After reading The Life and Times of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch: The “Quiet Girl” with a Big Voice (Part I), and viewing both artists’ styles of photomontage, I have decided that I agree with Liz Hager, the author of Hannah Hoch: Hannah Hoch was a master manipulator of the photomontage medium, which “reached far beyond the skills of the other Dadaists”.
While Heartfield’s art seems to constantly enforce his Dada agenda (save for the sole ad for a German club or something included in his gallery on the site), the artwork that was included in the Hoch text works with the Dada agenda with so much more depth than that of her mail counterparts, namely Heartfield, but also her lover, Raoul Hausmann. I found Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly cultural Epoch of Germany (1919) moving because while she does portray the world in true Dada fashion, she also is able to send her own social message. I didn’t realize this at first when I just viewed the image because it wasn’t big enough, but after Hager pointed out that all of the females depicted in the photomontage are in motion, when their male counterparts remain motionless, I felt the empowerment that Hoch wanted us to feel. The figures of the women may be small, but they are positioned in some of the areas with the most light in the picture, which gives us hope as individuals and equals to men.
Hoch’s fascination with gender identity can also be viewed in Da Dandy (1919), where images of women actually make a man. This piece is beautiful for many reasons. The message she is sending out, that we are man’s equal, is stunning, but something else to note is the color scheme. Her colors are unified, light, and seem to only enhance her message. The shapes she uses are also beautiful and curvy. The only points that stick out are on the heels of the shoes of the woman, and the “man’s nose”. The colors and shapes work together to express the power of femininity in art, or at least that is what it seems like to me.
Her male counterparts, Heartfield included, expressed the Dada agenda, but did so in a way that is not beautiful to me. Nothing was unified and everything was harsh. Also, save for the Dada agenda, other social messages seem to be missing. Hoch was able to convey the Dada message while still displaying messages on gender, race, and other social facets of our society.
The image that I have included is from http://fashionablelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/11/hannah-hoch.html. It was the first one in my search to really catch my eye mainly because of the man’s eyes in this ultra-feminine photomontage. His eyes seem to create the hips of the woman, also portraying that women are equals to men. But there is something else, the fact that his eyes become a focal point when there is a female eye in the picture that troubles me. It’s as if men are constantly looking at us, judging us… What do you think?
I definitely agree with you on the quality and the depth of Hoch's work -- it definitely speaks to me more than the work of Haussman, Heartfield, Grosz, etc. But that may be for the mere fact that I'm a woman, a feminist no doubt, and I understand the issues she's bringing to the table. As for the male Dada artists, it wasn't a time in which men were necessarily acknowledging of the negativity of women's underprivileged status, and they were men in their own world, so they didn't necessarily acquire empathy towards women in that time. Just a thought! :)
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