Reflection - A4

"His rooms are inner landscapes, incongruous yet skilfully constructed, illogical as dreams and pure like gems.  It is as if the silver gelatin process turned the artist's practice into a branch of geology that delves into his psyche like a mine, searching for meaning by taking core samples of its successive layers, sediments and fossils.  Reaching into the twilight of consciousness where memories amass and dreams are born - the murky place that lies at the centre of the earth, of life, of the human being."

Taken from the introduction of Roger Ballan's Asylum of the Birds, written by Didi Bozzine

Wow - that sentence is just too exciting for me... I love everything about it and I now feel compelled to write down what I have been thinking about all day.

This morning as I was packing away a huge pile of clothes that had been waiting in the laundry basket for days - I'm sure I only just did this chore but it is never ending - it occurred to me that the work I have been doing, in particular the work from Assignments 2 & 3, is heading in a definite direction which may (or may not) culminate in Assignment 5.  I certainly felt that some, if not all, of Assignment 3's images were unformed, or unfinished.  Nevertheless they are a development from images in A2 and related somehow to much of the work I am looking at and thinking about.  For me that work of mine is an expression of experience that is difficult to be concise about although I wrote in A2:

 "These images are an expression of where I have been and acceptance of where I am now.  I hope there is keening, death, love, sex, innocence, isolation and aging in them.  There should also be fear of the unknown but an acceptance of that fear, excitement, celebration and play.  For me these are the words that describe life so far and in particular pertain to events of the last two, possibly three years."

I also thought this morning of all the work of other photographers that I have been looking at over the last few months and very definitely the work I'm focusing on lately - many of which are trying to express something from our unconscious worlds. 

One of the most important books I read last year, and I read a lot then, was Jung - A Very Short Introduction by Anthony Stevens which I have no doubt mentioned here before, if not several times.  (I should probably try to find the equivalent of a long introduction but Steven's book was excellent and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to know about Jung and his ideas - have I said that before? I can be quite repetitive when there is something I feel strongly about.) 

When I read that book I was absolutely taken with it and with Jung, who despite being a cheating bastard (sorry - it's just too hard not to spit like a viper when I say that), wrote about life in way that made a great deal of sense to me.  We must take our inner worlds seriously, they are key to understanding who we are, growing and living a full life. The spiritual or non-material, illogical and inexplicable world is as valuable and important as its opposite.  We must listen to our fantasies - and it we don't our dreams will make us.  And if not those, then mental illness will instead. Our psyche will make us hear.

I had been intrigued by archetypes ever since learning about them when I was doing my A'levels, now over two decades ago.  And so learning about them in more detail was fascinating.  

The idea of a 'shadow', of anima and animus, of life having steps which we needed to take in order to reach the next phase,  rites of passage and individuation all made so much sense to me.  I was also extremely interested in his value of fantasy, of fairy-tales and stories, and was encouraged by what I read to write a bizarre and peculiar fantasy of my own that expressed something of what I'd experienced.  Exploring what I was going through by writing my strange gown-up fairy tale was incredibly cathartic and even if nothing else comes of reading that book, I will always be grateful for that story which I would not have written had I not downloaded Jung  - A Very Short Introduction.

I do, however, think there is more to come out it, along with many of the other books and artists I've been looking at.  The work I am most interested in at the moment is very much about our inner worlds, about how that can be expressed.  

There is also something in Jung's work  - and I think this is part of the synchronicity story - about how we recreate our inner worlds in our material world.  So, I noticed at one point in my life that everyone in my family lived in homes that had incredibly precarious stairs or balconies or both, which seemed an accurate reflection of something very particular to our family.  The thing is we don't notice these things that we live with, even though they tell us a story about what's happening beneath the surface.  Well, 'beneath the surface' is probably the wrong expression and for now I am not sure what the right words are. But art, stories, and songs manage to find a way to illuminate those stories.  There are so many artists from every sphere looking at this and I think I have just begun to understand that this is what a lot of art is doing - even when it's not entirely obvious.   So some art is more obviously an expression of our inner worlds but I'm not sure the less obvious, less surreal,  stuff isn't also an expression of something spiritual and 'other -worldliness'.  Not sure I'm making much sense now.  Not sure how any of this rather meandering post fits into things, and I think I am missing bits in my mind but...

Anyway, I think the work going forward has to be a development from what I have done so far.  I'm not sure at the moment how to approach A4 or ensure I move forward but I hope it will come to me - and obviously the images will in part be dictated by assignment parameters.   I also hope I will be brave enough to do what ever it is  - by that I mean create a set if that's what I'm after or find the right location or go to it.  It may be that those things aren't what ever being brave means but I have this sense in me that says - how do people allow themselves to do that? to create that? to give themselves permission?

Didi Bozzine's sentence above - is, it goes without saying, beautifully written - but it also about as wonderful a sentence as I could possibly find. Geology and consciousness, dreams and being human - it's so much of what I love and am interested in.  I really hope I can continue to get closer to expressing something of that from within me in my next assignments.

Gallery Visit Whitechapel Hannah Hoch

Study Visit

Hannah Hoch

Whitechapel Gallery, London, E1 7QX

9^th 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 9^th 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 21^st 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 20^th 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.

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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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[1] The New Manhood: 20^th Anniversary Edition, Steve Biddulph, © Stephen Biddulp and Shaaron Biddulp, Finch Publishing Sydney, Kindle, Loc 263 of 4094 (6%).

[2] Hannah Hoch, Whitechapel Gallery & Prestel, 2014, ©Whitechapel Gallery, page 140

[3] Jung: A Very Short Introduction, Anthony Stevens, 1994, © Anthony Stevens, Oxford Press, 2001 edition, Kindle page 46 of 159 (26%)