Study Visit
Hannah Hoch
Whitechapel Gallery, London, E1 7QX
9th March 2014
All the images I mention in this blog can be viewed at The Whitechapel Gallery http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/hannah-hch
I was looking forward to attending a
study visit on Sunday 9th March especially as I had to cancel going
to the one at the Saatchi Gallery in February.
However, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the Hannah Hoch show quite
as much I as did, despite having read somewhere that it was the must-go-to show
of the moment. I’m not sure why, especially
as I’d been in a reenactment of The Cabaret Voltaire at Manchester Metropolitan
University, shortly after graduating in 1994 and enjoyed it immensely. I certainly
didn’t see just how interesting she was when I looked up some of her work on the Internet
prior to seeing it at the Whitechapel Gallery.
There are several things that struck me
about Hoch’s work early on in my day.
The first was how resonant her work is
now. Her deep interest in how women are
perceived is so current – the media’s preoccupation with feminine ideals
and the lack of reality in many of the images that woman are faced with is
something that might very well be explored in a show of work produced this week. This makes Hoch’s work incredibly fresh and relevant. I am intrigued by the fact that her work has lately become so important having been somewhat put aside for a time. My mother's Open University History of Art
books (she studied in the 80’s and 90’s) barely mention Hannah Hoch and show no
examples of her work. Even the books entirely
focused on Dadaism and Surrealism fare no better. Hoch
it seems has now been placed in a formidable position amongst her contemporaries.
The other thing that struck me was how
much her work seemed to allude to ideas explored by the psychoanalytical
movement. I think this is hardly
surprising due to her place on the timeline of Western History, and because the Surrealists, well known for their links to
Freudian dream theories, and the Dadaists are closely related although the latter are known to be more
anarchic and political. I was instantly reminded of the Jungian concepts I
recently read about, in a wonderful book called A Very Short Introduction to Carl Jung, of fragmented, un-individuated
personalities especially when looking at images such as Gerhard Hauptman (1919) and The
Father (1920) - which also speak to
me of societies in the same state, so the collages work on a micro and macro
level. The whole process of collage
seems to lend itself wonderfully to an illustration of Jung’s ideas. Or perhaps rather they each tap into
something that was happening to the outer and inner worlds for humanity at the
time.
If it is true that there was a
prolonged period of disruption to how society operated following the industrial
revolution as described by Steven Biddulph below, then this fragmented picture
of a new society makes sense:
“[1]The
Industrial Revolution started in the English Midlands, but it rolled
tsunami-like across the globe. Wherever
it arrived, it took us in one generation from small, rural villages to huge,
industrial towns, and from working together as men women and children (there
was as yet no school) into sharply divided lives. Suddenly everything changed – women were
stuck at home, men went down coal mines, and boys began to fall through the
cracks.” Families, communities became split, fragmented and broken by human development and then wars.
We were told by one of the tutors at
our visit that The Father (1920) explores
a period of time when the men were too frightened to go out at all due to
persecution and violence and so were left behind to hold the baby which is how
the central male figure is depicted. He
is surrounded by leaping, dancing women all at leisure pursuits which remind me
of the images of Third Reich propaganda that we have in our collective
memories; perfect Arian bodies exercising.
There is also a boxer who punches the baby; he has a black eye, stuck on
in the typical collage style and the Father too a glued-on eye - the same side of the face. The violence in society that is wrought upon
the father shows up on the face of the baby too.
The
Father is feminised with a half a women’s
mouth, women’s clothes, legs and shoes. There
is so much about genders being less fixed than society feels comfortable with:
Hock talks about her desire to “blur the firm borders that we human beings,
cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is possible to
us”[2]. The blurring of gender ‘borders’ is typical
of much of Hock’s work and for me is it hard not to relate some of these themes
to descriptions of Jung’s amina and aminus along with the model he devised of
the human psyche.[3]
The delicate, carefully made collages
seem to explore a human psyche that is split, fragmented.
The other thing that I have not been
able to stop thinking about is the montage itself. I had a terrific A ‘level theatre studies
tutor over 20 years ago who taught us about montage and alienation,
estrangement or “verfremdungseffekt” when we were looking at Bertolt
Brecht. Brecht and other artists as well
as states were starting to explore montage; especially in response to the way
states were using film-editing techniques to create powerful messages. What editing (montage) allowed states to do
was create subjective realities in their favour promoting ideals that suited
them - propaganda. Brecht and many other
artists, Hoch included it seems, started doing the same but not to convince people, rather to make them question and even do something. Brecht talks about making people see things
afresh – to alienate them from reality. By making something unfamiliar you can begin see it in a new way and are more likely to
question.
I think this alienation technique is
very much what Hannah Hock is doing too.
By sticking Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn’s face and legs together
with the far more exotic and overtly sexual body of a ‘foreign’ belly dancer in
Hommage a Riza Abasi (1963) the
viewer is forced to question attitudes towards celebrity, femininity,
sexuality, and the role of the media over how women are perceived. One is unlikely to be faced with these
questions so overtly if such a darling of the Hollywood era were not cut up and
re-presented as such.
In another way we are forced to look at
the crying eyes and mouth of a baby which is placed with an adult male’s nose,
forehead, head and ears in the Der Kleine
P (1931) or a crying baby’s mouth within the face of an adult women in Klage (1930). Here a viewer is forced to look at the
emotion of a child and the emotion of an adult afresh. I think these works are extremely powerful
and give a very clear illustration of the child within the adult. We tend to dismiss a child’s cry or at least
undervalue it and we suppress our appreciation of an adults pain but Hoch makes
us look at it afresh by employing this “verfremdungseffect.”
Hoch's youthful collage also is somehow an echo of film, not only because of the
propaganda montage which is literally cutting and pasting moving images, but
because her earlier work which is far more fragmented than her later work,
gives one the sense of the broken fragmented rhythm of black and white film of the era.
The upper level of the Whitechapel
Gallery was filled with later work and again I was struck by the idea of Jung’s
individuation – a coming together of the disparate parts of one psyche, a
calmer more grown up time. Hoch’s work
is less stilted, less jarring, less loud, more serene and very beautiful. I did prefer the earlier work though but I
suspect this is a personal taste. There
is something beguiling about the time in Germany between those wars, which
might seem a strange thing for the daughter of Jew to say given what was
brewing there. But the decadent,
anarchic, rebelliousness of the Dadaists and other modernists is incredibly
compelling.
Finally, I wonder if it is simply a
case of projecting 21st century pop psychology onto the work, which
is what makes it seem so relevant and modern or if Hoch indeed was in fact
ahead of her times. She was working at a
moment in history when Western society seemed to be at the dawn of it’s own
modern consciousness, and my favourite quote from my little Jung book is “there
is no dawning of consciousness without pain” and certainly the first half of
the 20th century was one of intense pain and loss - and perhaps this
is what all forms of modernism may be an expression of.
I
do believe Hoch was ahead of her time. I
was a little blasé and underwhelmed before I went along to the Whitechapel
Gallery, rather naively dismissing collage as something not quite art-worthy no
doubt. But the work is extremely
powerful, delicate, highly original, resonant and extraordinarily relevant
to our lives now.
********
Hannah Hoch (1889-1978) was one of the
Berlin Dada Group and the only female artist included, although I understand
there were other overlooked but important female artists around at the
time. Even Hoch herself may have been
somewhat undervalued by the Dadaists themselves because of her sex. Hoch is a
pioneer of photomontage working during the time of Weimer Republic (1919 – 33)
alongside other Dadaists Max Ersnt, Jean Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Johanness Bauder,
amongst others and especially the German artist Kurt Schwitters whom she was
close to.
After beginning her artistic life in
textiles she started working in fashion magazines where she became acutely
aware of the contrast between images of women in the media and reality. She began to work with cutouts and
photomontage and became involved with the Berlin Dada Group.
Hoch took part in the First International Dada Fair where her
collages where well received. Hoch also
designed backdrops for the Cabaret Voltaire and performed in some events too,
although only rarely.
She was very active up until the Second
World War, during which she kept a very low profile in Germany. After the war she continued to work and
exhibit until her death in 1978. Her
post war work has a very different quality to it but she continued to be
concerned with women and how they are perceived.
The Whitechapel separates Hock’s work
into two sections. The lower floor shows
the period 1912-36, including early textiles, drawings and the beginnings of
her photomontage. Upstairs a small room
contains The Album – an exhibit celebrating Hoch’s scrapbook, a collection of
cuttings.
Further on is work from 1936 up to her death in
1978. Hoch continued to work throughout
her life.
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