| Artist: | Hausmann, Raoul |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Dada Victorious (Dada Siegt) | |
| Date of Work: | 1920 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post WWI | |
| Movement: | Berlin Dada | |
| Medium: | Photomontage | |
| Subject: Dada victorious! Imagine if Dada won the war! This photomontage of oddly juxtaposed images works through strange couplings and surprising encounters to upset any sense of preconceived order. Photomontage suggests is own kind of order and logic, which is a strategy that puts rational order itself into question. "Dada wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order" (Jean Arp). Dada points out the absurdity of it all as it upsets the authority of the information and images it cuts up and reassembles through photomontage. Office machines run amuck, the world of nature is undercut, and Dada takes over the world as its name sprawls across the map. "Dada is by no means a school and certainly not a brotherhood, nor is it a perfume. It is not a philosophy either. Dada is, quite simply, a new concept" (Marcel Janco). Style: Hausmann uses mass media imagery against itself here by cutting up newspapers and images from encyclopedias and other texts of "authority" and then re-contextualizing them in a Dada scene that undermines order and rational logic. Photomontage used in this slice and dice way is the ultimate deconstructor, ripping apart the very foundation and security of the bourgeois social order. This is very subversive in its deliberate, odd juxtapositions and displacements used as a form of social and political critique; it in essence sets out to de-program the preconceived assumptions of the bourgeoisie through an active campaign of Dada disinformation. Photomontage is also a good way for the artist to bypass personal touch and expression in that it is not a scene drawn by hand, but rather "cut with a kitchen knife." Context: Dada anti-art, working deliberately against the aesthetic and the academic in the spirit of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto to create an art of the streets rather than the museums. Anti-decorative and anti-sentimental about humanity; also anti-expressionistic in that it is not about the artist searching his own tortured soul or expressing his internal spiritual angst. Dada fought its own war, away from the muddy trenches and back in the cities where it was possible to put blinders on; Dada mounted its attack on the bourgeois morality and complacency that condoned the war from the stages of the cabaret and the streets rather than from the safety of the artist's studio and the art galleries. Dada is an "art" of protest that tried to point out the absurdity of the war, which they saw as hypocritical and morally bankrupt. In Berlin, Dada became particularly political in its "edge." Quotations from the Dada Manifesto: "The new artist protests: he no longer paints. . . . We recognize no theory. Dada is against systems, the most accpetable system is on principle to have none. . . . I write a manifesto and I want nothing . . . in principle I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too. I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense." | ||
