She represented the opposite of the one dimensional society that was being constructed around her. Contrary to the nazi idea of purity, the well-managed in-bred society in the quest for the authentic human being and with the help of eugenics, confident in an ability to pursue the imaginary pure. It was kitsch. Disingenious kitsch that Hoch transformed into the spirit of disintegration. Instead of order and method, it was the chaotic and absurd veering out of control and loaded with contradiction. An art of fantastic realism before the deadening hand of fascism killed these attempts of integrating abstraction and representation. Ultimately, we know that life outsmarts death — innate vitality triumphs over social melancholy –
Read More: http://www.dadart.com/dadaism/dada/022-dada-berlin.html ---Instead of fleeing Berlin, Höch chose inner exile so she could protect her precious artwork and Dada memorabilia. After the war, Höch quietly remained in Berlin and focused on smaller works.---
Höch’s and Heartfield’s Dadaistic realism also has a dream-like absurdity — a fantastic quality of unreality that was nonetheless true to reality. Everyday reality is always a component of a dream, but in Höch, Heartfield and Grosz it becomes the whole ugly dream. Indeed, they suggest that society is a kind of mad dream — its reality is so insane it has to be a dream. For the German Dadaist realists, reality itself is Dadaistic, that is, it has the bizarre coherence of a fantasy. The fantasies of the German Dadaist realists are not manufactured, like those of the Surrealists, but routinely real. Fantasy and reality are indistinguishable in fact as well as in the fiction of their art, which tries to capture the fantastic character of reality.Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit6-1-06.asp
Read More:http://dadasurr.blogspot.ca/2010/02/hannah-hoch.html ---Hoch: the photographers then inserted photographic portraits of the faces of their customers, generally coloring them later by hand. But the aesthetic purpose, if any, of this very primitive kind of photo montage was to idealize reality, whereas the Dada photo monteur set out to give to something entirely unreal all the appearances of something real that had actually been photographed....Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art. Our typographical collages or montages set out to achieve this by imposing, on something which could only be produced by hand, the appearances of something that had been entirely composed by a machine; in an imaginative composition, we used to bring together elements borrowed form books, newspapers, posters, or leaflets, in an arrangement that no machine could yet compose.
ADDENDUM:
While the Dadaists paid lip service to women’s emancipation they were clearly reluctant to include a woman among their ranks. The filmmaker Hans Richter described Höch’s contribution to the Dada movement as the “sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.” Raoul Hausmann even suggested that Höch get a job to support him financially. Later, Höch ironized the hypocrisy of the Berlin Dada group in her photomontage The Strong Guys:
Höch observed in an undated note: “None of these men were satisfied with just an ordinary woman. In protest against the older generation they all desired this “New Woman” and her groundbreaking will to freedom. But – they more or less brutally rejected the notion that they, too, had to adopt new attitudes. This led to these truly Strindbergian dramas that typified the private lives of these men”. Read More:http://weimarart.blogspot.ca/2010/08/hannah-hoch-brushflurlets-and-beer.html
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