The term "collage" is derived from the French word coller, which means "to glue," and was coined by cubist artists Braque and Picasso. The avant-garde assemblage movement began with this pair of artists, who began working with media to develop artistic tableaux around 1910.
Collages are made from a variety of materials, but the majority are made of paper or wood and frequently include cut-and-pasted photos, painted forms, or even 3-dimensional objects. Throughout the twentieth century, as more modern artists began to explore the practice, these mediums became more diverse and experimental.
Collage techniques were first used around the time of the invention of paper in China, around 200 BC. Collage, on the other hand, did not appear until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to use glued paper, with texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Many volumes of the Sanju Rokunin Kashu contain some surviving pieces in the collection of Nishi Hongan-ji.
The collage technique first appeared in medieval Europe in the 13th century. Around the 15th and 16th centuries, gold leaf panels began to be used in Gothic cathedrals. Gemstones and other precious metals were used to embellish religious images, icons, and coats of arms.
Dadaist artists began experimenting with collage in the 1920s, inspired by the avant-garde work of Picasso and Braque. Unlike the Cubists, who preferred still-life arrangements, the Dadaists created collages that included a wide range of iconography, from reinterpreted portraits to fantasy figures.
Raoul Hausmann was a pioneer of the Dada avant-garde art movement. Hausmann's art was a scathing critique of the society in which he lived; he questioned the necessity of war - in particular. Hausmann's use of unconventional art protested wars and, in particular, the conservative values he believed influenced war. His Dada works drew attention to their anti-war message because they were so out of the ordinary. He even used an unconventional art form known as photomontage to accomplish this. Hausmann's techniques enabled him to thrive in the Berlin Dada movement, which was both political and artistic.
The only surviving assemblage that Hausmann produced around 1919-20 is Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist Unserer Zeit), "The Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time)," c. 1920. The piece is made from a hairdresser's wig-making dummy and includes a ruler, a pocket watch mechanism, a typewriter, camera segments, and a crocodile wallet.
Karl Marx was one of Hegel's disciples and critics. Hausmann's sculpture could be interpreted as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose "thoughts" are materially determined by objects that are literally attached to it. Even so, deeper targets in Western culture provide the impetus for this modern masterpiece. Hausmann deconstructs the notion of the head as the seat of reason, an assumption that underpins Europe's fascination with portraiture. He reveals a brain that has been penetrated and is ruled by brute external forces.
The average German, according to Hausmann, "has no more abilities than those which chance has glued on the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty." At the end of World War I, Berlin was a city of maimed veterans and strife: in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht organized the communist Spartacus rising, which was suppressed by far-right Freikorps units; the leaders were murdered. It was a city where Baudelaire's vision of the modern-day artist took on a strong impetus.
Modernists had shattered perception, destroyed the Renaissance pictorial system, and destroyed naturalism before the war, but in Berlin, all of that somehow became more literal. Perhaps German artists were too preoccupied with beer-swilling reality to experiment with abstraction. For them, the fragmentation of art was a measure of the grotesque fragmentation of life brought about by the war.
The title Der Geist unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf alludes to the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Everything is mind, according to Hegel, whose works include Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807). Karl Marx was one of Hegel's disciples and critics. Hausmann's sculpture could be interpreted as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose "thoughts" are materially determined by objects that are attached to it.
This early modern masterpiece's power, however, comes from deeper criticisms of western culture. Hausmann deconstructs the notion of the head as the seat of reason, an assumption that underpins Europe's fascination with portraiture. He exhibits a head that has been penetrated and - under the control of violent outside forces.
Characteristics: Hausmann's crudely carved tailor's dummy head has a fantastically idiotic and depressing appearance, an absence of life that parodies all the great expressive faces of sculpture, from Michelangelo's Moses to Rodin's Thinker.
The objects stuck to the head give it identity only: a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacles case, and a piece of metal, which could be a plate plugging a soldier's damaged skull. If this is a "mechanical head," the prototype for a robotic human race is a crude; early Frankensteinian experiment - the soul and emotions are only represented by the heart-shaped etching on the empty tin cup.
However, Hausmann's pitiful, mutant sculpture has a tragic poetry that makes it exactly what the Dadaists rejected: a timeless masterpiece conveying a fundamental truth about the human condition. It sums up the death of an entire notion of self.
Gisela Perez | 6:48 PM
Monday, February 6, 2023
Berlin, Germany
Artpendix Press
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