The time of the Weimar Republic, rich in political events and changes
in the mode of production, caused revolutionary shifts both in social and
artistic lifestyles. Machinery and revolution became the keywords in everyday
life, so it was clear that art had to deal with them as well. Different
movements (like expressionism, dada and Constructivism) approached these
topics differently, but continuously.
The mass production of commodities is reflected in the usage of the
woodcut by the expressionists (this method made it possible to create large
amounts of originals), in the inverted usage of mass-media products (as
pieces of newspapers, fragments of political slogans etc.) by the dadaists,
in the inclusion of the «materials» (wood, metal and others) into paintings
by the Constructivists.
The revolutionary idea that the art should be re-established as non-elitist
was maintained to the greatest extent by the Constructivists, but was developed
and transformed by the Dadaists as well. Both the Dadaists and the Constructivists
in attempting to address masses had to get socially engaged. For that purpose,
all of them needed a platform that should have explained their goals and
made clear by what means those goals could be reached. Through the distinction
of those aesthetic programs the sometimes really tiny difference
(1) of two movements can probably be shown. In case of
dada, their aesthetic program can be reduced to one word -- «rebellion»,
while the Constructivists in Germany
(2) claimed to be politically neutral and concerned only
with the changes in art and artistic practice. From a certain point of
view, Constructivism appears as a successor movement: while the Dada tried
to attain the destruction of old-fashioned values and bourgeois culture
and be new and unrestricted, the goal of the Constructivism was
the enduring (Hans Richter, G Form, no. 3, 1966).
Dada: its statements and ways of expression
Hausmann wrote: «Dada gestaltet die Welt praktisch nach ihren Gegebenheiten,
esbenützt alle Formen und Gebräuche, um die moralisch-pharisäische Bürgerwelt
mit ihren eigenen Mitteln zu zerschlagen.»
(3) The moral instrument of dadaistic destruction was
irony; the instruments of irony were principally photomontage, collage,
bringing ready-made structures into a new context, changing the scale in
peculiar ways. The Dada reality is a reality where a newborn child is as
important as a fashionable shoe, and an anonymous black and white man with
a strange clockwork instead of the brain is Tatlin at home. Jean Arp wrote:
«dada is for senseless which doesn't mean nonsense.» One could put it that
way: Dada was so nonsensical, that it made sense again -- and it was the
sense of negation. «Am Anfang war Dada», «In the Beginning Was Dada» --
the title of Huelsenbeck's book denies the common God, replacing him with
Dada, the pure negation. In that way, Arp is wrong, saying that Dada was
new and unrestricted, because the negation of an object is a strong bind
onto it, therefore Dadaists were caught in the same world of the old values.
But there was something that made Dada really new -- destruction is acting,
hence Dada was an act, a performance. Hausmann, reading for hours his «onooohhoouuumhn»,
(4) was acting against any sense. Similar was the performance
arranged by George Grosz and Walter Mehring: the race between a typewriter
and a sewing machine (5).
What is distinctive here is that the mode of the meaning's destruction
(or, better -- de-construction) is a paradox. There is a movement, but
no race is possible. In this respect, Grosz and Mehring show resemblance
to their contemporary Franz Kafka, whose work
was full of paradoxes, concealing and revealing the meaning at the same
time.
Apart from performances, Dadaists wrote and published manifests, that
were supposed to influence potential readers with their revolutionary ideas,
yet this hardly could be achieved, as it becomes clear from the text of
Der neue Mensch (The New Man) by Huelsenbeck. «If this ecstatic
outpouring -- so reminiscent of a prayer -- with its Christian symbolism
and sprinkled throughout with Latin and Italian quotations, was meant as
a political manifesto inciting to rebellion in war-weary Berlin of 1917,
I am afraid it must have been a failure», says Kleinschmidt. Hannah Höch,
with her outstanding skills in the technique of collage and her unique
artwork, depicting «deleterious effects of technology»(Maria Makela,
The Misogynist Machine: Images of Technology in the Work of Hannah Höch)
in relation to women, was excluded from the Dada group and its annals by
her male colleagues, despite their proclamation of women's emancipation.
The irony of George Grosz knew no exclusion: he was so upset with the whole
world that named himself «the saddest man in Europe»
(6). The Dadaists «wanted to bring art in direct contact
with life; they had no tolerance for art that was not in the service of
life, or immediate political significance», says Kleinschmidt. But this
was an illusion; in 1954 Huelsenbeck wrote: «Life is life, and I know today
(something I didn't know as a dadaist) that life has a completely different
existential nature from art […]». In spite of producing a revolt in the
society, the Dadaists rather succeeded in being revolutionary in art: both
in their innovative collage techniques and in their recognition of the
existential man/machine conflict in the society.
Constructivism: the elements and the construction
El Lissitsky and Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in 1922 in the magazine Âåùü/Gegenstand/Objet:
«The negative tactics of the "dadaists", who are as like as the
first futurists of the pre-war period as two peas in a pod, appear anachronistic
to us. Now is the time to build on ground that has been cleared.» In some
respect, this is right: the tactics of Dada were negative, and they definitely
prepared the ground for Constructivism. But the word «anachronistic» is
perhaps not the most appropriate description. In the early 1920's Dada
remained «a continuing and active force in its own right.» (Dawn Ades,
Dada-Constructivism). There were examples of the Dadaists and the
Constructivists working together, such as the Aubette café in Strasbourg,
which was built by Arp and Van Doesburg and Sophie Täuber, or a «dictionary»
of modern art, Die Kunstismen, written by Arp and Lissitsky.
The ambition of the Constructivists was «to create an abstract art
that would signify new objective values»(Victor Margolin, Constructivism
in Germany). Van Doesburg outlined their strategy as follows: «certainty
instead of uncertainty, open instead of closeness, clarity instead of vagueness,
religious energy instead of faith (7),
truth instead of beauty, […], machine production instead of craft […].»
(8) As an aesthetical program it seemed a step further
in comparison with Dada, whose aim was merely to destroy old values. But
the social engagement by the Constructivists is similar to the Dadaists'
one: they claimed, «that their art was a beacon for social transformation»,
but actually they «fought their battles in a limited milieu»(ibid.).
They printed journals and wrote manifests, but were known only to a closed
circle of artists. Several years later, the Constructivism movement in
Germany splitted into two movements: one around the magazine G (supported
by Richter, Lissitsky and van Doesburg) and another, opposed to the first,
with the Hungarians Kallai, Kemeny and Moholy-Nagy, who published a magazine
Egyseg. The first group defined their art as not allied with any
political program, but expressing new forces of the modern life. For the
other group, Constructivism was the expression and the tool of the Communist
ideology.
Although the Constructivists' strivings for pure geometrical form,
for severe abstraction cannot be compared with the dadaistic freedom of
Chance (for example, Hans Arp's vogel selbdritt), those movements
had several things in common: Dada used to seek elements and cut them with
the kitchen knife from the belly (9)
of reality, and as the early Constructivist works by Moholy-Nagy show,
he used the same language -- letters, numbers, iconic symbols, — to create
machine-like symbols. Both of these avant-garde movements claimed to challenge
the contents of contemporary art and life, and tried out various modes
of expression apart from traditional drawing and painting: collage and
sound poems by the Dada, the forms, mutating between art, sculpture and
architecture by Constructivism.
1. An example can be found in the
pages of the magazine Mecano, Blue, 1922: Moholy-Nagy's Nickel-Plastik
is reproduced at the same page with a sound poem by Raoul Hausmann
and the drawing Cigarette by Scharchoune. Although the spirit of
Dada was that of a playful parody (Dawn Ades, Dada-Constructivism),
the analogy is too striking to miss. One can find further examples in early
works by Moholy-Nagy, that show similarities with dada in composition and
technique: Perpe (1919), Bridges (1920), h Construction
(1921).
2. Here the International Constructivists
are meant; the Russian Constructivists explored the idea of political representation
in their art.
3. «Dada forms the world practically
with its own contents to destroy the burgher-pharisaical world with its
own means.» (Raoul Hausmann, Dada in Europa, 1920,translation
mine)
4. Raoul Hausmann, «bbbb»,
1922
5. This event is described in «Dada
Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt» by Hans Kleinschmidt.
6. Lewis, George Grosz.
7. Compare with «In the Beginning
Was Dada».
8. Theo van Doesburg, The Will
to Style.
9. Hanna Höch, Cut with the Kitchen
Knife: Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany.