Cut with the Kitchen Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. - book reviews

Maud Lavin's application of mind of avant-garde artist Hannah Hoch is the latest of a number of new feminist contributions to research upon the art, politics and tillage of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, for more than a decade now, feminist scholars in a variety of disciplines have challenged the conventional view of Weimar agriculture (popularized by Peter Gay's Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider) in which the artistic fall off in Germany of the 1920 as well as the following fascist reaction to it are seen in exclusively male and narrowly oedipal terminuss (For example, the chapter of Gays work that describes Expressionism in the arts is titled The desert of the Son," while another chapter, "Revenge of the Father," traces the conservative backlash against artistic experimentation.) Focusing upon the changing roles of women during Weimar, feminist historians and, more lately feminist film scholars have insisted upon a different, less exclusively masculinist, understanding of the two "revolt" and "backlash" during these years. They have thus begun to address the widespread fascination with and anxiety surrounding the control of sexual transgression in the arts and mass media during the Weimar period and, equally, the get back of traditional gender roles and repressive sexual taboos below Nazism.

Lavin's volume introduces this feminist debate into art history, exploring the everyday life of women in Germany of the 1920 as viewed end the lens of a female artist's private obsessions and public visions. Hannah Hoch the control of Lavin's study, was a member of Berlin Dada in the early Weimar years; she shared an interest in using montage for social critique with her colleagues Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader, Richard Huelsenbeck, John Heartfield and George Grosz single of the few female artists affiliated with the assemblage Hoch brought a unique perspective to the Dada throw creating a remarkable group of photomontages during the period works which answer to - sometimes critically on the contrary more often ambivalently - the changing representations of women in the mass media and consumer tillage of the time.

Lavin's greatest in quantity compelling and original argument is that Hannah Hoch's photomontages reveal the intersection of avant-garde production with the media, and that they illuminate the widespread effort upon the part of the German avant-garde (especially following the dissipation of Berlin Dada as a movement) to participate in the institutions and forms of mass tillage Challenging the claims of Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, and particularly his association of modernism with an art-world estheticism against which the avant-garde rebelled, Lavin argues for what looks to be a postmodern understanding of German avant-garde practices. "The burning issue for the German avant-garde from 1922 until Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 was not a rebellion against art institutions at all, on the other hand rather a serious and protracted negotiation with mass culture." Lavin says that instead of regarding the avant-garde as Burger does, as a collection of artists committed primarily to the dismantling of the false autonomy of the institution of art," we must diocese the 1920s avant-garde more broadly as an international assemblage centered in Germany involved with a "selective embrace" of modernity, in various ways more affirmative than critical. While this makes it les easy to transform avant-garde artists into revolutionary heroes, this approach redefines the avant-garde as a bourgeois subculture struggling to explain their possess engaged but ambivalent experience of novel industrialized capitalism.

The resemblance of Lavin's argument here to generally received debates about postmodernism is no doubt intentional, and her discussion be under the orders ofs as an important and timely reminder that modernist and avant-garde practices were quite heterogeneous, especially in Germany of the Weimar years.

on the other hand the author's presentist perspective can also occasionally be problematical. Her reach forthed analysis of Hoch's photomontage make an incision in with the Kitchen Knife, for example, draws heavily upon various theoretical ideas from the literature of postmodernism and in the proces guards to obscure rather than clarify the artist's achievement. In this case, Lavin places great interpretive weight upon the individual images of sum of two units Weimar women that appear at the center of the work (the headless figure of the dancer Niddy Impekoven and the divideed head of the Expressionist Kathe Kollwitz) - greater weight than the images can comfortably bear. although elsewhere in this book Lavin is relate toed to challenge such an approach, she here presents a near-hagiographical reading of these images and, as the following citation suggests, attributes a revolutionary fervor to the work itself:

The sight of the fractured image of Impekoven and Kollwitz at the center of wound with the Kitchen Knife elicits replys of alienation, exultation, and dislocation. Ambiguities proceed from viewing the head separated from the female material part and yet recognizing the dancer's headless material part as a signifier of female pleasure, power, and change As such images become allegories in the implied narrative of the larger composition - dismantling the Weimar Republic - this pleasure is linked specifically to revolutionary change.