This popular 1928 election poster equates the five fingers of the laboring hand with the number 5 of the Communist Party's electoral list. the tire), advertisements, and the very language of photographic mass media demonstrates how the Dadaists mocked and even broke down the conventional means of representation ubiquitous in the visual culture of the Weimar Republic.Īn oversized grasping hand energetically confronts the viewer. Yet, Höch created a cohesive image out of these pieces to critique the patriarchal political establishment. Hannah Höch, like Heartfield, appropriated mass media fragments. Photomontage enabled the Dadaist Heartfield to allow the news headlines and advertising slogans to speak for themselves in the form of fragmented words and images that conveyed the social turmoil and the cacophony of the urban street of commerce and news. This Dada montage intended to playfully jolt the viewer to confront the contemporary moment of social and political crisis. The cut-out words and images drawn from newspapers, advertisements, and magazines are used to spell non-words, such as "DADA," and project the Dadaist outrage at the status quo (its rational norms and values), as seen in the shouting face of the dandy Raoul Hausmann in the bottom left corner of the montage. This photomontage suggests the dynamic movement of the Republic automotive tire that runs over, crashes against, moves around emphatic slogans, ads, world news, and various Dada nonsense. The montaged interplay of animal and human, animate and inanimate, technological and "natural" are revealed as the hidden structure in mechanical reproductions under industrial capitalism.ġ920 Cover for Der Dada, "The Tire Travels the World" Heartfield's seamlessly sutured photomontages show how the photographic medium was mere artifice.
To call the authenticity of reality into question was to show the masses how they had traded in their own perception of reality for the media's view. Similarly, Heartfield's violently cut and pasted fragments with their rough edges exposed the media's realistic description of the world as a mimetic illusion. Cubism dismantled the mimetic representation in art. The Berlin Dadaists used photomontage to rupture the commercialized media's view of reality by dismantling it into fragmented parts. Montage, for Heartfield, was a vernacular art form, readily used for propaganda and commercial purposes.
He became known for his one-man battle against Hitler due to his concentrated critique of this dictator as a liar, backed by the big industrialists. Heartfield's name is synonymous with his 1930s antifascist photomontages.He provoked reality to snap its own picture through excerpts taken from popular mass media products, as a variation on a cameraless photographic process. Heartfield caused the times to speak for themselves through cut-out fragments from everyday materials, such as advertisements, newspapers, and illustrations.
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