of culture, and dissolves the foundation for any positive utopian position. If in principle thought and culture are mainly interpreted as man's oppression of nature (and of nature within man), then there is no room for progress towards the utopian stage. Like Benjamin, the later Horkheimer has showed that action in the name of and for the sake of progress instead led necessarily to the abolishment of the free subject and to the oppression of man by the system of culture."The circumstance that the blind development of technology strengthens social oppression and exploitation threatens at every stage to transform progress into its opposite, complete barbarism" My reconstruction of Horkheimer's position points to a relation of the dissolution of the free subject to the development of evil: "progress" emerges as causing them both. "Progress" brings about an intensification of both knowledge and human domination which are responsible for fostering "the radically evil." Progress is also an expression of such intensification. As man develops the knowledge that doing good does not accompany him - and with it also the knowledge of the good itself - he actually becomes more evil... Read More:http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Utopia4.html image:http://www.artnet.de/magazine/provocative-realism/images/6/
Barglow:Weimar capitalism – like capitalism today – scarcely concealed the fact that it organized the world to benefit the wealthy. This arrangement was made acceptable to the public by giving them the opportunity to buy into a small part of the rulers’ abundance. (Benjamin notes that “The poor person, even if he possesses only one Thaler, can participate in the holding of public stock which is divided into very small portions, and can thus speak of our palaces, our factories, our treasures.”) Stock-ownership, though, offered little actual economic control, as a character in Kästner’s novel elaborates: “The manufacturers reduce wages; the state accelerates the decline in the purchasing power of the masses by imposing taxes which it dare not impose on the rich; capital still flees by the billions across the frontiers. Isn’t that consistency? Can you say that madness has no method?” The “masses,” previously the Marxist agency of hope and collective action, are represented here only as consumers, having fallen far from the ideals of self-determination that, a decade earlier, had motivated the workers and soldiers councils. Read More:http://www.sciy.org/2010/03/18/the-angel-of-history-walter-benjamin%E2%80%99s-vision-of-hope-and-despair-by-raymond-barglow/
---George Grosz (1893–1959) The Poet Max He
n-Neisse 1927 The work he produced in Germany was seething with rage & hate toward the Nazis and toward a political & economic system where everything was for sale & in a state of dissipation. Generally, he painted women as sex objects to be bought & discarded.--- Read More:http://bjws.blogspot.com/2010/07/george-grosz-18931959.html
The metaphor of spatial conquest evoked in the context of Weimar Germany was imperial conquest and imperial desire. German colonial history was brief, from the 1880 to 1914, but this duration did not dampen the importance of imperialism in German
culture and politics. The loss and possible restoration of a greater German empire shaped the dreams of the Weimar period, its visual culture was extending the reach of the spectacle over urban space, it, and visual culture more generally, was profoundly implicated in material and imaginative projects of conquest outside the borders of Germany. The urban space , that of the world of Dix and all with its marginals was equally invoked by the left and its own version of colonialism, and its necessity for conquest and an “other”. Eugenics was initially a concept of the left before being appropriated and inverted.
---The best word to describe her work may be conflation. This is most evident in Höch’s collage series entitled Aus einem ethnographischen Museum or, in English, Out of an Ethnographic Museum. In this series, working with images torn from magazines, she attached male and female body parts and blended often highly sexualized images of German women with pictures of African and other so-called “exotic” people and sculptures (such as may have been on exhibit in a Western-style ethnographic museum). In so doing, Höch called into question the distinctions between self and “Other”, making thinly disguised and jarring indictments of Weimar (German) colonialism, infantilization and fear of the Other and gender politics.--- Read More:http://squarehillart.com/2011/01/24/hannah-hoch-out-of-an-ethnographic-museum/
Donald Kuspit:Capitalism and technology inform all of Dix’s paintings, appropriating human presence dehumanizing the body. Capitalism and technology also show their omnivorous presence and ominous power in Georg Scholz’s Self-Portrait Before an Advertisement Pillar (1926), with its automobile and gas pump as well as advertisement pillar still a feature of German public space and Rudolf Schlichter’s The Writer Bertolt Brecht (1926), standing in front of an automobile. Without the larger-than-life automobile backing him up, the cigar-smoking Brecht is all pretentious ego, and without the sturdy pillar and pristine automobile behind him Scholz is a troubled bourgeois, his propriety a shaky facade on his misery. Read More:http://www.artnet.de/magazine/provocative-realism/
The conquest of space through visual culture thus involved the exploration and making of a “spectacle” of a range of figures of marginality
which signified the troubled limits of modern,alienated urban culture. From Watteau’s Pierrot and Picasso’s harlequins and Demoiselles D’Avignon we now have the hooker, the cripple, the vagrant, the eternal wandering Jew, and the underworld in various shadings. And, as these assemblages, even collages would imply, the obsession with these outsiders narrativized this “show” through the myth of progress. It was a recognition of the extent of the ways in which practices of marginalization, the containment and policing of heterogeneity, sustained the capitalist social order.
These marginalized figures marked the points at which the narrative of progress sustaining capitalist expansion degenerated and regenerated. There had to be a continuous supply of them to establish the base of the pecking order. This peculiar social class of the most vulnerable threatened to disrupt and expose the contradictions of the social order, but simultaneously their policing enabled the stabilization of that order. Writers like Benjamin and the playwright Brecht appropriated these figures for their projects, using them to destabilize the practices which rendered them as marginal, but not really linking them to the triad of politics, technology and progress which was spilling blood they seemed to imply based on conflict as emotional and anthropological.
Hoch. Racial ambivalence?...Dadaist Hannah Hoch was a Weimar collage artist known for her bold critiques of gender conventions. Obscured by Hoch’s liberating depictions of gender, scholars neglect her colonialist representations of race. In her 1924–1936 series, From an Ethnographic Museum, Hoch depicts the “New Woman” in conflict with fragmented images of black men and with recontextualized ethnographic objects that function as signifiers of race. The ethnographic objects, procured through colonial conquest, are used unreflectively, revealing an awareness of gender and an ignorance of race. In the process, Hoch reduces black males to the primitive Other, portraying them as hyper-sexualized and animalistic. Read More:http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/3/4/7/3/p234733_index.html image:http://venetianred.net/2010/01/
ADDENDUM:
Walter Benjamin:The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.
“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. Read More:http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Read More:http://venetianred.net/2010/01/
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