WEBVTT

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(jazz music)

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Voiceover: This amazing photo montage

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is by German artist Hannah Hoch
and it's from 1919 to about 1920

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and it has an extremely long title.

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Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through

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the Last Weimar Beer-Belly
Cultural Epoch of Germany.

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It was displayed in First
International Dada Fair.

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Voiceover: 1919-1920, that was
a really pretty frought moment.

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What was going on?

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Voiceover: Political chaos.

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Voiceover: Okay, she seems
to have captured that.

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Voiceover: She has captured it (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: What kind of political chaos?

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Voiceover: Well, the government has been

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completely changed after World War I.

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There's a lot of conflict
between the Spartacists,

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which is the far left wing communist,

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some of which of those
people are featured in this.

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There are conflicts between
those groups and the [fry court].

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The [fry court] was
encouraged to attack people

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by members of the government.

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There are all these clashes and a
lot of people end up getting arrested

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and some people end up getting killed

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and that's just one particular moment.

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That's January of 1919, all
of that fighting happens.

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Voiceover: All this fragmentation
is just beautifully captured here.

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The contrast from the kind of long war,

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which would have really
focused the country's attention

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and then this complete breakdown.

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The contrast is just stunning.

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Voiceover: It's really a sort
of tabula rosa here (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: That's a very important point.

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There's a lot of little
pieces that are left over.

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That's exactly what Hoch
is working with here.

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All the political players
(crosstalk) between them.

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If you think about the title,
Cut with the Kitchen Knife,

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think about the idea of
cutting things literally.

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That works for the photo montage
and she's sort of cutting

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a swath through all this and
piecing things back together

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in ways that make sense to her.

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Focusing on the fragmentation as
defining culture at that moment.

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Voiceover: But I love
that it's a photo montage

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and I'm assuming most of
these photographs came

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from newspapers from magazines,

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so it's all immediate and topical
and all relevant in this moment,

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but it's being reconstructed.

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Voiceover: But I love
that it's a kitchen knife.

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Voiceover: She's very focused
also the role of women artists.

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She talked a lot about it
and she wrote about it.

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As a Dadaist, how was she treated?

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She wasn't treated very well.

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I think one of the things she
actually had a problem with

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is a lot of male Dadaists had grand ideas

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about changing cultural morays
and views and gender equity,

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but then in their practice
of that, they did nothing.

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There was a couple of ways
that is visualized here.

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If we look at the very central image,

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we actually see one of the foremost

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German expressionist
artists K채the Kollwitz

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Voiceover: It's also been severed.

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Voiceover: And the body underneath
her is dancer Niddi Impekoven

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and if you look at the way
that that forms a central point

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around which everything else rotates

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and there is a sense of movement
happening all at the same time.

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Voiceover: Well, I noticed a
lot wheels and gears (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: It's a machine.

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If you think about the machinery of -

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Voiceover: Government.

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Voiceover: Government, the
machinery of culture of ...

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If you think of the machine
itself, even the machine of Dada.

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Voiceover: But the machine, to me,
has a very male connotation to it.

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Voiceover: One thing I always think
is really interesting to point out

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if we zoom in and look in
the far right lower corner.

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This tiny little head right
here is actually Hannah Hoch.

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Instead of putting her signature,
she puts a little portrait of herself

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and what it is is it's actually
pasted on to the corner of a map

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which shows the countries in Europe

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that had women's voting
rights at the time,

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so that's one of the ways
that we know she was thinking

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about the role of women in
society and in the art world.

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One of the best ways to deal
with a picture of this scale,

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where there's so much happening
is to look at this other version

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that I actually annotated.

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Voiceover: We're in Flickr now.

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Voiceover: We're in Flickr right
now and I created this image,

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which has a lot of notes on it.

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Voiceover: If you want to
see this, you can just go

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to the SmartHistory group in Flickr.

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Voiceover: In Flickr and
you can find this image.

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Then what happens is we wave over it

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and we see all these different things.

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First of all, if you think about
this image in terms of quadrants.

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There's an upper right and a lower right
and a lower left and an upper left.

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I've decided to name the left side,
even though they're not usually named.

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Usually the right side is
known as the anti-Dadaists

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and if you look, she's called that
"di anti-dadists" right over here.

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She's cut out a lot of text,
as well, and that's up here.

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The people that are in
the anti-Dadaist corner

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are obviously politicians
and former politicians.

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Kaiser Wilhelm is right here.

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His head is really big and
this figure is quite large.

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Voiceover: And Kaiser
Wilhelm has been deposed.

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Voiceover: He's abdicated in Holland.

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Voiceover: Okay. (crosstalk)

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And he's led the country into World War I.

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Voiceover: Yes, into
disaster, so he's gone.

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Voiceover: I just want
to be clear who he was.

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Not a nice man.

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Voiceover: Not a nice man and there's
a lot of satire going on in this.

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Then there are also
other political figures.

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There's General von
Hindenberg, the head of him

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on the body of this exotic dancer.

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Voiceover: She took a male general
and put him on a female body

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and castrated him in a way.

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Voiceover: She makes fun of Kaiser
Wilhelm with this little figure

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of two wrestlers that are
creating the mustache.

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Down here there is German
Minister of Defense Gustav Noske.

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He's talking to another general over here

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and this general up here
is standing on their heads.

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Voiceover: Another man
who led them into war.

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Voiceover: Yeah.

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Voiceover: Sort of like the
Donald Rumsfeld, (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: If you think about
pictures of our contemporary US.

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Voiceover: These are people (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: And some of
them were still in power.

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They're working with
reformulating the government,

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which is not ...

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There's no way any sense of
organization fragmented in many ways

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and all these people are grasping
for power that they did have before

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and trying to figure out ways
to pull the country together,

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but if we go down here,
in the lower right corner,

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we see the world of the Dadaists.

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"Die welt Dada" and right here
it says "Dada isten" right there.

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This is the corner that has
Hannah Hoch and the map.

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Then it also has other Dadaist figures.

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There is the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann.

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Hannah Hoch had a relationship
with Hausmann for a while,

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not her whole life, and for a long
time all the literature on Hoch

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focused on her relationship.

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She was always referred to as
the wife of Raoul Hausmann.

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Voiceover: What's interesting is that
visually the bottom right corner,

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the Dadaist corner is much
less dense (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: Here you see the two
heads of Dadaists George Grosz

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and Wielande Herzfelde.

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Wielande Herzfelde is the
brother of John Heartfield.

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John Heartfield changed his
name, he anglicized his name

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and Niddi Impekoven, the same
dancer that's in the center here,

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is now over here bathing John
Heartfield in this bathtub.

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Voiceover: It seems to be demeaning men.

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Voiceover: She is, I
think very specifically,

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trying to reverse as much -

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Voiceover: Power relations.

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Voiceover: Yeah, power
relations as much as she can.

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In here we have in the
center Lenin is over here,

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kind of in the center, you
can't really see it right now

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and then there's another
Dadaist, Johannes Baader

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and then you see one of the
communist party leaders, Karl Radek

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and he was back and forth
between Russia and Germany,

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so he's very involved with the
communist party in Germany.

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Those three together, there's Karl Marx,

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because we always have to
have Marx, then over here

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is the head of modern art critic
and writer Theodore D채ubler

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and his head is on top of
a baby's body (laughing)

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Voiceover: A huge baby's body. (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: It's pretty funny.

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Voiceover: So really
infantilizing all of these people.

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Voiceover: And they're all
men, all these Dadists are men.

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Voiceover: And her colleagues.

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Voiceover: What I've decided
is that on the left side,

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they're forms of Dada.

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This is Dada propaganda.

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This is Einstein right here, actually.

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And he is saying a couple
of different things.

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Right here, this little
bit of text is in German

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and it says, "He he, young
man, Dada is not an art trend."

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It's not just something
that's coming and going

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and that it's actually
something more meaningful

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and that it's about (crosstalk).

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Voiceover: Political
and worldy and timely.

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Voiceover: Up in the corner
this is another thing.

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(crosstalk)

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Voiceover: Propagandistic
messages designed

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to tap into the idea of art making is
a money venture, it's an investment.

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Voiceover: But it's
also clearly absurdist.

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Voiceover: It's just
mocking the entire venture.

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Voiceover: Down here, there's a
lot of scenes of mass gathering.

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We see in the center here this figure.

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This is Karl Liebknecht, one of
the German communist party leaders,

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along with Rosa Luxembourg,
who were, as it says,

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jailed, tortured, and then
assassinated in January 1919.

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That was a moment that
really brought together -

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Voiceover: Galvanized the left.

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Voiceover: Galvanized the left.

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These are all photographs that
she's taken out of popular press.

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She's taken that figure of him and
right here, he's saying, "Join Dada."

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This is why I think it's
a kind of Dada persuasion.

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These are persuasive messages, right?

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This is all about -

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Voiceover: Resist these, resist that.

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Voiceover: After all, these images
came out of a commercial magazine.

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It was -

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Voiceover: Product magazines
also and popular women's journals

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and the Berliner Illustrated Zeitung,

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which is the illustrated press of Berlin.

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Voiceover: Dada had only been
around for a couple of years

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at this point, for just a few years.

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How was this being received?

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What kind of audience did this have?

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Voiceover: This had the audience of
other Dadaists (laughing) in Berlin.

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Dada is going on all over Europe and
there are different centers of Dada.

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There is a Dada movement in Paris -

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Voiceover: Zurich (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: And Hanover and in Berlin.

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They all have different
art making practices

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and photo montage was central
to the Berlin Dadaists.

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Voiceover: What is the the Last
Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch mean?

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Voiceover: Abundance and
gluttony and beer, of course,

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being, to me, very German,
having a beer-belly

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and those last vestiges
of that bourgeois -

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Voiceover: Wealthy, stable
culture that had allowed

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the first World War to really happen.

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There were some artists
that were actually looking

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at traditional painting as
having been, in some ways,

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responsible for the violence
of the war, and responsible

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for the culture that
could've produced this war

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and art having some -

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Voiceover: Or holding up those values.

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Voiceover: Holding up those
values, exactly (crosstalk)

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Commodity of (crosstalk)

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Would have allowed for the hierarchy
to create this kind of violence.

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Voiceover: Another kind
of armchair bourgeois.

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Voiceover: Yeah, that's right,

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and what is art's responsibility
within that cultural framework?

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Voiceover: in the upper right we
have a political establishment,

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but on the lower left (crosstalk)
that's a huge contrast.

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That tension remains (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: Dada cutting a
swath, in a way, (crosstalk)

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Voiceover: The word
"Dada" in the upper left

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through the word "Dada"
again in the lower right

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and her own self portrait with
Kollwitz in the middle there.

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Voiceover: Dividing those classes.

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Voiceover: Women, in a way.

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Voiceover: And women, I think,
she puts in places of power,

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or at least as a destabilizing force.

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Voiceover: The whole notion of the
kitchen knife is really empowering.

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Voiceover: The idea of
domesticity as being something

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that could undermine cultural values.

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It's an amazing idea.

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Voiceover: Yeah.

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Voiceover: It's brilliant, I love it.

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Voiceover: I love it.

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Voiceover: It's cool.

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(jazz music)