“Cut_with_the_Kitchen_Knife_Through_the_First_Epoch_of_the_Weimar_Beer-Belly_Culture”_vs._“What_Makes_Today's_Homes_so_Different_so_Appealing_”

“Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture” vs. “What Makes Today’s Homes so Different so Appealing'” Society is strange. We all know this. Since the beginning of time the way people interact as a whole society can be very unusual and many artists have picked up on this fact. Two examples would be Hannah Hoch and Richard Hamilton. They both took peculiar aspects of the society they lived in and portrayed them using photomontage in the works “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture” 1919, and “What Makes Today’s Homes so Different so Appealing'”, 1956. Hannah Hoch was part of the Dada movement, which reacted to the horrors of WWI and focused on the absurdity surrounded around that, while Richard Hamilton was part of the pre-pop movement, which focused on mass consumerism. Both found society a bit off the wall in respect to those aspects and wanted to send a message through their art about it. Dada was an absurd art movement. The effects that WWI had on society were unbelievable to the Dadaists. The new technology if the era led to a war nobody had ever seen before. Gases, airplanes, new guns, ect. all led to devastating amounts of casualties and wounded people including a great number of civilians. These horrors of war brought about by the industrial revolution left the Dadaists questioning “the establishment”. If all the things they are teaching and saying lead to this sort of destruction, how could it be anything but nonsense' They felt that Europe was morally bankrupt and the way they wanted to convey this message was to make ‘anti-art”. The structure of society was clearly faulted to them, therefore so was their idea of art. That is why in 1916 in Zurich the Dada movement started and soon spread across Europe. Incorporated in this anti-art movements was a new technique called the photomontage. Photomontage “uses cut-up photographs, usually from newspapers, magazines, or other printed sources, which are severed from their original context and juxtaposed with other images, text, and graphic elements, leaving the joins visible.”(answers.com). In Hannah Hoch’s “Cut With a Kitchen Knife” she uses this photomontage technique to highlight the absurdities of society. The juxtaposition of images she cut from magazines and newspaper alone provides an absurd composition, but when you really examine what the images are is when the piece really gets strange. Many of the people either do not have heads or are twisted around, there is a giant bug on a forehead of a man, there is a repeating wheel type shape, which probably refers to machinery in the modern world at the time, and there are many other odd images interacting with each other in this piece. By using images that are mass produced and are commonly found by most members of society, and creating such a bizarre composition with them is her reaction to the bizarre way that “the establishment” took the rules of the modern world and created this war out of it which in turn created many more problems for many people. IF they can create madness out why can’t she do the same with her art' Using the technique of photomontage that Hannah Hoch help develop, Richard Hamilton created a piece thirty-six years later also commenting on the absurdities of society. In “What Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing'” he is focusing on how ridiculous mass consumerism was in the 1950’s. Crammed into this tiny living room space of the typical British home during that time, are loads of mass produced objects that came from modern technology. The Jazz Singer billboard advertising the first talking movie, The new vacuum cleaner that reaches farther than the others, the television, the canned ham, the stereo, ect. are all juxtaposed in a manner to emphasize the irrationality of not only the products themselves, but of the way they are advertised to us. They want us to believe that owning these products will lead to this great and fabulous lifestyle, hence the “ideal” couple in the room. If one thinks rationally about it, do you really think eating canned ham is going to make you a glamorous playboy model' I think not; and that is what Richard Hamilton is trying to say. He’s steaming from the groundwork that Hannah Hoch and the other Dadaist did with their absurd views of the strange way society function in the early 1900’s and is doing the same thing, only now the absurdities are different. There will always be something in society that is not quite sane. In a way it is the artists job to show this to the world. Both Hannah Hoch and Richard Hamilton did this in a pretty provactive way by using photomantage and both were very successful at poking fun almost at society and the wacky things people become used to. That is the reason I choose these peies to talk to about. In my everyday life I am constantly witnessing absolute ridiculous things that people call normal, the most recently probably being the “Black Friday” phenomeon. The last place I’d want to be at 5 am is in a mall with millions of people. I think that these artists would probably share this same view and that is why I liked their work in the first place. Bibliography Answers.com, http://www.answers.com/topic/photomontage Kleiner, Fred, Mamiya, Christin, ‘Gardner’s Art Through the Ages the Western Perspective, 12th edition’, Thomson Wadsworth, 2006 Meggs, Purvis, ‘Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 4th edition’, John Wiley & Sons, 2006