Ernst. The Antipope. 1942

Its the absence of the ultimate divine truth, as absence of an organising center or a frame, giving way to pagan proliferation of the meaning of the text. As a writer of fragments which exist alone ‘with no before or after he disrupts the linear progression of the story and relies on chance to move the plot forward. Thus, complexity opposes earlier linear ordering of cause and effect. Chance is an unpredictable and whimsical goddess, misused in ‘bad’ literature as a device that allows the writer freedom for endless possibilities and combinations.

However, in Auster’s fiction chance is a way of shattering the power of reason and logic as it occurs in his narrative. The unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in our lives’, he declares in “The Art of Hunger”. As the improbable exists in reality, the task of the realist writer, as Paul Auster declares in ” The Art of Hunger”, is to use it as a source of imagination and present it in his fiction. But how does this represent itself in the visual art as a representation of the chance encounter. Max Ernst explored some profound regions to arrive at the chance encounter…..

Ernst. Approaching Puberty 1921

“These are observations that run entirely counter to the first radical phase of Cologne Dada, whose attack on aesthetic conventions placed it closer to Duchamp and Francis Picabia than, say, to the Dadaists in Berlin. This is why, in dealing with Max Ernst’s work, it is impossible to do without the concept of processing, the conscious reworking of existing material. It is pointless to speak of anti-art in this connection, because what we are dealing with, quite objectively, is the genesis of a superb and far-reaching aesthetic. This is the point at which Ernst, the artist, comes on the scene.” ( Werner Spies )

Ernst. Au Rendez Vous Des Amis. 1922.

ABOVE: To be remarked is Ernst’s rather camp, even coquettish pose. Sitting on Dostoevsky’s right knee, with a less obviously flirtatious Jean Paulhan perched on the left, he appears to be tweaking the writer’s beard. It would seem Dostoevsky is represented as a parodic father figure for the artist, and Ernst’s seemingly feminine response to such a figure is explicable in terms of the artist’s apparent fascination with a Freudian construct; the notion of the inverted Oedipus  complex, involving the male child’s unconscious sexual fantasies surrounding his father….

Max Ernst paralleled the sudden shifts in film images in the Dada collages that made his nane in Paris in the early 1920′s. He also pioneered the idea that modern pictures must be read as well as looked at; his collages were often spiked with long captions that darted in and out of common sense as a lizard darts in and out of rocks. He quickly became as much a master of the French language as he needed to be for his purposes; in the collage poems he wrote jointly with Paul Eluard it is difficult even for a Frenchman to konow which lines are by Eluard and which are by Ernst.

''In 1924 the poet André Breton published the first Manifesto of Surrealism. The primary aim of this literary and artistic movement was, he explained: 'to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.' Inspired by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious, Surrealism used irrational images to portray the working of the human mind. Max Ernst's Pietà or Revolution by Night is typical. ''

ABOVE: In a work of less than a year later, Ernst duplicates the almost same pose of a father figure physically suppressing his son, and clearly alluding to a specific psychoanalytic case history, that of the ”wolf man” .In the ”Rendez-Vous” Ernst’s ”femininity” is further emphasized by a reference to Ingres’s ”Jupiter and Thetis” in which the suppliant Nereid fingers the beard of the unyielding patriarch. The entire composition is also an ironic reworking of Ingres’s ”Apotheosis of Homer” and it is not perhaps, to far fetched, to see this small detail as effectively confirming Ernst’s bisexuality….

Ernst demanded that the public adjust to changes of pace and to shifts of attention that they had not encountered in art before; and he went on doing this in his two ”collage novels” , ”La Femme 100 Tetes” and ”Une Semaine de Bonte” which are as much a contribution to literature as to art insofar as they adapt the art experience to the experience of the turned page. Once again, no one label will do. To call these books novels is to imply they have a linear story line, which they don’t possess. Still, the experience of sitting in a chair , turning page after page, progressively envelopes one in an atmosphere as distinctive as that created by the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or the adventure novels of Jules Verne.

Ernst. oedipus rex. 1922. ''German Dada artist Max Ernst was one of the first to take his inspiration from De Chirico’s teachings, with such masterpieces as Oedipus Rex (1922). Ernst, arguably one of the greatest surrealist artists, explored the opportunities offered by chance and by subconscious automatism ''

The role played by Max Ernst the painter in the art of the 1920′s was intermittent. Perhaps ”inventor” is the best generic name  we shall ever find for his activity; for although he has always made paintings that are perfectly straightforward in their technical means, he had also been consistently inventive in that domain. It would be difficult to think of a substance, or of a class of object, that he could not incorporate into a picture if he felt so disposed.

A long spoon, a ready-made bow tie, a plastic lace tablemat, a small string bag, a pair of his own old trousers, and a cardiogram have all been pressed into service. It could have been freakish or gratuitous; but in point of fact these heterogeneous  ingredients look as if they had come back to their rightful home after a long period of exile. Art can be everything, as much in the year 201o as in 1918, and everything can be art.

''His arm also covers the mother’s genitals and therefore blocks her sexual availability, as per oedipal prescription. Consider that the bird-child is facing and possibly moving (thrusting its neck) to the left, towards the sexual enticements of the mother, as is the father with his aggressive striding and simultaneously penetrating and covering gesture. Father and son compete here for access to the primal mother. This sexual combat, moving always left, is reinforced by the enigmatic figure in the distance, also facing left, holding or pushing an ambiguous object that can be read as phallic, pointing towards the mother-creature. This sexual geography combines with the literal westward mapping of the fascist reading to suggest a conflation of national and sexual destiny—a conquering fascist male; passive, yielding Paris to the left/west.''

Surrealism in general, was concerned with private fancies , may of them idiosyncratic. Sometimes we find something in a surrealistic picture that relates to our own innermost disquietude; sometimes we don’t. When we do, the picture takes hold of us and becomes a part of our own inner landscape forever. Max Ernst experienced his full share of the private fancies that powered surrealism in the 1920′s and 1930′s; some of them he turned into universal currency. Anyone who has known the breakup of a relationship will recognize for instance, the demon dance of what Max Ernst so ironically calls ”The Angel of the Hearth and Home” in a painting done in 1937. He also created a number of premonitory images in such paintings as ”Barbarians Marching Westwards” ( 1935) and ”Europe Under Rain” completed during World War II; the rain in question being a cataclysm that overtakes an entire civilization and leaves it to mold and rot away.

There is something very awesome about Max Ernst when he turned his mind to subject matter of this sort; his has been one of the most powerful imaginations to deal with the theme of  Paradise Lost…..

”For me, two of the most pungent, original works of the 1920s — if one has to single out works that epitomize its contradictory artistic concerns — are Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex (1922) and Otto Dix’s 1924 portfolio of 50 engravings dealing with War in all its stunning terror. On the one hand, we have a painting whose meaning is somewhat obscure — but not entirely, for Oedipus Rex is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy — and on the other hand we have an avalanche of images whose meaning is horrifically clear….Ernst’s less immediately intelligible painting is also violent, as the pierced fingers and walnut indicate. The fingers are penetrated by a bow-like device used to puncture the feet of birds — there is one in the box — so that they cannot fly. Was it also used to shoot the arrow stuck in the walnut? The fingers do not bleed, but their wound must be painful. It is as though they stoically accept their suffering. Ernst’s violence is more subtle than Dix’s, just as his picture is more cryptic than the images in Dix’s series, but it is equally bitter and relentless. The sense of ruin is as irreparable as it is in Dix’s work, though more of a puzzle: A casual pinprick turns into permanent mutilation for no apparent reason. But the point is that a clever game has become self-destructive — masochistic as well as sadistic.” ( Donald Kuspit )

Max Ernst- The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses

One may also recall that Sophocles’s Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, and blinded himself out of guilt when he realized what he had done ; violated the prohibition against incest that is basic to society and sanity;  gave his name to Sigmund Freud’s “Oedipus Complex.” Ernst’s picture stages the Complex, using a cast of strange symbols, each with many meanings. To understand the picture one must excavate layer upon layer of hidden meaning, the way Freud said one must excavate the unconscious to find the meanings hidden in the psyche.

Ernst. The Angel of the Hearth and Home.

This archaeological work gives rise to the idea of chance as a key element in Ernst’s collages. The collage is an arrangement of found objects, found meaning randomly collected, and then are assembled in a sort of “chance meeting” often in a strange sort of association that tends to represent the subconscious, which was a key part of many of Freud’s works. Ernst was a student of abnormal psychology from 1910 to 1914 at the University of Bonn and he has been noted as reading many of Freud’s works in Bonn during this time; the two most influential being Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and The Interpretation of Dreams. Chance is actually a vehicle through which the unconscious mind can be explored and it also served as a way for the Ernst and other artists in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements to access forms and themes which would attempt to dissolve ties to the material, representative world of the old art.

Chance was expanded upon through a more conscious and intentional choice of violent confrontation. A common theme running through Ernst’s works is that of a polarization of meanings and objects and a condensation of meaning, which occurs through that process or polarizing. It is the association between the constructive and the destructive, the rational and irrational, the beautiful and the ugly, the dead and alive, sight and not seeing which defines the experience of the juxtaposition of Ernst. The juxtaposition of disparate images has an intense visual presence and influence in many of the collages. The association between objects like birds and people have a connotation that is not easily understandable, but at the same time is related enough to evoke emotions such as terror, disbelief, and confusion. These images also evoke an idea of the dream and the subconscious mind.

Condensation is a mechanism proposed by Freud by which condenses multiple words most of his work. Using condensation, Ernst took images that did not expressly belong together and he forced them into strange associations and juxtaposed them to bring new meanings to the materials and images involved, again with a selective use of what could be called distillation and synthesis.

Ernst. The Temptation of Saint Anthony 1945.

Ernst’s more bizarre painting, of which ”Oedipus” is representative,  certainly do not conform to ordinary standards of rationality.It is an unprocessed or, an artistically manufactured dream of Oedipus. “Each motif. . . sets up lines of association that all lead, ultimately, to different aspects of the oedipal predicament.” The picture is a riddle, resembling a rebus,  the Sphinx’s riddle, the answer of which Oedipus correctly guessed to be “man,” ironically turns out to refer to Oedipus himself, as Elizabeth Legge points out, noting the narcissistic component of Ernst’s work.  She notes the abundance of literary as well as personal references in Ernst’s painting, giving it a conceptual depth and richness. For example, the nut alludes to Hamlet’s statement “O God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (Hamlet, II.2.247). Hamlet is not only Oedipus’ social twin — equally royal (Freud notes that the infant acts in an “imperial” manner) — but his “psychological twin,” for he had similar unconscious incestuous wishes.

The bird refers to the pet cockatoo Ernst had when he was a child. It happened to die the same night his sister was born, confirming the treachery of woman and leading him to identify with his lost bird in the allegorical person of Loplop the Bird Superior, the omnipotent subject of many paintings. Thus Oedipus Rex is also Ernst’s self-portrait, that is, a portrait of the Oedipal child in Ernst’s psyche — the child that remains alive in his unconscious and whose conflicts he has encoded in his dream picture. It is also necessarily a portrait of the Oedipal child in every person, for the complex is universal.

''Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (pronounced: aah-n Gr-ah) was David’s most famous student. And while this prolific and successful artist was indebted to his teacher, Ingres quickly turned away from him. For his inspiration, Ingres, like David in his youth, rejected the accepted formulas of his day and sought instead to learn directly from the ancient Greek as well as the Italian Renaissance interpretation of this antique ideal. In 1827, Ingres exhibited Apotheosis of Homer ''

Legge concludes by noting that Ernst’s uncanny work is not only an “enactment of Freudian descriptions of the dream mechanism” — it certainly involves displacement and condensation — but becomes a “picture-manifesto dealing with image-creation itself.” It was born of “the uterus of methodical madness” that Ernst regarded as the unfailing source of creativity, and is itself a visual statement in which Ernst feigns madness, the way Hamlet did in one of his speeches (II.2.247). The picture is as absurd and mad as a dream’s manifest content, to use Freud’s language, the latent content of which is a forbidden but quite natural wish. The punishment for this wish is castration, which is what both Oedipus’s blindness and Ernst’s bird-clipper symbolize. This is a very bad dream indeed — an arrow shot through one’s brain, as it were (the walnut is also a symbol of the brain, for its irregular surface resembles that of the brain). Ernst’s painting is a private dream that mocks the spectator with its incomprehensibility and incoherence, even as it tantalizes him with hidden meanings that imply it could be his own.

”But even as he deceived himself by intellectualizing his art as offering insight into his life-world, he acknowledged that the automatist process was not altogether impersonal. It began “with a memory of childhood” which had become an “obsession.” The private importance of the automatist process of artistic free association was that it “revealed the first cause of the obsession, or produced a simulacrum of that cause.” In other words, its purpose was therapeutic. Ernst was not indulging in it only for artistic reasons, but to save himself. It was not simply an artistic lark, but a way of psychoanalyzing himself. Ernst, it seemed, had wanted to be a psychiatrist before the war broke his spirit; afterwards he used his psychoanalytic art and knowledge to restore his mental health. The times couldn’t be cured, but the self could be. The spell of the obsession was lifted when it was represented in the simulacrum of the hypnogogic vision. But a problem remained: Ernst didn’t want to give up his hypnagogic visions, for to do so would be to give up being an artist. He had to stay obsessed, which eventually led him to become repetitive. His later hypnogogic visions became tedious and predictable, however variable their detail. “I have seen. And I was surprised and enamored of what I saw, wishing to identify myself with it.” Doing so, he turned Surrealist magic, and with it frottage and automatism, into cliché, no longer capable of intensifying the mind’s “irritability.” ( Kuspit )

Ingres. Jupiter and Thetis

Any conclusion  cannot avoid supporting the thesis of Ernst’s works being intensely psychological in their basis and content and the idea that Freudian psychology was a strong, and likely central base for Ernst in his use of collage and of art in general. It was this exploration by Ernst of sexuality in late Dada and Early Surrealism that would lead to some of the intensely perverse, deviant images created later, such as the mannequins of Man Ray and the doll’s Balmer along with so many of the paintings done by artists such as Dali.

Ernst laid the basis for these later developments with his explorations in chance, the subconscious, and condensation joined with juxtaposition as well as with his use of sexuality and gender within a framework of Freud. His collages, which were his attempt at abandoning the traditionally artist creation and his work with found images, always working to keep their unique meaning would later be highly influential and today seen in the literary technique of  a Paul Auster.

Moose, A pioneer of the technique, hard at work

Nowadays people take the practice to a new level, covering entire walls of tunnels in graffiti that they make only by washing the grime and gunk off the walls.

For Example in this picture we see Moose, one of the style’s pioneers cleans the wall of a tunnel with nothing but a shoebrush and a bucket of water, and a lot of elbow grease and sweat. He’s even been hired by companies such as Smirnoff and Microsoft for advertising jobs , so in a way it’s advertising that’s not harmful to the environment, it grabs the attention of people because it’s unorthodox and it opens a window of opportunity for street artists. The fun comes when we look at this method at a legal point of view. The government doesn’t seem to like it at all. But it’s not really vandalism if you look at it at the right angle. There is no paint on the wall, the wall is in the exact same condition as it was originally but they can’t really pin anything on the “artists” responsible for the works, so they just wash the walls that they work on completely. It’s rather ironic, they somehow coax the authorities to clean up the environment by twisting the law in their favor.

A more complex example of reverse graffiti

technique has already been adopted by many artists, some making portraits, some landscapes. Paul Curtis AKA: Moose, whose work is seen above, has created a large mural in San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel. A tunnel that see’s about 20,000 cars every day, which makes it get covered in dirt, soot from exhaust fumes and old graffiti paint patches.

With the help of Greenworks and their eco-friendly cleaning products, a high pressure water hose and a lot of patience they made a mural of what they thought San Francisco looked like some five hundred years ago. This was part of a project ” The Reverse Graffiti Project” It was documented by filmmaker Doug Pray.

The meek shall not inherit the earth, but, will apparently  be responsible to  pay for the clean  up. Its part of a new mantra called the ”prosperity gospels” and corporations are thumping it up on the business bible circuit known a social responsibility. With the advent of advanced digital technology, camels have no qualms about passing through the eyes of those one time annoying needles to enter the kingdom of zero footprint.

There is a new corporate sponsored site by Volkswagen called TheFunTheory. Nice and coccoon.Warm and toasty Like a Luv Bug in a rug. The idea is to preach responsibility for the environment through installations that were installed in Stockholm then virally circulating the content on YouTube to enhance the image of Volkswagen as a socially responsible, multinational corporation; an oxymoron of sorts.

Marcel Duchamp was the first known artist to appropriate a common object in his art. This challenged the art community in its definition of what is or is not labeled art. Duchamp believed that declaring an object a work of art was the artist’s key role in creating art. In the case of Fountain, he took a urinal, turned it on its side, and signed it with his pseudonym, R. Mutt.

The installations are like little altars where the flock can bow, obey, and take mercantile communion, expiate their guilt and fill up their car with more accumulations. A viral campaign for Volkswagen that does without any visual images of their cars. That is, the vehicles are virtual as well.Its a  church of the politically correct that perpetuates the fraud of multiculturalism  and homogenizes many issues, to achieve an economy of scale of opinion and viewpoint .The installations  are pop arty  products of a synthetic and plastic cultural value to keep consumers passively satisfied and acceptingly apathetic, similar to what writer Martin Amis referred to as ” global confrontation with the dependent mind”.

Volkswagen’s ”candid camera” approach is novel in terms of the juxtaposed context to move slow moving inventory  off the lot, but ultimately a fairly mediocre,  banal, and reactionary response to a changing world marked by increasingly vague faith and agnosticism towards corporate religion. A form of religion in these spots  where the ritual of recycling is more important than the ideas. In all likelihood, Volkswagen would like consumers to think of their cars as confessional booths.

mark jenkins

To take banal recycle bins and bland metro staircases and replace them with more difficult, arresting, and critical art forms, would probably promote a counter movement to the cult of commodity fetishism condoned by Volkswagen. Public service art  by artists like Mark Jenkins and Maurizio Cattelan would lead to more people questioning social life, gender bias, consumption based on false needs etc. Taking the original concept of Marcel Duchamp, Art as a ”ready made” would perhaps fit the aesthetic of a feel-good public art , making people more willing to  recycle and exercise if they imagined a world in which social relations and cultural experiences were not objectified in terms of money, and value of exhange, but a higher, more authentic, and sustainable vibration.

Mark Jenkins

” Some critics have said that Miller was a man of attitudes, not ideas. Wrong again. Miller was a cipher as a writer, but a marvelous promoter – the P.T. Barnum of early 20th Century literature. And this should be acknowledged, for it was his only talent. Yet, to even attempt a deep analysis of what is clearly one of the premier put-ons in literature is waste of time and effort. And I’m hardly a prude. I simply demand quality. Henry Miller simply says less with more words than just about any writer that has ever been published.” ( Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 2006 )

Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is not a book in the conventional sense, not literature or art in formal idiom from which to judge written words. It is anti-literature and anti-art. Its a protracted insult. A vomit express, a release of intestinal bile on the face of art. A kick in the balls of god’s sanctimonious ego-centric, perverted and unfathomable alter ego that keeps eating naked lunches and shits them on humanity with the regularity of Exlax induced frequency.It is the aesthetic of anti-plot, anti-narrative and anti-poetry. the little Dharma Bum tucked under the mattress like a talisman. He is an atheist weapon of mass destruction; the occidental world’s reply to Mein Kampf by Hitler.Where Hitler was rewarded with the Iron Cross for Bravery, Henry Miller garners the Irony Cross for passion, imagination and courage in the face of chaos. Shit bombing Dresden with human cow manure before igniting the pile.

”A glance at that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labelled, documented, files, sealed and stamped break forth pellmell like ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute.” ( Tropic of Cancer )

Less timid and introverted compendium of werid emotions and sexual tensions of Kafka, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Baudelaire etc. A Vagina Diaries.A literary necrophilia from a frustrated gynecologist.A last tango in paris with the old vinyl, scrathing and playing the same song, the name notes of false enthusiam ad nauseum.

When Mein Kampf was first released in 1925 it sold poorly. People had been hoping for a juicy autobiography or a behind-the-scenes story of the Beer Hall Putsch. What they got were hundreds of pages of long, hard to follow sentences and wandering paragraphs composed by a self-educated man. It was a shambling chaotic mess by someone who didn’t know how to write; jews were a convenient hook to hang his porkpie hat on, but ultimately incidental to the anti-narrative in the same sense as Miller’s obsession with women and sex.Both were not books in the normal sense.  

‘‘ The truth was that Miller’s feelings about Jews, for instance, were nearly as complicated as those about women, anchored as they were by his deepest disgust of all, which was for the Aryan, which is to say himself, since Miller openly hated everything about his German heritage and strove to reinvent himself free of it, perpetuating the self-image of a carefree bohemian living in happy and willful squalor when it has been duly recorded he was the most teutonic of housekeepers, the tidiest of domestic managers, the most compulsive and anal antithesis of the joyful anarchist in Tropic of Cancer who watches the lice leap to and fro on the bed mattress with great amusement and jauntily chucks extra francs and centimes out the taxi window just because they get in the way of his lower finances.”( Steve Erickson, 1997 )

”One might say he was America’s Parisian Rimbaud, except that there were glimmers of talent in that overhyped scatologist. Miller has nothing but books larded with banality, dullness, and the overuse of curse words. And, no, he does not use them creatively in the Imagine Pound writing fiction on a bad day at the asylum.  The out that defenders of such garbage – the forebear of execrable pissings like James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed ‘A Million Little Pieces’ – never rely on the actual work to defend it. No one ever Even Jack Kerouac’s droning ‘On The Road’ is a masterpiece by comparison to these two utter pieces of nothingness.Had only Miller spent more time working on writing than his own most obvious talent, public relations, he may have been a greeting card writer in the offing.  Of course, nothing much really happens in either book. Miller fucks, sucks, drinks and stinks. Yet, the work is not pornographic, as its detractors over the years have claimed. Porn actually induces a visceral reaction. This is just dull as sin. The truth is that the pre-War Paris of the 30s was the epicentre of indulgent expatriate American prose writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, at least, had talent to begin with, despite their flaws. Miller needed to set himself apart. If he couldn’t do it with words, why not shit?Miller’s descriptions of sex are so absurd, unintendedly, that they one might actually believe the man never was conscious during the act. He both degrades and hypes it, rather than looking at it with dispassion and examining what may lay inside – figuratively and literally.” ( Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 2006 )

‘‘It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!” ( Tropic of Cancer ) He is a forbidden archetype,auto-manipulated; he speaks from the dark heart of some place beyond ideology or the refinements of civilization, he is not progressive or regressive but the literary inhabitant of a place in the psyche where human experience recognizes no forward or backward, where the shadows of the soul know no time.

Hoch, The Coquette, 1923-25

She cuts up faces and bodies and fits together parts mismatched in size, color, and style, achieving through paper surgery, a biting critique  on the folly of beauty culture. Even the most painstaking and time consuming pieces convey a sense of spontaneity and freshness.

However, the nostalgic  vision of artists as heroic, belies the depraved recollections of many  Dadaist artists; many were called, but few were chosen amid a cast of talentless visual artists, literary beggars, and leeches who were no less pathetic then, than they would be today. Though the zeitgeist held a certain lack of pretentiousness, there is the irritating bias towards making suffering seem chic. Yet the lie is not only that it’s not, but those who are born from disadvantaged backgrounds, the poor, know it’s not, and only bourgeois elitists who go slumming , would think it is and try to  embellish and create an urban legend around it. 

Nonetheless,the context of Weimar Germany, and its inherent complications and contradictions nurtured this form of underground art that aesthetically conveyed a nuanced foreboding and vulnerability that only the imminent spectre of war can produce.the photomontage technique was the perfect metaphor for the disconnect and fragmentation, and attempt at attachment that existed when everyday seemed like a twilight year. Weimar Berlin likely resembled Paris at the same time Henry Miller described it in Tropic of Cancer as ”bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement ”.

Hannah Hoch,Splintered and disjunct, Hoch's photomontages wittily reflect the multiple social fractures of Weimar Germany

” The political parties had finally been dissolved, and it remained only to sweep away the democratic debris. The pretense of a coalition government had vanished. Hitler, far from being contained by the conservatives, had made them his prisoners. He still made his moves with a degree of caution until he was ready to strike down or assimilate non-Nazis, but when he was ready he struck with deadly precision.”( The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler, Davidson )

The prevailing view of art  in the crumbling Weimar was anchored in varying interpretations of a post metaphysical conception of art that would be consistent or tailored to the accepted ”inner truth” of National Socialism. A fascist conception of fusing modern technology to the hot impulses and flashes of intuitive truth known as ”lived experiences”( erlebnis) The idea of erlebnis was a metaphysical precursor to naturalism embodied in the doctrine of the ”blond beast” which according to Heidegger, represented everything wrong-headed about the usual Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche. Nonetheless, Heidegger and others, plodded on in the ego-driven belief they were at the forefront of a purient new guard in Western Culture.

”An idealist in the tradition of German nationalism, Heidegger’s fate was to be that of the faithless thinker, ultimately disloyal to German fascism because it was not sufficiently metaphysical, yet unable to reconcile himself to western liberalism because it was, in his estimation, the political self-consciousness of technicity. For this reason, Heidegger ended the war digging ditches, having been ousted by German university authorities acting at the behest of state fascism as the University of Freiburg’s “most dispensable Professor.”… For Heidegger, National Socialists were not sufficiently self-conscious metaphysically, too trapped in the particularities of politics, to be capable finally of realizing the ontology of the fascist moment: delivering the metaphysical possibilities of (German) folk-community into concrete historical realization. To the tribal consciousness of fascism, Heidegger remained a metaphysician of dasein. Ironically, his prescience concerning the fading away of second-order (National Socialist) fascism before the coming to be of first-order (virtual) fascism ultimately made of his thought a historical incommensurability: too metaphysically pure for the direct action, “hand to mouth” politics of German fascism; and yet too radically deconstructive of the claims of technological rationality to find its home in liberalism. “Homeless thought.”( Arthur Kroker, Hyper- Heidegger)

The Dadaists, then, revolted against this form of logic and reasoning, in which everything that did not conform  to the Nazi view was regarded as mental illness. For Dadaists,  the nonsensical and the absurd became tools to startle and provoke their audience out of their bourgeois complacence and conventional thinking which was fashioned on fear, an enduring appetite of militarism, consumerism, and racism; all of which  seemed  rejuvenated  by the emerging technologies and the promise of a leisure oriented society.

Hoch, Dance

While ostensibly indifferent to aesthetics, the Dadaist anti-aestheticism  became  viewed as a new avant-garde aesthetic. Dadaists defended against their bitterness with a kind of aesthetic irony, but it was a futile visual gesture that did nothing to reverse or stop the tide of contemporary events. But there is a deeper point to the Dadaistic realism of Hannah Höch and others such as John Heartfield.  It suggested a way to break the stalemate between abstraction and representation, or,more particularly, figuration.  The aesthetic impasse created by their reconciliation  was a healthy nonconformist dose of outer-world influence, forcing a recalibration of their relationship in favor of representation, with abstraction going underground, not denied, but somewhat camouflaged. The result was a sense that there was something innately magical about reality, that is, inherently fantastic and strange. What has been called “magical realism,” or “fantastic realism”, a realism that calls attention to the absurdity of even the most mundane and trivial reality, that is, the bizarrity of the banal, an assault on mediocrity.

Weimar Germany was a bizarre world and Hitler was  bizarre at its highest reaches, a level  that strained credulity. The ideologues as well as the libertines and underworld of  Weimar Berlin lived a fantasy, with equally disastrous social results. One of the reasons the German Dadaist realists turned to photography as a model, however much they departed from its apparently clinical realism, is that it alone seemed capable of representing what was too horrifically true to be imaginatively represented. Imagination would obstruct a view of reality that had become unimaginable.

Truth once again showed that it was stranger and weirder than fiction, and the clinical truthfulness of photography was the best way of conveying it. The avant-garde devices such as collage, futurist dynamics and Dadaist incongruity  seemed fasle by comparison. They were a futile overlay on the stark truth, imaginatively enlivening it without necessarily penetrating it. Nonetheless, for Hoch and others, clear-eyed social observation , implicitly photographic, however unphotographic in style , fed into a traditional apocalyptic vision of collective human bondage. A vision somewhat morbid and fatalistic, subject to conventional laws of gravity .

Hannah Hoch, High Finance, 1923

After the dissolution of Dada in the early 1920s, Höch spent the remainder of the Weimar period creating work that  commented on prevalent social issues with wry humor, a finely tuned sensibility, and careful attention to pictorial issues. In particular, Höch’s work from this period is notable for its focus on gender issues. Weimar Germany was the site of intense debate about the emancipated “New Woman,” whose life was typically romanticized by the new illustrated periodicals of the day. Höch’s art provided an alternative view of the modern woman as a locus of conflicting values whose liberation was largely illusory. Among the works from this period is her series “From an Ethnographic Museum,” which equates contemporary attitudes toward women with those held toward “primitive” cultures.

”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.” (Luc Sante, Slate Magazine )

Hoch, Cut With the Kitchen Knife

During Plastination, all bodily fluids and soluble fats are replaced with reactive resins and elastomers such as silicon rubber and epoxy, through vacuum-forced impregnation. After gas, heat, or light curing, the specimens assume rigidity and permanence. “The purpose of Plastination from its very inception was a scientific one, to educate medical students. But the interest that laypeople had in the plastinated specimens inspired me to think of creating public exhibitions, which was followed by the realization that I had to offer a heightened sense of aesthetics, to avoid shocking the public and to capture their imagination,” said von Hagens

Shock and Awe. The cross between anatomy, art and religion in large scale public exhibits has left few indifferent. The world of a small cabal of scientists thrust into the mass market. It is a conflict between different views of the human body and what it means to be human. The result and ensuing reaction has disturbed encrusted aesthetic, moral and religious sensibilities. Anatomy is to teach the living, or in this case, perhaps to scare the dead into harboring any optimistic pretenses they may have that reincarnation actually exists.

The central issue appears to be the element of perceived provocation and serving up the deceased for self promotion and profit.A commodification of the dead who can be warehoused like stage props. The artistic arrangements and poses of the bodies as statues, Greek theatre meeting Penthouse magazine, showcases a new form of sculpting material.The stylistic presentation was conceived to allay a sense of disgust, but in fact the promotion of the exhibit as ”artistic”, featuring copulating bodies, anal sex and other sensational displays has merely enhanced the  exhibit’s notoriety. Artistically, it may be the aesthetic of violence at its stark, realistic and ultimate conclusion. To date, 28 million people around the world have visited the exhibitions. In afghanistan and Iraq, they call this Road Kill.

Once considered an extremely low-brow  form of literature, denounced by conservative parents, teachers, and clergy for their perception ofbeing a corrupting influence on the minds and morals of youth; disreputable yet condemned as insubstantial, comics, or graphic novels now draw the attention of cultural critics and scholars of art history. Art Spiegelman has been of great importance for the re-appraisal of the comics art form as an adult art form by creating an aesthetic that draws on traditional literary and visual art  both structurally and with a contemporary reinterpretation and appropriation of classic narrative themes.

Spiegelman created a substantial body of formal experimentation in comics, work that helped to clarify the place of comics in the aesthetic history of modernism and post modernism. His genius has been his unclassifiability , his elusiveness as to genre, and blurring of distinction between high and low culture. He developed the form of the meta-narrative; he writes a comic and at the same time writes about writing it. This device, of doubling back, a nervy ferbile worry about the course of the book as its being written to which the reader is privy.

The literary terrain staked out is always that of the fragile and vulnerable; the Wandering Joke, an eternal joke inhabiting the spirit and soul of artist who is compelled  to find a stance, take a position, a vantage point, that allows one to live or rest, albeit temporarily, where it’s clear the center isn’t holding anymore. That stance is a kind of cynicism, a kind of worldliness that is non-judgmental and at the same time superior to actions around you that are attempting to seduce the artist down a path of least resistance . The work is of an emotional pitch where the stance is transparent in all the glory of its imperfections being unmasked. Dark. but engaging, compatible, endearing and embracing . An attraction to the joy in discovering debased possibilities; A street poetry that is echoing, flexible , and moves to syncopated beat. Spiegelman’s work is a collision of sensuality, innocence and cynicism that meet but aren’t quite ready to melt into each other, thus defying an easy categorization.  It’s not just a breakdown of genre; very often it’s a breakdown of values, a form of deconstruction where  genre is a symbolic superficial manifestation of something that can’t be fully articulated. A world of collision between the world that rhymes and a world that can’t dance, a world of fiction and a world of reality.

Bland he is not. They are often bleak, fragmented and distrurbing themes. Black comedies of a Jet black  hue both opaque and transparent. The narrative of a wandering restless soul and a life embodying elements as a ”voyage of the damned”, is a background or premise to his inscrutable, but accessible world.  Life is seen as both blessing and curse. The past is never dead and never buried and only fleetingly forgotten. Its not a past, but a present reality. Like an alternate version  of Glen Berger’s solo play, Underneath the Lintel that reworks the artifice: A librarian finds a book in the return bin that had been checked out 113 years earlier.His investigation goes back to Egypt, the Exodus, the Babylonin Exile and into the modern era, with the borrower, Spiegelman, a metaphor for life’s elusive but inextinguishable meaning.

”The essential magic of comics is that a few simple words and marks can conjure up an entire world for a reader to enter and believe in. Presumably, this is true of erotic comics as well; how else can one explain the willingness to spend hard Depression-era currency to be aroused by a very primitively drawn Donald Duck schtupping an ineptly drawn Minnie Mouse? It’s precisely this miraculous ability to suspend disbelief and temporarily blur Image and Reality that arouses the ire of those puritanical censors of the Left and Right who can confuse depictions of rape with actual rape. It’s a profound confusion of categories as well as a scrambling of symptom and cause.” ( Art Spiegelman )

”Here, we have Spiegelman at his most complex, creating comics that, even as they tell a story, comment on the process, highlighting its contradictions, suggesting that we are complicit in the tales we tell. “When you say to give form, you’re giving a shape to something that’s much more nebulous,” Spiegelman says. “As soon as you try to tell the truth, you’re always lying. ””The one thing I am adamant about is that I’m not going to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books.

There is little doubt that cartoons, derive their power to shock from the use of   simplified and compacted images,that are able to pass beneath the reader’s critical radar and deliver their meanings with an immediacy that other art forms cannot match.The magic of Spiegelman resides in the notion of ”process work” which is artistic, anti-commodity and anti-industrial. It means drawing ideas, direction and inspiration from the process of working on the design itself rather than having a fixed destination in mind. And it is this ”organic”  approach which gives birth to the elements of visual surprise and subtle clues so crucial to his art.
‘After all, comics are a gutter medium; that is, it’s what takes place in the gutters between the panels that activates the medium. Of course comics have been seen as a gutter medium in the more obvious sense of the term ever since the Yellow Kid ushered in the first Sunday comics supplements at the turn of the century. The genteel classes have long expressed outrage at their vulgarity and tried to have them squelched as a threat to literacy and a corrupting influence on children. The funnies were certainly read by kids, but a 1938 Gallup poll showed that about 70 percent of all American adults followed them faithfully too. It’s difficult to over-estimate how central comics were to our mass culture in the days before cathode rays beamed images into every home.” ( Art Spiegelman )

Buster Keaton

  Keaton captures the epic sweep of his art, drawing the vaudeville and danse hall genre to a dignified close in the General.Johnnie Gray is modern man, more passionately attached  to the materiality of his Locomotive than his love for the heroine. His perilous adventures begin at the call to arms in 1861. Except, he has the political consciousness of ” The Good Soldier Schweik”, a satirical Czech novel on the World War One, where Shweik and other Czechs participate in conflicts they do not understand which breeds indifference towards those whom they are risking their lives to. Both McCuller’s and Keaton’s work are equal part art and genius.

The General  is memorable for its strong story-line of a single, brave, but wild Southern Confederate train engineer doggedly in pursuit of his passionately-loved locomotive (“The General”) and to a lesser degree, the woman he  thinks he loves. His stoic, unflappable reactions to fateful calamities, his ingenious and resourceful uses of machines and various objects (water tanks, a large piece of timber, a cowcatcher, a rolling artillery cannon on wheels, and unattached railroad cars), and the unpredictable forces of nature, provide much of the plot. A hall of fame effort, incorporating the complete inventory  of all the slapstick, physical humour that both he and Chaplin were most credited for.

Buster Keaton, The General, 1926

”Johnnie races to the general store, which is now a makeshift recruitment office. Taking a shortcut he manages to be the first in line. The door to the office is opened and Johnnie comes marching in—only he and the rest of the line go in two different directions, and he has to jump over several tables to get in front again. He gives the enlistment officer his name and occupation, but the man rejects him. Johnnie is more valuable to the South as an engineer. Later, Annabelle believes that Johnnie didn’t even try to enlist. She refuses to speak to him again until he’s in uniform. What follows is a classic moment: Johnnie sits on the connecting rod of his engine. He’s so miserable that he doesn’t notice when he starts moving up and down, until just before the train enters a tunnel.”

Carson McCullers

”Marion Mack leaves no mark of her personality on the screen. She deserves credit mainly for being willing and able to take it. Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn were never thrown around, trod upon or knocked about the way Marion Mack was. She has hilarious moments. The excitement of the chase does not prevent her from taking out a broom to sweep the dusty floor of the engine. An exasperated Johnnie tells her to keep throwing wood into the fire. She takes a small stick and daintily puts it in. Johnnie sarcastically hands her a sliver, and she puts that in, too. Then, in a moment that has an audience roaring and clapping, Johnnie grabs her and half-throttles her before kissing her instead.”

Heart of a Lonely Hunter by McCuller’s   explores the spiritual isolation of misfits ,and quirky but well defined and redeeming figures of the South. It effectively predates and circumvents, a perhaps manufactured  ”new consciousness” that was written by sociologist academic David Riesman in ”The Lonely Crowd”, which became an accepted template for analyzing society. Riesman writes of three very different character types in his book “The Lonely Crowd.” McCuller’s world is of people perennially in exile, always a few steps ahead of their personal Babylon,and at once accessible, yet incomprehensible.

The first type, tradition directed, is driven by cultural demands to act in an approved way, and is enforced through fear of being shamed or losing honour. The second type, inner directed, is driven by an inner  gyroscope” that is set primarily by his parents. The inner-directed person behaves according to this “internal piloting” and often senses feelings of guilt, rather than shame, if his behavior shifts from these parent-instilled values. The third and final type, other-directed, is the group that Riesman has nicknamed “the lonely crowd.” The behavior of other-directed individuals is governed primarily by their set of peers at any given moment. According to Riesman, other-directed individuals have an internal “radar” for sensing and responding to their peers and makes them “capable of a rapid if sometimes superficial intimacy with and response to everyone.” The “lonely crowd” of inner-directed individuals is where most Americans today would belong according to Riesman’s categorizations”

McCuller’s other novels employed similar narratives played out over a Southern setting, an its impact  is almost coincidental. Her  central theme; the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love. Her characters are aggressive people whose tendencies are tempered by a deep curiosity and sensibility making them empathetic, and almost biblical in stature.

 In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence De Vere White she confessed: “Writing, for me, is a search for God.” This search was not acknowledged by all of her colleagues – Arthur Miller dismissed her a “minor author”, but Gore Vidal praised her work as ”one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture.”

Heartfield, Justice, 1933

 With Dada’s founding members all affected in one form or another by World War I, they banded together through their suspicion of language and logic, the so-called trustworthy foundations of society that had  lead to the utter destruction of the Great War. The Dada in Berlin continued to follow the anti-war stance of Zurich, with John Heartfield and the other Dadaist creating ironic and often darkly humorous collages criticizing Hitler and the Nazi regime. Both the technological developments in printing and the prevalence of Nazi imagery and propaganda made collage a natural and highly effective medium for the Berlin Dadaists to work in.Heartfield used the technology of his age to similarly co-opt and re-contextualize the Nazis to  ironic ends, both political and as orginal works of art.The associations between money and war, capitalism and militarism were persistent themes with George Grosz and Heartfield in particular.

George Grosz, The Agitator, 1928

”…the idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content, its form as subversive as the application of the photograph and printed texts which, together, are transformed into a static film. Having invented the static…poem, the Dadaists applied the same principles to pictorial representation. They were the first to use photography as material to create, with the aid of structures that were very different, often anomalous and with antagonistic significance, a new entity which tore from the chaos of war and revolution an entirely new image; and they were aware that their method possessed a propaganda power…” ( Raoul Hausmann, 1931 )

Grosz, Eclipse of the Sun, 1928

Some of Heartfield’s photomontages deploy the device of divided or fragmented  surfaces such as the book illustration “The Land of Record Profits” (1927) which uses the direct juxtaposition of separate fragments and contrasts pictures of beauty queens with a lynching , scattered American coins and a cheque, and newspaper headlines and advertising slogans such as “I’d rather be safe with my hard-earned money that’s why I take it to the Citizen’s Savings Bank” and “money opens all doors”.Rather than represent reality by a single, unfragmented image. Heartfield, by breaking up and juxtaposing images was able to make visible the class nature of social relations and lay bare the contradictions of capitalism and foreground the menace of war and fascism. See for example, The Finest Products of Capitalism (1932) in which an unemployed man (in 1932 six million Germans were unemployed) with a placard reading “Any Work Accepted” stands on the train,with the image of an expensive wedding dress of an evidently bourgeois bride. In 1917 the French artist Marcel Duchamp created one of the most famous of Dadaist statements in New York. He turned a man’s urinal on its back and signed it R Mutt. This, known as a ‘ready made’ or ‘found object’, and was an attack on the traditional preconceptions of what art is, also by signing it he questions the value attributed to a signature. The art may have been adsurd, but was not insane as was the Reich’s book burning, which was a collective submission to an epidemic of mental illness among the ruling classes:

John Heartfield, And Yet It Moves, 1933

”In this distemper the book burning students were joined by some of the most distinguished memebers of the academic community. One of them was a founder of existentialism, the philosopher and metaphysician Martin Heidegger, a student of the German-Jewish founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and one of the most abstruse and influential among contemporary philosophers. …he made an address… that strongly implied approval of the book burning.” ( The Unmasking of Adolf Hitler, Eugene Davidson )

 With the illogical and absurd, with irony, cynicism and anarchy, playing a major part in their works, the Dadaists,  satirically  drew sharp contrasts between the lives of those who promote the war, the ruling class, and those who fight it, the working Class. One such drawing by Grosz entitled ‘Fit for Active Service’ (1918) depicts a rotten, skeletal corpse being declared fit to fight on the front line by a corpulent doctor. Grosz himself had twice been called up and twice discharged for being unfit. On the second occasion he was saved from a firing squad by the intervention of an influential patron.In these paintings Grosz uses his skills as a caricaturist to produce vivid, grotesque, nightmarish, portrayals of those who control society. Businessmen, Clergy, Generals, are all portrayed not as the polished, fine, refined gentlemen of Academy art, but as vicious, selfish, and uncaring individuals with superficial identities.

Almost from the start Grosz and the others found themselves in trouble with the people they were satirising. During the First international Dada fair held in Berlin, Grosz and Heartfield were charged with defaming the military for among other things sticking a pig’s head on top of a dummy dressed in a military uniform. On this occasion he was fined 300 Marks.On many other occasions he was charged with obscenity and blasphemy for his frank depiction of issues like poverty, prostitution, greed and the relation these things have to wealth, the Church and the State. One painting depicts a prostitute forced to sell herself to an uncaring, unfeeling businessman. Entitled ‘Daum Marries her Pedantic Automation’ (1920), it depicts the businessman being fed a series of numbers through the top of his head which then feeds through a machine which has replaced his internal organs, his “wife” in a state of partial undress looks on at the numbers being fed in. How could the cream of academia rationalize the dementia around them:

George Grosz, Pillars of Society, 1926

”…. and thus the eminent, esoteric philosopher (Heidegger ) came to much the same view as did an untutored crackpot Gauleiter such as Julius Streicher. The revolution spared nothing and no one…. As Heine had written a century before: ‘There where books are burned, in the end people too are burned’ ” ( Davidson )

By the mid 1920s the Dada movement had begun to split, Andre Breton a Frenchman founded the Surrealist movement. This linked the original concept of Dada with the new theories of Sigmund Freud, but in a much more organised and doctrinaire way. Individuals like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Man Ray, were some of the principal artists in this new and revolutionary movement. In Germany, however, a movement called, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) linked the Dadaists’ satire to the realist eliminates of the German Expressionists.Whilst the individuals involved like Otto Dix, Grosz and Heartfield had differing styles they were all linked by common themes Horror of war, social hypocrisy, and moral decadence, the plight of the poor and the rise of Nazism which cohesively united this group.

” Hitler celebrated not science, but art as the source for saving Western culture. Adolf Hitler, himself a frustrated artist, conceived of his mission as saving the west from spiritual degeneration” ( Michael Zimmerman ) Chief curator and appropriator of good taste. If he had only been accepted at art school. But then his work was so outstandingly banal and boring…..the antithesis of art.

”Hitler’s political-artistic ambitions went far beyond public buildings and landscapes to encompass the entire German landscape. Hans Jurgen Syberberg has argued that Hitler viewed the Third Reich as a total work of art,analagous on a national scale to the total works of art attempted by Wagner at Bayreuth. … we ordinarily think of Hitler’ interest in film perjoratively, but have failed to consider the astonishing possibility that World War II was directed like a big budget war film to be viewed from Hitler’s bunker. The gruesome image of Germany in flames in 1945 may be regarded as the final scene in a historical spectacle generated by suicidal impulse. The drive to create an amoral state defined by art and violence could only end in self destruction.”( Heidegger’s Confrontation With Modernity, Michael Zimmerman )

 German Dadaism cannot be separated from the political and social context of postwar Germany. Acutely sensitive to the political collapse of the country and the horrifying aftermath of the war – the dead, the wounded, the disabled, and the starving, unemployed masses – Berlin Dada was anti-Prussian, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalistic from its inception. Siding with the Spartacist revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg, the Dadaists vigorously opposed the creation of the Weimar Republic; and their strong political commitment influenced all of their activities. Artistically speaking, even if they denied it, these artists had all been influenced by Expressionism, and some by Cubism and Futurism; after 1920, they were heavily influenced by Giorgio de Chirico.

This image shows Goebbel's solution for ending the food shortage in Germany. It was featured in Berlin's Arbeiter-Illustriect-Zerlung (AIZ)(Workers Illustrated Newspaper) as a political satire. The caption reads: "What? No butter or lard? Well then, eat your Jews?" This demonstrates the German leader's general view of the Jews. They are seen as expendable if the rest of Germany is at stake. Why go hungry when we can eat those who's lives have no value.

Throughout their history, the Dadaists used the collage technique they had inherited from Cubism; and eventually combining this technique with photography, they innovated and created modern photomontage.One of the main aims and functions of photomontage is to denaturalize the way we are socialized into seeing the world, to make the familiar strange or problematic, to interrogate photographic representations of reality by fragmenting and juxtaposing them in ways other than those intended by the original producers and thus to uncover the ideology behind photographs and the society which they are made to represent.

At its core, Dadaism  supported all types of misunderstandings and confusion in a belief that form would be established through the function of expression. It was based on common ethics of art, which through various places and people, new individual forms of expression arose.In the beginning… In 1915 – at the beginning of World War I – Hugo Ball, a writer and theatre director, came with his female partner Emmy Hennings from Munich to Zurich .On Saturday February 3, 1916, was the inauguration of the Cabaret or ‘artist-tavern’ Voltaire located at Spiegelgasse 1 in Zurich.Hugo Ball made an agreement with the owner of the tavern ‘Meierei’ to use the backroom for a literary cabaret and to increase the sale of beer, sausages and sandwiches. An evening with music, dance, manifestos, theory, poems, pictures, masks and costumes presented by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Georges Janco and Hans Arp. Despite  World War I, the atmosphere in Zurich was very liberal.Interestingly, in the same narrow alley, Spiegelgasse 14, where the Cabarat Voltaire played, lived a certain Mister Uljanow aka Lenin. Apparently,the authorities were much more suspicious about the chaotic dadaists than the reclusiv, quiet,and  studied Russians …

The only edition of the magazine Cabaret Voltaire was published on June 15, 1916.It was initiated by Hugo Ball and contained contributions from Kandinsky, Arp, Modigliani and others,and marked the first print of the word Dada! In addition to the literary character of Cabaret Voltaire, the Zurich Dadaism inaugurated  a second phase devoted  to the pictorial art .At the Bahnhofstrasse 19, they exhibited works from Kandinsky, Klee, Arp, de Chirico, Feininger, Ernst, Janco, Modigliani, Macke, Kokoschka and others.

”The word Dada symbolises the most primitive relation to surrounding reality, a relation with which Dadaism in turn establishes a new reality. Life appears as a simultaneous confusion of noises, colours and spiritual rhythms, and is thus incorporated — with all the sensational screams and feverish excitements of its audacious everyday psyche and the entirety of its brutal reality — unwaveringly into Dadaist art. This is the clearly marked dividing line which separates Dada from all previous artistic directions, most particularly from FUTURISM, which recently some imbeciles took to be a new version of impressionist realization. For the first time Dadaism has made a break with the aesthetic approach to life by rending all the slogans of ethics, culture and inwardness, which are mere cloaks for weak muscles, into their component parts.”

Hannah Hoch, Berlin Dada

In Jan, 1917, RichardHuelsenbeck returned to Berlin. He is tired of abstract art and is looking for something that can relate to the reality of the time. Avant-garde art would soon fragment into the pure opticality and formalism of artists like Picasso and the movement articulated by the Dadaists in Germany with its emphasis on Surrealism, futurism and constructivism. In May 1917,Huelsenbeck publishes “Der Neue Mensch” ,”The New Man”. A text with a positive philosophy engaged in the betterment of humanity through non-revolutionary action. In February, 1918 Huelsenbeck’s presentation  at the Neue Sezession Saal of DADA in Zürich and  proclamation that DADA is the Future: “DADA wants to be the war party of the great international art movements. It is the transition to the new joy garnered from real things.” 

In March 1918, Huelsenbeck created the Club Dada in Berlin with Jung and Hausmann. Baader, Mehring, Grosz and the Herzfeld brothers join in. The following are excerpts from the Berlin Dada manifesto which in its corrosive, provocative fashion, articulates an aesthetic that endures to this day in various permutations and combinations:

”What did Expressionism Want: It ” wanted” something, that much remains characteristic of it. Dada wants nothing, Dada grows. Expressionism wanted inwardness, it conceived of itself as a reaction against the times, while Dadaism is nothing but an expression of the times. Dada is one with the times, it is a child of the present epoch which one may curse, but cannot deny. Dada has taken the mechanisation, the sterility, the rigidity and the tempo of these times into its broad lap, and in the last analysis it is nothing else and in no way different from them. Expressionism is not spontaneous action. It is the gesture of tired people who wish to escape themselves and forget the present, the war and the misery. To this end they invented “humanity,” and walked versifying and psalmodysing along streets on which the escalators rise and descend and the telephones ring shrilly. The Expressionists are tired people who have turned their backs on nature and do not dare look the cruelty of the epoch in the face. They have forgotten how to be daring. Dada is daring per se, Dada exposes itself to the risk of its own death. Dada puts itself at the heart of things. Expressionism wanted to forget itself, Dada wants to affirm itself. Expressionism was harmonious, mystic, angelic, Baaderish-Superdadaist — Dada is the scream of brakes and the bellowing of the brokers at the Chicago Stock Exchange. Vive Dada!

Heartfield, in collaboration with his brother Wieland Herzfelde and others, staged photographs subsequently cutting them together or superimposing negatives to create a single “scene.” (Here a pointed critique of the Hermann Göring’s suggestion that “Iron ore makes an empire strong – butter and lard have at most made it fat.” Now that their butter is gone, the nationalistic family cheerfully scarfs down a bicycle, while their baby is teething on the blade of an axe). The results of this formal manipulation look somewhat realistic at first glance, yet completely off-kilter and out of joint on closer examination – an appropriate figure for the dire circumstances Heartfield’s designs were meant to diagnose and attack.

The execution and direction of art depends on the times in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that whose mental content represents the thousandfold problems of the day, which has manifestly allowed itself to be torn apart by the explosions of last week, and which is forever trying to gather up its limbs after the impact of yesterday. The best and most unprecedented artists will be those who continuously snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the chaos of life’s cataracts, clutching the intellectual zeitgeist and bleeding from hands and hearts.

Under the pretext of inwardness the Expressionist writers and painters have closed ranks to form a generation which is already expectantly looking forward to an honourable appraisal in the histories of art and literature and is aspiring to honours and accolades. On the pretext of propagating the soul, their struggle with Naturalism has led them back to those abstract, pathetic gestures which are dependent on a cosy, motionless life void of all content. Their stages are cluttered with every manner of kings, poets and Faustian characters, and a theoretical, melioristic understanding of life — whose childish and psychologically naïve style will have to wait for Expressionism’s critical afterword — lurking at the backs of their idle minds. Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of sensationalism, these indicate people who find their armchairs more important than the din of the streets, and who make it a point of pride to be conned by every petty racketeer. Their sentimental opposition to the times, no better nor worse, no more reactionary nor revolutionary than any other, that feeble resistance with half an eye on prayer and incense when not making papier maché cannon balls from Attic iambics — these are the characteristics of a younger generation which has never known how to be young. Expressionism, which was discovered abroad and has quite typically become a portly idyll in Germany with the expectation of a good pension, has nothing more to do with the aspirations of active people. The signatories of this manifesto have banded together under the battle cry of DADA!

John Heartfield, Berlin Dada