My Kid Could Paint That

Picabia, DAME!, 1920

Hannah Höch, Fashion Show, 1925

If Hannah Hoch lived in 2014, I would imagine her art would look pretty much the same as it did during her lifetime from 1889 to 1978. She thrived under the influences of Dada in Germany during (and after) World War I. As a woman, her perspective on Dada was different than that of the hyper-political George Grosz or Marcel Duchamp. In German society, and even within Dada, Hoch faced discrimination due to her gender. For the first time, women’s culture was put in the limelight with the emergence of the fashion industry and mass media aimed at women’s beauty standards. Having worked for a fashion magazine under the Ullstein Verlag publishing company in Berlin, Hoch new firsthand the impact the fashion and advertising industry had on society, and she hated it. Her art was inspired by an acerbic disproval of the fashion industry and society’s obsession with women’s beauty. Rather than sit at a vanity pondering over an assortment of creams like the archetypal woman of the time, Hoch turned to Dada to criticize society and express her views of women’s liberation. Hoch’s rejection of media’s portrayal of women led her to create art that combined different media to satirize the values that women seemed to venerate.

Hoch used an art form called photomontage for most of her work. She popularized the method and it easily complimented her dada style. Photomontage involves piecing together different parts of photographs to make seamless illusions. In Fashion Show, which Hoch created in 1925, the main focus is the three female forms in a line in the center of the canvas. Each form is dressed exactly alike, however where a face should be, instead are pieces of different faces molded together. The “faces” are disturbing at best, with parts of mouth, distorted eyes, and mismatched expressions. And the name, Fashion Show, could not be any more spot-on.

I said I imagined Hoch’s art would look the same in the modern times as it did 80 years ago, and here’s why: Between Photoshop scandals, ridiculous fashion trends, and every pretentious fashion blog out there, the fashion industry is just as distorted and absurd as it was in Hoch’s time. The trends have changed, as well as the designers, but the monotony and corruption remain the same. 

Raoul Hausmann, Dada Cino, 1920

"What we are celebrating is at once a buffoonery and a requiem mass..." - Hugo Ball

Anti-war, anti-bourgeoisie, anti-establishment...anti-practically anything, Dada emerged during WWI. Its medium? Everything. Starting in Zurich, Switzerland, the movement spread to Berlin, Paris, and New York. Dadaists played with language, music, and visual art. Manifestos were written, proclaiming the aims of the movement - and calling the Impressionists "puddingheads." 

Cut-and-paste collages became the primary medium for the Dadaists. However, the critique of consumerism and capitalist society was achieved through furniture and sculpture as well. Artists would dig through the trash for discarded cigarette boxes and unused pieces of wood. Even a bicycle wheel was used. They searched for something new, something that would capture the human spirit better than the previous generation's attempts.

Bored and frustrated with academic art, indignant at society's apathy towards the war, and in search of something so counterculture society would love to hate it, Dadaists approached art in an entirely different way than previous movements. They didn't care if their art was rejected or ridiculed. They preferred that over conforming to artistic norms.