Transmedialism in Dada: Readymades, Fashion, + Sculpture Caricatures

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dada Portrait of Berenice Abbott, c. 1922-1926. 

Museum of Modern Art, New York. 21.9 x 23.5 cm.

Call me for a good time [drinking whisky & obsessing over Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven].

Dada, often known as the ‘anti-art’ movement, developed as a reaction to World War I. To Dadaists, there was a direct connection between the Enlightenment and the destruction and despair of the war; the Enlightenment movement and its philosophies were what created the circumstances from which the war was born. The Dadaists saw the art canon as complicit, carrying heavy influence from Enlightenment thinking. Thus, Dada turned to new, undervalued, often transmedial artistic exploration, including new genres such as photography, photomontage, and the readymade, in rejection of the art canon and reason and the history they represented.

To describe Dada as ‘anti-art’ is not fully accurate. The Dadaists did not reject art itself, but rather the institution, the bourgeois stronghold, that has traditionally been art’s arbiter. As a result, Dada works are more often than not intensely political. And, beyond the subject matter, the truly disruptive aspect of Dada art is that it was often created with an anti-tradition, anti-capitalist intention, freeing its artists to use anything as artistic matter – the less traditional, the better. It wasn’t just new; it actively went against the old. Junk scavenged from the streets replaced clay and marble as a sculpting medium, and photomontage threatened painting. Even when media with established precedent were employed, such as poetry and theatre, the work’s execution was twisted against expectation. The transmediality of Dada works is a key part of this project, as each media carries with it certain expectations and connotations, allowing for dramatic effect when combined in unconventional ways.

Photography is now a fully established and essential corner of the art world, but in Dada’s time, it was not at all seen as an art form. Its undervalued nature as an art form made it enticing to the Dadaists, as did its dissemination into everyday life, thanks to newspapers and magazines. This created an abundance of material, often political or pop-culture-centric in nature, forming the perfect circumstances for a Dada invention: the photomontage. 

This new medium combined found photographic material – ‘photomatter’, to use the artist Hannah Höch’s word – with collage techniques. It also sometimes incorporated painting or illustration, or other media, such as paper dress patterns, as seen in Höch’s Entwurf für das Denkmal eines bedeutenden Spitzenhemdes (Design for the Memorial to an Important Lace Shirt, 1922). Already, in this one genre, the Dada transmedial instinct is evident.

Hannah Höch, Entwurf für das Denkmal eines bedeutenden Spitzenhemdes (Design for the Memorial to an Important Lace Shirt), 1922. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 27.6 x 16.8 cm.

Hannah Höch was a great pioneer of the photomontage, and though the details of the technique’s development in Dada are disputed, she certainly (at least in large part) made the medium into what it is. Her works are dynamic, chaotic, absurd, and deeply political, often tackling gender stereotypes and ridiculing authority in particular. One such example is her great work Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany), a vast work combining photomatter from newspaper images and cut-out words, letters, and phrases. With the title alone this work immediately announces its political nature. Besides its reference to the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1918, the title also plays with the domestic vs. the public spheres and the inherent gender roles therein. The diminutive kitchen knife, tool of ‘the woman’s proper place’, cuts through the patriarchal beer-belly of Weimar Germany. In a characteristically witty gesture, Höch’s title also parallels her artistic process of cutting into contemporary newspapers full of powerful men for raw material.

Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany), 1919. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. 114 × 90 cm.

There is so much going on in Cut with the Kitchen Knife that, at first glance, it is difficult to identify any one theme. This chaos reflects that of World War I and of post-war Germany. Upon closer inspection, the viewer finds not just one but many themes. Höch subverts the popular and makes absurd the powerful; Albert Einstein is taken over by a fly, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s moustache is made of two upside-down wrestlers.

She also subverts gender expectations – not merely traditional gender roles, but gender presentation. Well-known men find their heads pasted onto the bodies of female dancers, which are often topless or dressed in ‘exotic’ fashion, or female skaters or performers, creating odd gender-bent or androgynous figures. Some men are given the (often wildly-unproportional) bodies of children or babies instead. Industry pervades the entire work as well; pieces of machinery are everywhere. These are mostly circular, echoing the Dada view that the status quo led to World War I and would come full circle again (which, of course, it did, less than two decades later). Industry is also evident in the skyscrapers in the top right and bottom left of the piece, which dominate the surrounding crowds.

Höch has also incorporated many phrases from printed matter, taking elements from both Dadaist material and reactions to the Dada movement. Almost every snippet of text includes the word ‘dada’. Some of these seem to be spoken by the figures in the work, like the tiny, open-mouthed head of Karl Marx in the bottom right, whose dialogue reads: ‘Die große Welt dada’ (the great Dada world). Other phrases include ‘Legen Sie Ihr Geld in dada an!’ (put your money in Dada!), pasted near the Einstein-fly, and ‘Tretet dada bei’ (join Dada), which also seems to be spoken by one of Höch’s characters. These four key themes in Cut with the Kitchen Knife are common ideas in Höch’s work, and reflect the larger Dada movement. All of this is achieved thanks to the transmedial nature of the photomontage, in this case combining photographic material and printed text from newspapers and magazines. In this piece, Höch has combined multiple genres of popular, everyday printed material – the serious, political newspaper, and the more casual magazine images of performers and athletes – both of which her audience was likely familiar with already, and would have had various connotations attached. Höch and her contemporaries played off of those connotations in their work, twisting the audience’s assumptions and preconceptions to provoke a reaction.

     

Left: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,  Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, c. 1920- 1922,  in The Little Review: Quarterly Journal of Art and Letters, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter 1922).

Right: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, God, c 1917. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Height 31.4 cm; base 7.6 x 12.1 x 29.5 cm.

Höch was far from the only Dadaist exploring – and mixing – unconventional materials in art. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a staple of the New York Dada scene with roots in Germany, also used found material for her work, prolifically using anything and everything as artistic materials and media. This particular element of her work represents not just another Dada genre but perhaps embodies the movement the most out of all the Dadaists, in its forward-looking, visually nonsensical, often pointedly political, and wholly radical nature. The Baroness would collect junk from the street and turn it into assemblage sculptures, as in her Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (c1919). Or, much like her contemporary Duchamp (whom she caricaturised mercilessly), she would present found objects as readymade sculptures, as in God (c1917). 

She would also wear her creations, in essence transforming herself into a living Dada work on a daily basis. The Baroness’ transmedial art served multiple purposes. Her work pushed every boundary and tested the limits of every label, especially those of art, fashion, and gender norms, and a lot of that was possible thanks to her unconventional artistic materials. One of the most interesting – and perhaps most truly Dadaist, given its provocative nature – combination of media comes from her fashion; by incorporating her physical body into her artwork, she herself became an art medium. This leads to interesting tensions of, for example, class and class expectations. This tension occurs by virtue of the artist using worthless, scavenged materials in her art while holding the title of baroness and thus being a member of nobility.

Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, between c. 1920 and c. 1925.  Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 12.7 x 17.8 cm.

While not all of her art used multiple media, the Baroness produced a continual stream of work in many different genres, from illustrations to poetry. In this respect, she produced both multimedia and transmedia work. And this is another crucial element of cross-media Dada output: the artists could (at least in theory) create exactly the kind of sensation and message they wanted because every artistic form was available to them. Furthermore, by working across multiple art forms, artists could cross-pollinate and gather inspiration for a work in one genre from another. One excellent example of this can be found in Höch’s work. From 1916-1926, she worked as a pattern-maker and illustrator, giving her an engineer’s eye and technical training, and providing material for photomontages like Design for the Memorial to an Important Lace Shirt. Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work also shows a similar benefit from cross-discipline practice. The relationship between her assemblage sculptures and her fashion is evident, but there are less obvious examples. Her poetry, for example, often reflected on the experience of making certain pieces or working with other artists, and she often illustrated elements from her poems, including words within the piece. Her illustration Affectionate (Wheels are Growing) is a good example of this. Her paintings also sometimes contained assemblage techniques, drawing from her sculptural work, as in her Dada Portrait of Berenice Abbott. Both Höch and the Baroness thus exemplify this secondary aspect (and benefit) of transmedialism in Dada art.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Affectionate (Wheels are Growing), 1921-1922. Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York.

For Höch, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, and many other Dada artists, the use of diverse, non-traditional, and oftentimes mixed media served to disrupt the status quo and reject the bourgeois, ‘proper’ art canon. It allowed these artists to question gender and social norms, as well as force their audiences to question what ‘art’ even is, how the label should be defined and constrained, and who has the authority to bestow that label. The subversion of the expectations of art the Dadaists created, aided by the transmedial nature of their work, allowed them to reject what had come before and fundamentally disrupt art and culture.

If you enjoyed this, you may want to have a look at my list of further reading.