Alexey Titarenko

I watched a documentary about Alexey Titarenko which was recommended to me by a photographer who is doing a bit of mentoring for/with me.  I am writing about Titarenko straight away as I was so blown away by his work.  I wanted to buy yet another book but they are over £200 so I will need to start saving up, I think.

He is a Russian photographer now living in New York who began taking photographs when he was 8 years old.  He studied fine art at the Department of Cinematic and Photographic Art at Leningrad's Institute of Culture and is known especially for his work with long exposures, which I am so interested in.  He is heavily influenced by the music of Shostakovitch - I know nothing about classical music but I have liked Shostakovich for a very long time and when I look at Titarenko's pictures I can just imagine hearing it, especially in the series The City of Shadows where grey figures blur into one another and seem to swarm heavily through the streets of St. Petersburg and up the steps of authoritarian looking buildings.

According to Wikipedia he is also influenced by the Dada movement which means so much to me. (when I left drama school the first job I had was a re-enactment of the Dada Cabaret which I think we did at the Contact Theatre in Manchester and I loved being in it, and was delighted to find myself looking at Dada again when I went on a study visit to see the Hannah Hoch exhibition in London earlier this year).  Another influence mentioned is Malevich which I have been to see twice at The Tate Modern and will need to return again to as I went both times with a different child, one of whom kept saying, 'He's scary, Mummy.  I want to go home!" and the other seemed to have been given a dose of very strong coffee as we entered and hurried through in about ten minutes saying, "Look at all the movement in his pictures, Mummy.  They're optical illusions!" Which is why I have not yet written about that gallery visit.

It was very interesting to see in the documentary how Titarenko manipulates his images not only in-camera by using very long exposures and also moving his camera to create a flimsy light effect, but also in the real-life darkroom - just like Lillian Bassman and Wynn Bullock whom I have written about in this blog.  He too uses bleach and solarisation, exposing his images to light as he develops them to add to the ghostly effect he is after.

I was also interested to see him 'hunting' for people and scenes to photograph.  This poor old lady although seemingly oblivious was photographed several times as she wandered through the streets, Titarenko following with his tripod and Hasselblad.  This stalking for subjects is something I have such trouble with myself but his finished photograph was really very beautiful and he seems in such another world as he does it.

He talks about how his photographs communicate all the sorrow and horror of what the Russian people have been through throughout their violent and sometimes horrifically brutal history.  Although he was based mainly in St. Petersburg and the photographs in the film are on the whole taken there he says they represent all of Russia.  He uses long exposure as he is trying to capture so much of Russian history as well as present in one photograph or image and this process of allowing time to be absorbed slowly onto the film rather than a fraction of a moment creates some very powerful art.

Titarenko also discusses how he came to realise that you could do things with photography that communicated something immensely powerful and creative, a reality that is transformed in some way, rather than just click and make an accurate representation of the scene.  This was such a good thing for me to hear at this particular moment when I am feeling full of doubts and horribly exposed!

I really want to know more about his work.  I have to say I felt emotional but also excited seeing it.  Not only are his photographs incredibly moving and evocative, it is also an immensely strong indication for me to stick with where I'm going - it's worth pursuing and persevering.  But perhaps I have quite a long way to go!

Links
Website
Wikipedia
The ASC: Streetwise blog (fantastic essay)

Gallery Visit: Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern, 21st May 2014

I am interested in co-incidences and synchronicity: in how and why we project our inner world onto our outer world and the how we make sense of, or try to fathom, those two positions, as well as the interplay and tensions between our conscious and unconscious minds. 

Is it a co-incidence that I keep going to see work by people who work with the idea of montage, with collage or simply cutting out and pasting shapes, physically and by placing different styles and media together? 

I did not notice the date when I set out on the 21^st of May.  However, it was in fact my late father’s birthday and he would very much have enjoyed visiting the exhibition with me despite his painful feet and inability to stand for very long. 

I mention my father because his death seems to have been the trigger for the beginning of my photographic odyssey.  Shortly before he died he mentioned how much he admired a photograph I took, and which was framed for me by my ex-husband.  The night he died, unbeknownst to me at the time, I dreamed that that photograph was no longer on the wall and in the dream the sense of its absence was overwhelmingly troubling to me.  Utter nothingness where once there was something. The next day I rang the police when I could not get hold of my father and they discovered that he had died in quite strange circumstances less than 24 hours previously – the night I had had my very powerful dream.

Photography, my father’s death and the new direction I have taken in life are all in my mind connected. 

What is more, Richard Hamilton’s work spans from the late 40s to 2011.  My father was born in 1939 and died in 2011. Because Hamilton’s work can, I think, be read as a ‘social documentary’ of those years, as a commentary on British preoccupations, mood and changing attitudes, it seems intrinsically connected to the world in which my father lived.

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Although Hamilton is not primarily a photographer, he was interested in and utilized photography in his work, not only in preparatory work but also as a medium in itself.  There are lots of photographic works in the exhibition, which contains over 200 altogether, and also includes installation, painting, print, film and sculpture.  I tend to focus on installation in this written work.

Hamilton was born in 1922 and died in 2011.  He was English but more than any other British artist, ‘associated with international colleagues’[1], ‘a champion of Marcel Duchamp in the post-war era, he befriended and collaborated with American and European artists from Roy Lichtenstein to Dieter Roth.’[2]  Hamilton studied at Slade following a succession of jobs in advertising, design and production after leaving school at 14.

I know virtually nothing about Pop Art (to be honest I’m beginning to comprehend that I know virtually nothing at all and have a growing awareness of a hideous sense of ignorance which with everything I learn becomes grows greater and can’t possibly be overcome sufficiently in the remaining 30, maybe 40 years if I’m lucky, that I have left – it’s annoying; my fractured un-education is annoying.) Hamilton is, I have read, understood to be the founding father of this movement – I think I might have assumed it was Warhol but perhaps he is merely the most populist of the pop artists.

There is an enormous body of work in the exhibition – it really is quite prolific - so I will discuss a small selection of those that I found most interesting here:

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different and appealing? 1956, which was a collage to be used in the catalogue representing an installation called, The ‘fun house’, one of twelve in the This is tomorrow exhibition held at the Whitechapel gallery as part of a collective, referred to as ‘the now infamous icon of Pop Art’[3](although I have struggled to discover why infamous), instantly reminded me of Hoch’s work (again!) which I’d seen at the Whitechapel a few months ago.

The collage for me contains a great deal of humour with its pastiche of Adam and Eve, and contains a number of contemporary aspirational objects such as a vacuum cleaner, tape player, television, and a tinned ham (I remember eating that!).  I’m not sure if the ham is meant to indicate what I see as the ‘ theatrical hamming’ physicality of the couple but if so, I can’t help reading a kind of ridicule of all the very materialistic desires of modern ‘keeping-up-with the-Jones’ habits and sentimentalities.

“Like Hamilton’s exhibition strategy, the image was complied from a tabulated list of image requirements…”[4] which served to outline and determine a basic foundation for Pop Art itself: Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.

Hamilton worked alongside artist, John McHale and architect John Voelcker.  “Their installation consisted of an a-symmetrical, dramatically angled structure, the ‘Fun house’, covered with an over-sized image of Marilyn Monroe which, along with a large scale replica bottle of Guinness, mimicked the monumental scale of city hoarding and cinema advertising, although an aesthetic tension was set up between these mass –culture images and the mass-consumption poster of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers hung on the wall as a work of Art”[5].  I have to say when I first returned to England, aged 16 (having been born in the UK but emigrated to South Africa aged 6 weeks) I was struck by the visual bombardment of advertising in London.  It had a definite impact on me and contributed to the sense of cultural shock I experienced for some years.  Although I returned in the 80s and not in the 50s, that cultural trend probably began with such alacrity three decades earlier and Hamilton and his collaborators’ commentary on it resonates profoundly with me.

I am also struck by the irony of the title, which in retrospect becomes a joke – This is in fact yesteryear but also a comment on the future impact of materialism.

There was a jukebox playing music from the era which was incredibly evocative.  I do think that sound-scapes and music in a gallery is an immensely powerful means of communicating and creating a mood.  It harks back to my experience in theatre and I’m tentatively and perhaps a little bashfully drawn to the idea of creating art that is almost a 'production' of sorts.  I know this is not right for all art and think often such a collage of aural, visual, and spatial sensations is likely to be overwhelming and undermining of the individual aspects in many cases – but for me I think it might be something to think about as my appreciation of what is possible grows.

The Critics Laugh, 1968 is not covered in the catalogue book a great deal which means I must try to make sense of it alone.  The work encompasses several photographs, actual items, design drawings and and an advertisement and it really struck a chord with me.  Hamilton’s work is intrinsically tied up in modern design and engineering.  He seemed obsessively interested in the detail of design and this preoccupation runs throughout the exhibition.  I suppose what stood out for me with this work in particular is the humour and Surrealist nature of it.  The utterly ridiculous fake set of false teeth (a memento his son bought back from a seaside holiday) is attached to the handle of a Braun toothbrush.  Hamilton always admired Braun and did a lot of related work around the design of Braun items.  To me Braun has always been around in the background of existence I suppose but I’ve only ever seen it as a logo on functional and quotidian objects in the home.  Hamilton sees the beauty of design but by attaching it to the teeth creates an hilarious and bizarre object that has some sort of feedback loop on itself – a toothbrush that shakes and rattles a set of false teeth.  There is something about the ridiculousness of human sexuality here which made me laugh out loud when I watched the very funny advert, a spoof of overtly sexualized advertising which has been so prominent in our media.  I thought this was one of the highlights of the whole exhibition but perhaps that is because I have an infantile sense of humour.  I do, however, like the Surrealism – sex, death, inner worlds colliding in fantasy and dreams with outer worlds.  And humour is immensely powerful.

Treatment Rooms 1984 is another installation but one that is very different in tone and temperament to the one discussed earlier. Although there is an innate criticism about commercialism and materialism in This is tomorrow, there is also a sense of optimism and hope.  This is utterly gone by the time Hamilton created Treatment Room for the Arts Council Group exhibition titled Four Rooms in 1984.  There is an Orwellian sense of despair and oppression in the austere, unhappy rooms.  Hamilton “found the spirit of the 80s to be one of contrasting ‘depression’, and determined his room would be ‘inspired by the bleak, disinterested, seedily clinical style of the establishment institution”[6].

In one of the rooms there is a hospital bed/table and a less than comfortable looking blanket strewn upon it, just underneath a TV monitor, which plays silent footage of one of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Political party Broadcasts.  ‘The installation dealt with the workings of power through surveillance (the monitor reminding the viewer of CCTV cameras in Public spaces) and indoctrination (the patient cured by the image of the leader”[7].  What I am struck by is the foretelling and warning about the growth of mass surveillance, and the critique of what that might do to individuals in society, possibly robbing them of something precious and fundamental to life.  Whilst the accompanying literature sardonically talks of indoctrination ‘healing’ the patient I of course read the image as one where the patient is in fact killed off – empty hospitable beds with crumpled bedding seem symbolic of someone having been removed.  Nothingness where once there was something.

I wonder what my father would have made of this installation – an avid Thatcher supporter and defender. 

Finally, I was struck by Lobby, 1988, another installation (seems I like such things) which is a work inspired by a postcard Hamilton owned of the German hotel lobby.  It is a room: at the back of the room covering the entire wall is a painting of the postcard, containing a pillar, which is covered floor to ceiling in mirror.  Then the lobby is recreated in actuality in the room, a pillar covered from floor to ceiling in mirror.  A set of stairs in the postcard is also there, although in the real room you’re standing in, the stairs of course lead nowhere.  Dotted about the room are smaller paintings of the lobby plus drawings.  The carpet in the painting is on the floor of the actual recreated lobby.

Even though the sense created by Lobby is one of loneliness, isolation, disorientation and detachment I found it a magical work.  You are able to step into and walk around the artwork and it reminded me of Broadway Danny Rose, a Woody Allen film where one of the characters steps out of the film – reality and fantasy merge.  Here the same thing happens only the other way round, and the fantasy is a pretty miserable one at that.  The mirror maintains a sense of never-ending blurring between the two dimensions and this blurring is something that interests me a great deal.  I was really quite over-awed by this particular work.

I must end otherwise this may be the longest Gallery Visit write up ever, but wanted to say there were so many works which I have not had time to mention here which I found interesting and compelling.  I am not sure what my father would have made of Hamilton’s view of the world – perhaps too left wing and bleak for him, a bleak, despite his profession as a comic, but right wing individual.  He would have certainly appreciated the intellect, Hamilton’s immense knowledge and broad use of media.  While some of the work did not immediately draw me in, there was much that did, and I have found his use of so many different styles and media inspirational and fantastic to see.

I think there was so much unconscious ‘stuff’ about my decision to visit the Tate on the 21^st, and I think it will take me a while to think about and make sense of it.  But I am very pleased I went because I sense I am beginning to appreciate just how much of an impact art can have, and in a way that I haven’t done before.

Hamilton’s relationship with Surrealism and then pop art suggest to me that he was dealing with the tension between our inner and outer worlds, connections, projections and the various levels of reality we humans must contend with as we navigate through life both as individuals and in terms of the state.  I think I will be considering some of what I picked up on during this visit for a good while to come.

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[1] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Introduction.

[2] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Introduction.

[3] Page 73, Richard Hamilton catalogue, Published by Tate Modern Publishing, 2014 originated by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and TF Editores, Madrid.

[4] Page 73, Richard Hamilton catalogue, Published by Tate Modern Publishing, 2014 originated by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and TF Editores, Madrid.

[5] Page 73, Richard Hamilton catalogue, Published by Tate Modern Publishing, 2014 originated by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and TF Editores, Madrid.

[6] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Room 12.

[7] Richard Hamilton, 2014 Tate Modern exhibition accompanying handout – Room 12.

William S Burroughs, Andy Warhol & David Lynch - The Photographer's Gallery, Ramillies Street, London

www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Today I visited the Photographer's gallery in London to see their current exhibition of three well known artists known for non-photographic art, as well as writing and film making.

  
Andy Warhol: Photographs 1976 to 1987 - Famous for far longer than a mere 15 minutes due to his iconic prints which sell for vast sums, for questioning the idea of what art should be so profoundly and successfully, his bohemian lifestyle and legendary nightclub, The Factory, Warhol (USA 1928-1987) was a prolific photographer who took '36 frames per day' from the 70s onwards.  This exhibition celebrates some of the scenes he captured from the area around where he lived, people he knew and spent time with, along with alarming events such as a car crash which took place in the streets directly in front of his apartment.  


There are included a series of stitched photographs which were the most interesting for me as they echo some of the work for which Warhol is best known.  'Warhol’s interest in serial and repeated imagery, seen throughout his work, is brought to play though his striking series of "stitched" photographs'1. 


I found it difficult to connect with many of the photographs in this collection but the stitched photographs were compelling.  Serial images do something strange – perhaps raise the status of the moment or scene depicted by reiterating it again and again and again.  Very bizarrely I had commented only last night on some work on Flickr by someone who had used this technique of repeating a single image – saying I thought the photo worked well in a grid, although I have to be honest I don’t really know why I liked it.  Is it because the habit of presenting this way is familiar due to Warhol’s success having made it somewhat ubiquitous?  Or perhaps a very clear and strong pattern creates a rhythm which is comfortable for a sentient being with a regular heart beat, or is it that the repetition makes us feel safe as it offers us structure – something we humans seem to respond well to, especially in a world that lacks coherent and cohesive internal structures?  I really don’t know the answer but suspect much has been written (and not read about by me!) about why Warhol’s use of serial images has become so iconic, sought after and copied.

Apart from the stitched photographs, the work felt to me in the main like something that feeds into his prints rather than standing alone in its own right - am I allowed to say that?  I don’t think this understanding in any way diminishes the work and I am reminded of the scrapbooks of Hannah Hoch (my previous gallery visit), which were so important to her lifelong project of making art.


Nevertheless I was immediately more drawn in by Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs on the floor above.   Burroughs (1914-1997) is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20^th century most famous for his book Naked Lunch amongst others.

“Burroughs’ photographs, striking in their self containment, lack any reference to other practitioners or genres2” were presented beautifully mounted in sturdy frames, which was markedly different to the Warhol pictures.  The latter seemed to be far less carefully mounted.  One of the Burroughs’ prints was tiny and only a couple of inches across and yet placed in a relatively large, expensive and finely crafted mount – this made me really think about how work is presented because the Burroughs’ work seemed much less ‘grubby’ to me than Warhol’s photographs – although why that should be given that he was an addict who lived quite a grubby existence most of his adult life, and was prosecuted for manslaughter after killing his second wife, I am not entirely sure.


What really fascinated me was that although it says Burroughs’ work lacks any reference to other practitioners or genres, by some sort of weird quirk of synchronicity I found myself looking at and reading about collage and cut-up work again just two weeks after seeing the Hoch show.  Burroughs used a similar technique in his written work, notably The Nova Trilogy (1961-64) – cutting up a story and creating a new one by sticking it back together in a different order.

“Cutting images from different works, Burroughs arranges and assembles photographs and objects to conceive new connections and meanings. In his more complex collages his assemblies are photographed and printed, then reassembled and photographed again and again, creating a near-infinity of images. For him these pieces functioned as a form of time travel, ones in which the camera was used to literally cut pieces from the continuum to then be repositioned and disseminated.”3

It seems that the artists I (through no concious planning) am becoming more familiar with, from the modernist to the post modern, are ones that explore a deeply fragmented world, and find ways and means of expressing the splintered existence we find ourselves in very graphically by literally cutting out and pasting and recreating.

Finally on the top floor was David Lynch: The Factory of Photographs (b. 1946, USA).  As soon as you enter you know you’re in Lynch territory because there is a sound-scape installation which feels like it might at any minute evolve into Falling, the theme song from Twin Peaks, Lynch’s TV serial which people of my generation were so hooked on back in the 80s.  For anyone interested in filmaking and acting as I was, David Lynch was a kind of demi-god.  Blue Velvet, the Elephant Man and Eraserhead (the last of which I must admit was just too much for me at the time) were all held in high esteem by my circle of friends.  So the familiar dark but intoxicatng themes were instantly recognisable and even welcoming.

Lynch’s photographs are of factories that are no longer in use from various locations around the world: London, New York, New Jersey, Germany and Poland.  They are very dark – I mean literally dark - as you might imagine being by David Lynch. Like an early scene from Blue Velvet where the camera emerges from beneath the dirt in the lawn, these photographs seem to prod and pry right into the dirt that is piling up in the carcasses of these ‘haunting cathedrals of a bygone industrial era slowly being taken over by nature4’.  

The industrial revolution changed the course of the human story profoundly and was a seismic catalyst for much that occurred in the following decades and century.5  These photographs seem to be recording and exploring the death of that age.  Nature has indeed begun to take over but humanity will not, cannot, should not even return to what it was prior to that moment in history and Lynch for me seems to be dealing with something of the horrors, perhaps in the ghosts we are leaving behind in buildings that have yet to be transformed into trendy housing and office space.  We have moved on to pastures new as ever with the digital revolution but the creeping, infallible nature is never far behind and will in the end win.

 

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1.The Photographer’s Gallery publicity leaflet that accompanies theexhibition.

2. The Photographer’s Gallery publicity leaflet that accompanies the exhibition.

3. Quote taken from the teaching guide notes supplied by The Photographer’s Gallery.

4. The Photographer’s Gallery publicity leaflet that accompanies the exhibition.

5. See Hannah Hoch gallery visit paragraph on Industrial Revolution

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%)