Hannah Höch’s Dada Kitchen Knife

As Germany began its slide into hyperinflation following the First World War, it did not escape the notice of some that while generals and politicians banqueted, citizens, including the war-injured, were starving. Hannah Höch was one such artist whose response to the political and cultural context included a photomontage ostensibly cut using the Dada kitchen knife. Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (‘Cut with the Dada kitchen knife through the last Weimar beer-belly cultural epoch of Germany’), is a large photomontage made from print reproductions cut from magazines and journals, first shown at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin, in 1920.1 Höch was a German artist who, as an art student in Berlin in 1915, had become involved with the Berlin Dada group.2She is known for her use of photomontage, a technique characteristic of Berlin Dada during the early Weimar period, in which previously published photographs from newspapers and magazines are used as material for collage, often in a satirical or politically critical way. Exhibited in a venue re-modelled along the lines of a commercial trade fair, rather than a traditional art gallery, Höch’s most famous work offers the burger van approach to art nutrition: de-ritualised, democratised and closely concerned with an everyday domestic diet of images. It seems likely that Höch used a scalpel or scissors to produce her work, in the way she would have been trained as a student of graphic and book arts. Her naming of the kitchen knife is likely, therefore, to be a deliberately planted suggestion of a more roughly hewn collage, hacked from popular magazines using a domestic cooking tool.

The kitchen knife of the title emphasises the physicality of chopping and slicing. It creates a disturbing collision between images of the body, making up much of the content of the photomontage, and the mental image of the kitchen knife. Höch cuts up, and cuts through, individual bodies to serve up the epoch as represented by a conglomerate of social and cultural actions, people and ideas. It is a subtle advancement on the Dadaist creation of the artist as engineer to include and incorporate the domestic realm of cookery. As well featuring the head of Karl Marx, this photomontage contains further representations of symbols of a Marxist superstructure: politics, for example, is represented by a map of women’s suffrage in Europe.3 Other elements of superstructure include political figures such as Marx; media, presented in the source material, culture and art through images of dance, Expressionism and Dada; and philosophy and science through an image of Albert Einstein, but moderated by a mathematical symbol and quotation from the philosopher Salomo Friedländer’s theory of Creative Indifference.4 These elements are combined by Höch to give an overview or cross-section of the epoch that she defines, in her title, as the beer-belly cultural epoch, in a further reference to food.

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The First International Dada Fair was not intended to merely document, but to challenge. Höch’s gesture in presenting, in one work, the entire Weimar cultural epoch mocks the grandiosity of the ‘moral and aesthetic standards of the existing social order, which then seemed to us to be doomed’.5 Appearing in the same exhibition was Georg Grosz’s Prussian Archangel, 1920, consisting of a floating figure in military uniform, topped by a pig’s head, the exhibition of which led to Grosz and Wieland Hertzfelde being fined for defamation of the military.6 The content of Höch’s photomontage makes clear that the Dada kitchen is in close communication with the Dada department of propaganda. The beer-belly of the title stabs at particular people: the anti-revolutionary social democrats who compromised with the right while supressing the left. The work includes the recently murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, as well as Gustav Noske, considered by many at the time to be substantially responsible for their deaths.7 A topical photograph of the Weimar Republic’s Defence Minister, Noske together with President Friedrich Ebert is represented elsewhere in Höch’s work, such as in Staatshäupter (‘Heads of State’), 1918-20, in which Noske and Ebert appear in their swimwear, wading in the Baltic.8 The political content in Höch’s Cut with the Dada kitchen knife is conveyed through the means of carving out images of bodies from the carcass of popular culture using a metaphorical kitchen implement.9 In Höch’s Dada kitchen, the Expressionist giant Kathe Köllwitz is fondly skewered through the head and the more formal fare of Expressionism is replaced by a gluttony of mass-produced imagery. In this way Höch’s photomontage announces emphatically that art is under new management, in response the political context. It is no longer the ritualised dining occasion of the wealthy bourgeois connoisseur, who can afford to make pragmatic ideological compromises. By including references to the recent consequences of political compromises made by the government, together with examples from the prevailing art culture, Höch indicts the government and at the same time suggests that the cultural representatives contained in this photomontage are as responsible as the political representatives for the current state of affairs. The bourgeois art setting of the gallery is replaced in this exhibition with a facsimile of the industrial trade fair where, instead of the luxuriant dining hall, makeshift nourishment is provided from the fast food counter.

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Dadaists had wanted to shift the apparent site of production for art in order for artists to be seen as productive workers, like engineers, with production shifted from the art studio to a venue of industry. The maker of a photomontage in Berlin Dada was termed a ‘photomonteur’ to reflect the importance of this association with the productive base rather than the superstructure of art and culture.10 In Cut with the Dada kitchen knife, Höch shifts the site of production again, to the kitchen, a domestic site. In this photomontage ingredients are collected, mixed and cooked using non-traditional art practices for a non-traditional art. The new tools of the new art now include the implements of the kitchen and the servery. The social context in which Höch presents this work is one in which women were expected to serve the state with their bodies by reproducing, much as men were expected to serve by joining the military. Even before the Nazi takeover of power in the 1930s an attitude existed that women’s activities should be limited to ‘Kinder, Küche, and Kirche’ (children, kitchen and church).11 Höch’s intervention into the kitchen realm subverts this proposed restriction on women’s activities and contributions to the economy by associating her revolutionary Dada photomontage with an area of interest deemed appropriate to her sex. Her invocation of the kitchen implement parodies the expected fulfilment of her domestic duty.12

Taking the Dada kitchen knife as a starting point, this article will consider how the implied reference to food and cutlery in the title of Cut with the Dada kitchen knife connects an economic and political critique of capitalism to ideas about the consumption of both food and image. It will then explore how Höch’s invocation of the body, through food, could have been intended to activate a transformation of culture and social reality.

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Kitchens