Fashion Show

Dada
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. 

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The Sweet One

Hannah Hoch
Hannah Höch. The Sweet One (Die Susse). 1929.
Collage, a technique now frequently seen on popular social media like Tumblr, had its origins in Germany after World War I. Hannah Höch, among other Dadaists, developed techniques of collage and photomontage as a response to the instability of the Weimar years. In Germany after the Great War, life restored and soldiers returned home to their wives, but there was no joy—streets were filled with crimes and senseless gunfights. Germans felt the humiliation of losing the war and suddenly faced six thousand millions of reparations that had to be squeezed out of their pockets. Post-war confusion haunted every German’s mind, including the avant-garde artists who chose to attack all established institutions, the only way they thought would better the society.

Hannah Höch’s photomontages depicted the turbulence and violence of the era with reassembled pieces and expressive watercolor backgrounds, but above all, she addressed the experience of the modern woman. Her longtime companion and fellow Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, despite his revolutionary “feminist” theories, was psychologically violent to Höch during their relationship. In The Sweet One (Die Susse), the distortions of the female body express Höch’s struggle to establish her identity in her relationship as well as in a society that called for the “new woman.” She took images of beautiful and subservient women from newspapers and cut them up, then recombined them to show their true fragmented, powerless state. 

By violating the integrity of the body, Höch criticized society for the perception of women as literally the sum of their parts. Created in 1929, The Sweet One was a product of “The Golden Years” in Germany. In the late 20s, the price of the war had gradually faded beneath the surface of prosperity. Germans, aware that this artificial abundance wouldn’t last for long, celebrated their overdue peace with excessive spending. As nightlife flourished, women enjoyed more sexual liberation than in past decades of restrictive governance, but also became increasingly objectified by men. Hannah Höch promoted a artistic revolution in body representation and provoked a question that is still relevant today, whether female identity can exist independently of the male gaze.

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Rebellious Soul: Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany

Cut with the dada kitchen knife through the last weimar beer-belly cultural epoch in germany
Rebellious Soul
A Walk on the Wild Side
Curated by Leo Yuan


Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919
Nihilistic. Destructive. Bolshevism. Even today, people often use these kind of words to describe Dadaism. (Coincidently, these were also the words people usually used to malign anything new and unexpected, anything that reflected the slightest defiance of the status quo). Emerging after the First Word War, Dada was one of many artistic, literal, and philosophical movements in response to this European cataclysm. Artists felt necessary to, or at least try to, account for this annihilation of civilization.

Despite some parallel branches in Eastern Europe after October Revolution, Dadaism had nothing to do with Bolshevism. It was merely an radical reaction in the form of somewhat Western bourgeois ideas. It almost sounds like a horseplay when you hear stories like, "Dada came from a meeting where a knife stuck into a French-German dictionary, pointing at dada, a French word for hobbyhorse," and "Duchamp embellished Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa with a moustache." And it was indeed the original purpose of this movement – to mock and laugh at the world where "everything works fine, but people don't anymore" (Hugo Ball).

But Dada was something more than occasional horseplay. It reflected the anxiety and absurdity of the beginning of a mass-produced culture and adopted a skeptical view towards all big, political words and promising phrases. It was a revolt, as Ruhrberg puts, "a revolt of vitality against ossification, of liberty against doctrine, of the irrational against the 'reason' of political and war speculators, a despairing attempt to survive destructiveness by destroying." In Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, the chaotic composition, and the use of photomontage, bring together different pieces of life and society, but not in a logical way, instead, like an exploding grenade.

And what we do to a exploding grenade? Dadas had an answer for us: just kick it away.

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