The work of art and the problem of politics in Berlin Dada

October

Volumn , Issue 105, 2003, Pages 73-92

  Doherty, Brigid ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 57649099126     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/016228703769684164     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Oskar Kokoschka, cited in George Grosz and John Heartfield, "Der Kunstlump," Der Gegner 10-12 (n.d. [April 1920]; reprint, Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1979), p. 52.
2. On the subject of what came to be called the "Kunstlump-Debatte, " see Walter Fāhnders and Martin Rector, eds., Literatur im Klassenkampf. Zur proletarisch-revolutionären Literaturtheorie 1919-1923: Eine Dokumentation (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971), pp. 43-50;
3. Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 65-69;
4. Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 93-95;
5. Roland Mārz, ed., John Heartfield: Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit: Selbstzeugnisse, Erinnerungen, Interpretationen. Eine Dokumentation (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1981), pp. 102-28;
6. Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918-19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 240-41;
7. and Hubert van den Berg, Avantgarde und Anarchismus: Dada in Zurich und Berlin (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), pp. 390-98.
8. Grosz and Heartfield, "Der Kunstlump," p. 53. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
9. G. G. L. [Gertrud Alexander], "Herrn John Heartfield und George Grosz," Die Rote Fahne 99 (June 9, 1920).
10. Reprinted in Manfred Brauneck, ed., Die Rote Fahne: Kritik, Theorie, Feuilleton, 1918-1933 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), p. 65.
11. George Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde, Die Kunst ist in Gefahr! (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1925), pp. 23-24.
12. See Wieland Herzfelde, "Introduction to the First International Dada Fair," on pp. 100-04.
13. On the Dadaists' use of the term "products," see my introduction to Herzfelde, p. 93.
14. Alexander, "Kunst, Vandalismus und Proletariat," Die Rote Fahne 112 (June 24, 1920).
15. Reprinted in Brauneck, ed., Die Rote Fahne, p. 73.
16. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 135.
17. Adolf Behne, Neues Wohnen, Neues Bauen (1927)
18. cited in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 215. Translation slightly modified.
19. Kokoschka, cited in Claude Cernuschi, Re/Casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p. 55.
20. See, for example, Jaroslaw Leshko, "Kokoschka's Knight Errant," Arts Magazine (January 1982), pp. 126-33;
21. Thomas M. Messer, "Der irrende Ritter," in Oskar Kokoschka (Vienna: Residenz-Verlag, 1986), pp. 183-86;
22. and Werner Hofmann, "Der irrende Ritter," in Oskar Kokoschka, pp. 265-78.
23. See Tobias G. Natter, ed., Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin, 1909-1914 (New York: Neue Galerie, 2002), p. 180.
24. See Herzfelde's "Introduction to the First International Dada Fair" on pp. 100-04 for a gloss on another 1920 work by Grosz that purports to represent his friend and collaborator Heartfield: 'Der Sträfling': Monteur John Heartfield nach Franz Jungs Versuch, ihn auf die Beine zu stellen ('The Convict': Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung's attempt to get him up on his feet).
25. On 'Der Sträfling' as a Groszian self-portrait, see Brigid Doherty, "'See: We are all Neurasthenics!' or, The Trauma of Dada Montage," Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Fall 1997), pp. 104-18.
26. On modernism and disenchantment, see T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 7, passim.;
27. on modernist disenchantment and reenchantment in the art of Adolf Menzel, see Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 231-46.
28. See, for example, Die Rote Fahne 134 (July 20, 1920).
29. See McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party, p. 68.
30. See Grosz, letter of December 13, 1921, in Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage 1921-1945, ed. Ralf Burmeister and Eckhard Fürlus (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 34-35.
31. N. Lenin, Der "Radikalismus," die Kinderkrankheit des Kommunismus (Leipzig: Westeuropäisches Sekretariat der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1920), pp. 13-14.
32. V. I. Lenin, Werke (Berlin [GDR]: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED, 1970), vol. 31, p. 161.
33. For example, an installment of Gregorij Sinowjew's Lenin: Sein Leben und Seine Tätigkeit (Lenin: His Life and Work) was published in the same issue of Der Gegner as "Der Kunstlump."
34. Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: Die Geschichte des Dadaismus (1920; reprint, Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 1984), p. 39.
35. The placard's complete text reads: "Art is dead / Long live the new / machine art / of Tatlin." Those lines paraphrase a sentence from a 1920 article on the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin by Konstantin Umanski. In that article, the first in a four-part report on contemporary art in Russia, Umanski writes: "Die Kunst ist tot-es lebe die Kunst, die Kunst der Maschine mit ihrer Konstruktion und Logik, ihrem Rhythmus, ihrem Bestandteile, ihrem Material, ihrem metaphysischen Geist-die Kunst des 'Kontrereliefs' [Art is dead-long live art, the art of the machine with its construction and logic, its rhythm, its components, its material, its metaphysical spirit-the art of the counter-relief]." See Umanski, "Neue Kunstrichtungen in Rußland. I. Der Tatlinismus oder die Maschinenkunst," Der Ararat 1, no. 4 (January 1920), p. 12.
36. On the Dadaists' knowledge and reception of Tatlin's art, see Helen Adkins, "Erste Internationale Dada-Messe," in Stationen der Moderne: Die bedeutenden Kunstaustellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988), p. 159;
37. and Eva Zūchner, "Die Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in Berlin: Eine meta-mechanische Liebeserklārung an Tatlins Maschinenkunst," Berlin-Moskau. Moskau-Berlin (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1995), pp. 118-24.
38. On the relationship of the Dadaists' (mis)understanding of Tatlin's art to their conception of politics, see Samantha Kate Winskell, "Between Mass Culture and Proletkult, the Death of Art and Utopia: Berlin Dada and the Soviet Cultural Model," chap. 4 of her "Dada, Russia and Modernity, 1915-1922" (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 1995).
39. Preußischer Erzengel (Prussian Archangel), a collaborative sculptural construction attributed to Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter that hung from the gallery's ceiling at the Dada Fair, consisted of a plaster pig's head attached to a stuffed German military officer's uniform to which was clipped a sign that read: "To grasp entirely the meaning of this work of art, one must, while completely outfitted for battle and carrying a fully-loaded knapsack, perform daily twelve-hour drills on the Tempelhof field." See Doherty, "The Trauma of Dada Montage," pp. 118-21.
40. I borrow this phrase from Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 80.
41. See Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, p. 88.
42. On "der sichtbar-unsichtbare Phallus" in "Archaïscher Torso Apollos," see Groddeck, "Blendung," pp. 98-99.
43. On the definition of Glassturz as "a protective glass cover for an art object," see Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, p. 236, n. 70;
44. see also Groddeck, "Blendung," p. 98, n. 8.
45. The profile and eye of the one-legged veteran strongly resemble those in a number of Grosz's self-portraits of the period, for example 'Der Sträfling': Monteur John Heartfield nach Franz Jungs Versuch, ihn auf die beine zu stellen ('The Convict': Monteur John Heartfield after Franz Jung's attempt to get him up on his feet), which is reproduced with the translation of Herzfelde's "Introduction to the First International Dada Fair," pp. 100-04
46. In Montage, I locate the Dadaists' position within a larger problematic of modernism to which the following passage from a 1967 essay by Stanley Cavell points; Cavell's specific subject is "contemporary music," but his claims speak to modernism in general. What responses to contemporary music suggest, he writes, "is that the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music; that its full impact, even its immediate relevance, depends upon a willingness to trust the object, knowing that the time spent with its difficulties may be betrayed. I do not see how anyone who has experienced modern art can have avoided such experiences, and not just in the case of music--- [T]he dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art. Contemporary music is only the clearest case of something common to modernism as a whole, and modernism only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art. (That is almost a definition of modernism, not to say its purpose.) Aesthetics has so far been the aesthetics of the classics, which is as if we investigated the problem of other minds by using as our examples our experience of great men or dead men. In emphasizing the experiences of fraudulence and trust as essential to the experience of art, I am in effect claiming that the answer to the question 'What is art?' will in part be an answer which explains why it is we treat certain objects, or how we can treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for treating persons." See Cavell, "Music Discomposed," in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 188-89. Italics in original.
47. Anonymous, "Was der Spiesser vergessen hat.," Illustrierter Beobachter (1926), vol. 5, p. 14.