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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 5
Lesson 1: Dada- Introduction to Dada
- Dada Manifesto
- Dada Pataphysics
- Dada politics
- Dada collage
- Dada Readymades
- Dada Performance
- Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2
- Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass
- Art as concept: Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Duchamp, Fountain
- Duchamp, Fountain
- Duchamp, 3 Standard Stoppages
- Duchamp, Boite-en-valise (the red box), series F
- Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
- Marcel Duchamp and the Viewer
- Max Ernst, Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale
- Francis Picabia, Ideal
- Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany
- Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany
- Hausmann, Spirit of the Age: Mechanical Head
- Dada
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Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, collage, mixed media, 1919-1920. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- 4:28The size of the images (in the squares) seem to resemble a Fibonacci spiral. Does anyone know if this was possibly intentional?(3 votes)
- Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there a different woman in this video? I recognized Steven's voice, but I couldn't help but notice that Beth's voice is different.(3 votes)
- It's a second woman: Dr. Juliana Kreinik, who is speaking with Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.(2 votes)
- around 1.43 please correct the translation to "tabula rasa".(2 votes)
- I couldn't find the site for the flickr image shown in the video at auntie4:26. Could you send the website?(2 votes)
- Is there anywhere else that this image annotated can be found?(1 vote)
- Is there a way to sharpen the image? I tried watching the video in a full screen format as well, but the details of the image were fuzzy (and I was wearing my glasses at the time!!) :)(1 vote)
- Its an old video made when youtube streamed only very low res content. We hope to remake it eventually.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(lively music) - [interviewee] This amazing photo montage is by German artist, Hannah Hoch. And it's from 1919. It has an extremely long title. "Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through "the Last Weimar Beer-Belly
Cultural Epoch in Germany." - [interviewer] 1919, that was a really pretty fraught moment. So what was going on? - [interviewee] Political chaos. The government has been completely changed after World War I. There's a lot of conflict
between the Spartacists, the far-left wing, communists, and the Freikorps was
encouraged to attack people by members of the government. So there all these clashes
and a lot of people end up getting arrested and some
people end up getting killed. And that's just one particular moment. January of 1919, all of
that infighting happens. - [interviewer] So all this fragmentation is just beautifully captured here. The contrast from the kind of long war, which would have really focused
the country's attention, and then this complete breakdown. - [interviewee] If you
think about the title, "Cut with a Kitchen Knife,"
think about the idea of cutting things, literally, like that works for the photo montage. And she's cutting a
swath through all this, and piecing things back
together in ways that make sense to her, focusing on the fragmentation as defining culture at that moment. - [interviewer] I'm assuming
most of these photographs came from newspapers, from magazines. - They did.
- And so it's all immediate, and topical, and all
relevant at this moment, but it's being reconstructed. - [interviewee] But I love
that it's a kitchen knife. She's very focused on the
role of women artists. As a Dadaist, how was she treated? And she wasn't treated very well. I think one of the things
she actually had problem with is a lot of male Dadaists had grand ideas about changing cultural mores, and views, and gender equity, but then
in their practice of that, they did nothing. There's a couple of ways
that that is visualized here. If we look at the very central image, we actually see one of the foremost German expressionist
artists, Kathe Kollwitz, and the body underneath her
is dancer, Niddy Impekoven. And if you look at the way
that that forms a central point around which everything else rotates, and there is a sense of movement happening all at the same time. One thing I always think
is really interesting is this tiny little head
is actually Hannah Hoch. Instead of putting her signature, she puts a little portrait of herself. And what it is, is actually
pasted onto the corner of a map, which shows the countries in Europe that had women's voting
rights at the time. So that's one of the ways
that we know she was thinking about the role of women in
society and in the art world. So, first of all, if you think about this
image in terms of quadrants, usually the right side is
known as the anti-Dadaist. Now, the people that are
in the anti-Dadaist corner are obviously politicians. Kaiser Wilhelm is right here. His head is really big and
this figure is quite large. She makes fun of Kaiser
Wilhelm with this little figure of two wrestlers that are
creating the mustache. So then they're also
other political figures. There's General Von Hindenberg, the head of him on the
body of this exotic dancer. Down here, there is German Minister of Defense, Gustav Noske. And he's talking to another general, and this general up here
is standing on their heads. But if we go down here,
in the lower right corner, we see the world of the Dadaist. Right here, it says Dadaisten. So this is the corner
that has Hannah Hoch, and the map, and then it also
has other Dadaist figures. There's the Dadaist, Raoul Hausmann. Hannah Hoch had a relationship with Hausmann for awhile. And for a long time, all of the literature on Hoch referred to as the
wife of Raoul Hausmann. Here, you see the two heads of Dadaists, George Grosz and Wielande Herzfelde, the brother of John Heartfield
and Niddy Impekoven, the same dancer that's in the center here, is now over here, bathing John Heartfield in this bathtub. And here we have Lenin, and then there's another
Dadaist, Johannes Baader. And then you see one of the Communist
Party leaders, Karl Radek. And he was back and forth
between Russia and Germany. So he's very involved
with the Communist Party. Karl Marx. Then over here is the head of modern art critic and
writer, Theodore Daubler. And his head is on top of a baby's body. - [Interviewee] So really
infantilizing all of these-- - [Interviewee] Yeah,
and then they're all men. On the left side, there are forms of Dada. This is Dada propaganda. This is Einstein right here, actually. And he is saying a couple
of different things. Right here, this little bit of text is in German, and it says, "He he, young man, Dada
is not an art trend." That it's not just something
that's coming and going. And that it's actually
something more meaningful. Now down here, there's a lot
of scenes of mass gathering. So we see Karl Liebknecht, one of the German Communist Party leaders, along with Rosa Luxembourg,
who were jailed, tortured, and then assassinated in January 19. He's saying join Dada. Dada is going on all over Europe, and there are different centers of Dada, and they all have different
art-making practices. And photo montage was central
to the Berlin Dadaists. - [Interviewer] Well, the whole
notion of the kitchen knife is really empowering. - [Interviewee] The idea of domesticity as being something that could undermine cultural values is amazing