Gears, Clocks, Pipes, and Urinals: Art as the Psyche

          The generation of artists that were making art during the beginning of the 20^th century saw many drastic changes in society. The machine-like nature of modern life led to the machine-like nature of the first World War. The basis of this new oil and blood-soaked life caused several strong reactions in the art and general academic worlds. New theories about what was, and what should be abounded. Among this furore of new ideas, two artistic movements captured aspects of modernity in completely novel ways. Dadaism and Surrealism, while aesthetically different, share many commonalities, and are rather similar, even in their differences.

          As if a magazine had exploded and cutout images and words had floated down onto a canvas, Hannah Hoch's Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany first appears to be an eclectic photomontage that defies everything that art had traditionally been.¹ Rational explanation seems to fail this work as the bits of this and that seem to share little obvious relationships. In the top center of the frame a large cog sits beneath a picture of a row of buildings, a dancing couple, two letters “nf”, a man's head pasted onto a woman in a checkered bag dress. The cog overlaps and is overlapped by bits of people, machinery, elephants and things less identifiable. One might stare at this work for ages, and without a complete mastery of the culture and people contemporary to that age, one might never be able to identify the objects that make up the composition. Even when one is able to name the object, like “artist Kathe Kollwitz's head float[ing] above a dancer's body”, no rational reason as to why the elements were so composed might ever be forthcoming.²