Messing with Montage

Hannah Höch is a German born Dada artist whose photo montage is some of the best I’ve seen. I reflected on being a woman in the 1920’s and her amazing work. I found a quote from Hugo Ball saying ‘For us, art is not an end itself...but and opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in’. I liked that. However while reading about Hannah and the Dadaist I found it annoying that such free thinkers still expected Hannah to make the refreshments at their meetings. Hans Richter described Hoch’s contribution to the Dada movement as the “sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.”

Hannah’s work commonly combine’s male and female traits into one unified being. During this era "mannish women were both celebrated and castigated for breaking down traditional gender roles." Her androgynous characters may also have been related to her bisexuality and attraction to women. Many of her pieces challenge mass culture within the beauty industry, at the time gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Many of her political works from the Dada period supported women's liberation with social and political revolution. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973. Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination and the war.

Below are some of my experiment’s inspired by Höch. I got a bit carried away playing with these paper German dolls! I had a go at my own bit of photo montage and I got a book called The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Age by Silke Krohn. I think Hannah would have loved this book!

 This is my first real attempt at a montage. I really found the process cathartic.