MONTAGE AND MODERN LIFE 1919 – 1942
Maud Lavin, Annette Michelson, Christopher Phillips,
Sally Stein, Matthew Teitelbaum, Margarita Tupitsyn
Maud Lavin; Annette Michelson; Christopher Phillips; Sally Stein; Matthew Teitelbaum, Margarita Tupitsyn: MONTAGE AND MODERN LIFE 1919 – 1942. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992. First edition. Quarto. Beige cloth embossed and titled in black. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 208 pp. 115 black and white illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print and surprisingly uncommon in the hardcover first edition. Jacket lightly rubbed, but a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.25 x 10.25 hardcover book with 208 pages and 115 black and white illustrations. Edited by Teitelbaum. Essays by Maud Lavin, Annette Michelson, Margarita Tupitsyn and Sally Stein. Introduction by Christopher Phillips. All of the writers co-curated the accompanying exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Selected bibliography. Exhibition checklist.
This book conveys the enormous social, political, and aesthetic impact of montage and its pivotal role in the establishment of what we now know as the "mass media." Included here are examples of photographs, advertising, documentary films, journals, architectural and exhibition designs, posters, and rare archival materials from Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States.
Contents include:
- Preface by Matthew Teitelbaum
- Introduction by Christopher Phillips
- "Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity: Utopianism In The Circle Of New Advertising Designers“ by Maud Lavin
- "The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval" by Annette Michelson
- "From the Politics of Montage to the Montage of Politics: “Soviet Practice 1919-1937 by Margarita Tupitsyn
- "'Good Fences Make Good Neighbors': American Resistance to Photomontage Between the Wars" by Sally Stein
Artists include László Moholy-Nagy, Walker Evans, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Paul Citroën, Piet Zwart, Herbert Bayer, Willi Baumeister, Heinz and Bodo Rasch, Max Burchatz, Jan Tschichold, Paul Schuitema, Gustav Klutsis, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Nikolai Prusakov, Charles Sheeler and others.
Montage emerges as something of a scandal in the development of modern visual culture. Its ability to link disparate objects, persons, and places disrupts the integrity of single-point perspective and the sculptural autonomy of the object. Its fusion of mass-produced materials (whether through cubist papier collé, dadaist “Merz” collage, or constructivist design) into new organic totalities challenges the idea of an autonomous aesthetic realm. As Sally Stein points out, many U.S. artists deprecated photomontage as a “bastard medium,” aligned with bolshevism and the breakdown of rural life. But if it was a scandal, montage was also a kind of master trope for modernism, both in its technical applications in painting, literature, and photography and in its epistemological implications for the viewing subject.
Not surprisingly, Theodor Adorno worried over the challenge that montage offered to autonomous art: “Viewed aesthetically, montage was the capitulation by art before what is different from it.” Writing some thirty years after his initial debates with Walter Benjamin over the critical uses of new reproductive technologies, Adorno may have had good reason to feel that the shock of montage had “lost its punch” and that “the products of montage [had reverted] to being indifferent stuff or substance.” The curators of the 1992 Boston Institute of Contemporary Art exhibit “Montage and Modern Life” view montage not as a capitulation to instrumentalized, administered reality but as a constitutive feature within it. According to the exhibit’s organizer, Matthew Teitelbaum, photomontage not only represented the new realities of industrialization, urbanism and speed; it also extended “the idea of the real to something not yet seen.”
Montage and Modern Life, the exhibit and the catalogue, attempts to make visible that “something not yet seen” by studying a particular stage of modernism—between the two World Wars—as refracted through photomontage. Although individual essays in the volume refer to developments in France, Spain, Holland, and elsewhere, emphasis for the exhibition is limited to Germany, Russia, and the U.S. Juxtaposing advertising, political posters, documentary projects, newspaper images, and other forms of mass media with work by El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, Alexandr Rodchenko, and John Heartfield, the catalogue provides a much-needed cultural study of photomontage at a moment when its strictly aesthetic uses were being adapted to commercial and industrial purposes. Unlike MOMA’s “High and Low” Exhibition of 1990 that treated mass cultural productions as sources for work by Léger or Picasso, Montage and Modern Life refuses to assign priority to either mass or elite culture. Rather, the exhibition describes a constructive, if at times contentious, dialogue between the two spheres.
The contradictions created by this synthesis are evident in the work of German Ring neuer Werbegestalter (Circle of New Advertising Designers). Although the group’s members included major artists like Kurt Schwitters, Piet Zwart, Willi Baumeister, and Cesar Domela, much of their work was devoted to commercial design and advertising. As Maud Lavin says, most of the participants shared leftist political views, but nevertheless “espoused rationalized production and communication techniques” as part of their technological romanticism.” Taylorist work management had its adherents on both the Left and the Right, and Lavin documents how artists of differing political views adapted constructivist typography and grid composition to corporate interests.
While such interchange between avant-garde art and capitalist production was exactly the sort of complicity that Adorno feared, it indicates a side of modernism seldom included in more partisan art histories. Unlike Peter Bürger, for whom modernism is synonymous with aestheticism and formalism, the Ring neuer Werbegestalter regarded it as the “culture of contemporary life”—its speed, distractions, and dynamism. By endorsing certain aspects of industrial efficiency and functionalism, artists of the Left reconciled “conflicting political practices . . . through a utopian belief in rationalized technology.”
Photomontage: A Metaphor for Modern Life reviewed by Vicki Goldberg in The New York Times, May 31, 1992: In the 1920's, artists decided that photomontage, which had been keeping inferior company, should be inducted into the ranks of art. Back in the 19th century, ladies had idly cut figures out of photographs and made them straggle across album pages. Turn-of-the-century photographers had cobbled together postcard pictures of things like railroad cars straining to carry apples as big as Moby Dick. But after World War I, artists realized that montage could picture the increasingly fragmented, discontinuous, rapidly shifting nature of modern life; what's more, it could teach photographs to communicate complex ideas.
Dadaists were then seeking a way to imitate the world's chaos and scald the bourgeoisie with images from its own media; Russian artists needed an agitprop that could be understood by a largely illiterate populace. The polymorphous and promiscuous form of photomontage quickly proved adaptable to every social situation. It was as apt for the creation of a new art as for advertisements, as well suited to praising Stalin as to attacking Hitler.
Montage between the wars is usually considered in terms of art (Hannah Hoch, Alexander Rodchenko) and politics (John Heartfield). "Montage and Modern Life: 1919-1942," at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (through next Sunday, traveling to Vancouver in August and Brussels in November), attempts to include art, politics and the whole span of lower- and middle-class associations that montage continued to maintain, from book jackets to posters to ads to magazine and exhibition layouts. In this case, the mass arts, the emphemera and the throwaways far outnumber the objets d'art.
Organized by five independent curators -- Maud Lavin, Annette Michelson, Christopher Phillips, Sally Stein and Margarita Tupitsyn -- this is the photo show as "Finnegans Wake": monumental, intelligent, polyglot and in good part indecipherable and indigestible. Packed with material (much of it fascinating) never seen here before, clever juxtapositions, information and ideas, it boasts well over 400 works in at least four languages, many not translated, some not even labeled (which could almost literally drive you up the wall seeking enlightenment somewhere), plus 34 films. Having included films is admirable, but the relationship of some of them to photomontage is not immediately apparent.
The catalogue, edited by Matthew Teitelbaum, curator of the institute, has fine scholarly moments and a few that are quite opaque, in keeping with the show, which includes work without any photographs at all and leaves you to draw your own conclusions. The exhibition is as much about ideas as esthetics, and ideas are notoriously difficult to elucidate on the wall. The intent is to explore the social and political uses of montage, and here the show has flashes of valuable insight, as when it traces Stalin's literal growth in size until, by the time he had fully consolidated his power, he towered over everyone in the picture.
Modern urban life comes complete with montage elements even before artists get to work on it. Fast transportation produces quick cuts between unrelated incidents, and city noises provide a continual aural montage. In a corner of the exhibition are two photographs of the odd superimpositions that reflections make in store windows, an effect that is stronger still today, when glass skyscrapers mirror a distorted city on their facades.
Back in the 1920's, when reverence for machines extended to the camera, photomontage became a prime means of representing the modern experience. The clotted, jagged, anonymous and overpowering effect of big cities could be represented by Fritz Lang's film "Metropolis" or by Thurman Rotan's photomontage of skyscrapers on the march.
The very form of montage is a kind of metaphor of modernity: disruption and disjunction are inscribed in its nature. Dadaists, Surrealists, an entire avant-garde determined to find a new path of vision in a new world, as well as new ways to make the ordinary unfamiliar, quickly seized its potential for reorganizing snippets of everyday reality. Film, which participates in time itself, was the medium that could best imitate the telescoping of time and space so characteristic of the 20th century; photomontage came as close as a still medium could to such effects.
The show makes blindingly clear the degree to which photomontage became embedded in every level of culture in the Soviet Union, Germany, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent America, between two world wars.
From the high-art sophistication of Hoch's "Monument II: Vanity" (a Caucasian nude below the waist, a group of tribal artifacts above) to the amateur's "Travelog Lampshade" (vacation pictures every evening after dark), this recombinant, audacious vision of contemporary life swiftly established itself as a standard element of the world it was depicting metaphorically. It took on the everyday tasks of inspiring Communists with propaganda like Gustav Klutsis's "We Will Build Our Own World" (Russian masses and factories presided over by the huge, smiling, fused heads of a young man and woman) and seducing capitalists with ads for refrigerators (tiny, agitated women atop a mammoth carrot).
The curators claim that the links between popular culture and art today, in work by such artists as Gilbert and George and David Wojnarowicz, are rooted in montage practice of the 1920's and 30's. They are on the mark here. This early version of appropriation sprang up on a grand scale at that time, when photography became the technique of choice for many artists and advertisers, and an active interchange of esthetics, from high to low and back again, became commonplace.
In the 20's, artists of many persuasions felt a need to communicate with a mass audience they had previously ignored; photography and photomontage were called on because they depended on familiar and supposedly factual images. At the same time, commercial interests, which understood the importance of being up to date, rapidly adapted advanced artistic styles. Often they were assisted by the artists themselves, many of whom wanted to better the lives of the masses by redesigning the world. Rodchenko contributed movie posters, book jackets and magazines; Bauhaus artists designed fabrics and furniture for mass production.
Painters like Fernand Leger had already recognized the power of advertising in the contemporary urbanscape and incorporated its evidence in their paintings; now distinguished Dutch artists and designers like Kurt Schwitters, Willi Baumeister and Piet Zwart banded together to pursue their commitment to commercial design. Even dedicated Communists like El Lissitsky were excited by the power of capitalist advertising as effective, modern communication. (Everything comes full circle. This month, American advertising went up in Red Square for the first time.)
The wealth of material at the Institute of Contemporary Art demonstrates not only where and when the tradition was established but how continuous the tradition has been and how little has changed in all these years. Our own era is a kind of riotous fulfillment, for good or ill, of media trends laid down in the 20's and 30's, when film, newspapers and magazines established a mass image culture; radio extended the shared acquaintance with news and entertainment; and rapid travel and communications created the marvel of nearly instant connections across huge distances and the kind of rude transitions that occur when you twirl a radio dial.
Parallel visual images now and then speak not just of art-historical consciousness but of certain parallel issues. Around 1928, Piet Zwart designed a montage for a Dutch communications company: a world, a telephone, the words "the world is only a few minutes wide," and overlapping faces from far-off lands and various ethnic groups. Quite apart from the show, A.T.& T. has been advertising that "the whole world is talking," with a picture of a face pieced together from features belonging to people of different races and nations.
In Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film "October," a scene of soldiers pinned down by artillery, debris from explosions falling all about, is repeatedly intercut with the progress of a large machine descending to crush or stamp something. The technique is still in use. On the day of the worst riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, one television report of the burning and looting kept reverting to the same few seconds of film of a truck driver being dragged from his car and beaten.
Commercial imitation of art styles and artistic use of commercial artifacts are more extensive today than in the 20's but in many ways not so different. In 1928, Rodchenko overran a fragment of a face with words for a magazine cover; Barbara Kruger did the same for Esquire this month. When Eisenstein slipped a few seconds of film into the midst of a narrative, his cuts were faster and more abstract than MTV's today. The Russian's message may have been explicitly political, whereas MTV generally strips away the content and keeps the form, but the pace in both bespeaks the headlong rhythm of modern life.
There is much to be learned about perceptions of the world from the history of the way it has been presented. "Montage and Modern Life" lays out plenty of food for thought; just take along an antacid for image glut and something like Dramamine for disorientation. Come to think of it, the show itself may be the ultimate museum model of contemporary life.