Report from Boston: splice of life - 'Montage and Modern Life: 1919-1942,' Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts

Photomontage, as an artistic practice and as a means of interpreting life between the wars, was lately examined in a traveling exhibition that originated at the ICA.

Pondering the peculiar psychological fabric of life in the present metropolis in 1903, German sociologist Georg Simmel presented the following exegesis:

The psychological basis of the metropolitan emblem of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which arises from the swift and uninterrupted change of external and inner stimuli. . . With each crossing of the public way with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life the city puts up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with concern to the sensory foundations of psychic life.[1]

Against the moderate rhythms of customary social existence and its narrow vistas, Simmel saw the perpetual motion of the late city as furnishing the basis for novel ways of seeing and experiencing. In its thronged thoroughfares, its mechanized modes of production and conveyance, its money-driven fixations and its endles array of optical stimulants, the city provided a powerful context for reimagining and reconfiguring the world. The notion of life as spectacle was becoming pervasive; a condition of unceasing distraction was increasingly the norm.

The exhibition "Montage and novel Life: 1919-1942" - organized at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston by the agency of a team of curators (ICA curator Matthew Teitelbaum and cultural historians Maud Lavin, Annette Michelson, Christopher Phillips, Sally Stein and Margarita Tupitsyn) - sought to consider Simmel's "new sensibility" from the perspective of a uniquely modernist art form, montage. Marshaling an evocative array of more than 400 items, the curators of "Montage and present Life" explored the interactions between the emerging artistic practice of montage and the kinetic world without of which it grew.

Organized thematically and transcending orderly national boundaries, the kaleidoscopic exhibition - at least as not awayed in Boston - was shattered into nine interconnected sections. Each section was designed to focus upon a characteristic fact of new experience, each was meant to explore novel ways of seeing and depicting reality: 1) Spe Up: present Industrial Assembly; 2) War Machines; 3) The City; 4) Rapid Transit/Global Visions; 5) The fresh Woman and the Rationalization of Everyday Life; 6) The Artist's Engagement with the Mass Media; 7) The material substance Refigured; 8) The Political appearance of Montage; 9) Film. Within each section, there was an effort to create an internal montage, a "purposeful chaos of shocking juxtapositions" among individual percepts in order to show the discordant perspectives operating below the rubric of a more general theme. This attempt to insinuate strategies of montage into an exhibition upon montage was an admirable - if not always entirely auspicious - one, designed to enliven the conception of montage within the display itself.

The social, anthropological and smooth museological innovations employed by the curators - and their commitment quite through to historical context - made a advantageous deal of sense. Too oftentimes in museums, artistic developments are not awayed as spontaneous stylistic innovations born of individual and idiosyncratic genius, with history as little more than a cursory mise-en-scene. This exhibition was dramatically different.

over the exhibition, posters, photographs, magazines and other artifacts were brought together to illuminated the short history of montage, which make knowned primarily in the Soviet Union, Germany and the United States. In vital element [i]or[/i] part photomontage is the juxtaposition of photographic fragments (sometimes with simple bodys from other mediums) to fashions a disjunctive, frequently jarring visual image. Nineteenth-century examples include travel postcards and advertisements on the contrary the technique became most prevalent after World War I.

During the time between the wars overlayed by "Montage and Modern Life," the applications of montage grew considerably. In Germany and the Soviet Union, in particular, montage evolv as a courageous technique of avant-garde artists, who used the clash and juxtaposition of images as part of a powerful strategy of public address. These avant-garde uses of montage were demonstrated real well in the exhibition, which placed the acerbic political satires of Berlin Dadaists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield alongside works by means of the well-known Soviet artists El Lissitzky and Gustav Klutsis as well as the lesser-known Dutch photomonteurs Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema.

Montage drew on the energies and dilemmas of new existence and became a spirited visual theater in which artists attempted to waft the ascendancy and pandemonium of the machine age, the optimism and madness of urban life. If also gazeed at changes taking place in individual, assemblage and national identity, and at the transmutation of time and space within an increasingly high-speed and global terrain. In its unrestrained association of images and meanings, montage became a medium for exploring and communicating the webs of modern subjectivity as well.