Review: Dada Collage and Photomontage Reviewed Work(S

Reviewed Work(s): Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn of Surrealism by William Camfield; Walter Hopps; Werner Spies Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch by Maud Lavin John Heartfield by Peter Pachnicke; Klaus Honnef Johanna Drucker

Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4, Interactions between Artists and Writers. (Winter, 1993), pp. 82-84+87.

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http://www.jstor.org Tue Jan 23 21:40:13 2007 Dada Collage and P/zotomontuge JOHANNA D R U C K E R

William Camfield, with Walter Hopps and years in the 1910s, Dada had an importance that provided necessary and useful means for the in- Werner Spies. Max Ernst: Dada and the Dawn far outlived the diffuse and disorderly scattershot vestigation of ideology within lived experience. of Surrealism, exh. cat. Munich: Prestel for the of events and works produced under its nominal Max Ernst's collage techniques rarely ex- Menil Collection. Houston, 1993. 375 pp.; aegis. The three figures whose work is considered tended to embrace pure photomontage. Ernst's 160 color ills.. 275 black-and-white. $70.00; in these publications were all, however briefly, approach involved the appropriation of an eclectic $37.50 paper connected with events, artistic practices, and his- range of printed materials: the graphic imagery of Maud Lavin. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The torical circumstances that constituted the activ- medical books, catalogues of industrial equip- Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. New ities of Dada. But the retrospective assessment of ment and machinery, and botanical or biological Haven: Yale University Press. 1993. 278 pp., their activities, and that of various artists in New course books. In his painterly hands, these images 20 color ills., 158 black-and-white. $40.00 York. Berlin, Zurich, Paris. Cologne, and other became transformed into anthropornorphicized Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, eds. John venues from around 1915 through to the early figures embedded in scenes whose reality de- Heartfield, exh. cat. New York: Harry N. 1920s, betrays much about what is at stake forthe pended on pictorial conventions in the rendering Abrams for Museum of Modern Art, New York, 82 field of art history in the way these events and of space, which then permitted the sur-reality of 1993. 342 pp., 83 color ills., 206 black-and- productions are granted a social and aesthetic the juxtaposed fragments to be read with a full white. $95.00; $45.00 paper value. Most important with respect t o Hoch, measure of uncanny surprise. Camfield, Hopps. Heartfield, and Ernst is the retrospective assess- and Spies characterize Ernst's work in traditional ment of their use of the formal means of the then terms, seeing the collage technique as a means of still newly invented artistic strategies in social, po- disturbing the conventions of pictorial produc- litical, and artistic terms. tion. While this description is adequate to support ax Ernst, John Heartfield, and Hannah The agendas of each of these publications the narrow assertion that Surrealism as a visual Hoch were all present at the First Dada are completely distinct and yet each depends practice distinguished itself from precedents Art Fair held in June 1920 in Berlin. upon evaluating the forms and effects of photo- through just such novelties and inventions, it is Images from this event appear in each of these montage and collage: the fragmentation and re- thin material on which to found an argument for three publications, pointing up the strongest sin- assembly, rework, and transformation of imagery such work as either subversive or significant out- gle point of commonality among these artists: appropriated from mass-produced sources in the side the most parochial aesthetic boundaries. their association with Dada. Given the differences handsof artistsfor whom this was aprimary mode Ernst in such a characterization is without politics, amongthe three artists and the otherwise discrete of artistic practice in these years. and his work is deemed radical only in aesthetic trajectories of their careers, this fact demonstrates For William Camfield. Walter Hopps, and terms. The dream substance of Ernst's work, and the extent to which Dada was a position through Werner Spies, authors of the Ernst catalogue es- its clear engagement with the evolving psycho- which various artists passed in the late 1910s, says, Dada was a stage on the way to Surrealism. analytic theory that informed much of the Sur- rather than a unified movement or group. It was This version of the art historical narrative tends to realists' production, asserts individuality as only in the years immediately following the First consider Dada the necessary evil, the prepubes- personality, without recourse to ideological con- World War that Dada was briefly promoted as an cent phase of acting out in childish rebellion that siderations. The authors of this catalogue note international movement. Artists with a variety of ultimately laid the foundation for achieving the that the unconscious sources of Ernst's work were motives-some eager to reestablish a sense of mature condition of a Surrealist art. According to rich with personal memory, trauma, and experi- community and communication as part of the such an account, Dada provided tools, means, ence. Camfield's text forms the bulk of the cata- postwar healing process, some intent on develop- and formal methods, but little artistic or intellec- logue, and he is extremely conscientious in tracing ing their careers, some committed to activist tual substance; it merely facilitated the breaks every possible reference in both Ernst's biographi- aesthetics-all collaborated on publications and with older aesthetic traditions that severed the cal files and the literature that has considered exhibitions intended to display a common sensi- quintessentially twentieth-century movement of Ernst's work from a variety of psychoanalytic per- bility. But by that time, the conditions that had in Surrealism from any trace of its nineteenth- spectives. However, the shortcoming of Cam- fact given rise to Dada, such as the protest against century precedents. In such an account, Dada is field's treatment is that he isolates Ernst even from the war, or more profoundly, the aversion to ratio- without an agenda of its own. Itappears as chao- his aesthetic context. Only Paul and Gala Eluard, nalist processes of modernization, had either dis- tic, nonsensical, and undisciplined, but not in a and occasionally Andre Breton and a few other appeared or been transformed by a spirit of revo- purposive sense. By contrast, the authors of the artists, are mentioned, and then in the context of lutionary optimism, cynicism, or relief. Heartfield catalogue make clear that Dada sprang social connections. There is little sense of the par- For some historians, the very idea of char- from a critique of ideology, including an investiga- allel's between Ernst's development and that of his acterizing Dada as an organized movement is an- tion of mass media, and that its means were in- peers in visual arts and collage. This reinforces the tipathetic to its aims and methodology, while for struments of resistance and activism, not idle aes- myth of the artist as self-created individual talent, others the term simply includes any of the many thetic diversions from the artistic mainstream. and it leaves Ernst's achievements without aframe events and publications in which the word ap- Finally, Maud Lavin, in her discussion of Hoch's of reference for comparison. peared as part of the publicity. What is certain is work, extends the discussion of Dada to include There are two points to bring to bear upon that as an influential force on the aesthetic and works produced in the Weimar period in Ger- this treatment. The first is that the thematic sub- political sensibilities of artists in their formative many, demonstrating that the earlier activities stance of Ernst's collages is frequently misogynist

WINTER 1993 (in the usual cut-up, bound, and fragmented fe- aesthetic that is about as far from the photomon- and sophistication of his achievement. Part of the male body form so familiar in Surrealist aes- tage work of John Heartfield as that of any other strength of Pachnicke's essay is its attention to the thetics), while in other images his work investi- artist using the fragment as the basis of his or her visual particulars of the works. Pachnicke demon- gates both sexual identity and gender politics. work-personal, apparently ahistorical, and fan- strates that the way things look in Heartfield's Similarly, images in which ethnic characterization tasmatic. One of the striking elements in the Ernst images is the result of a well-integrated combina- and cultural difference are clearly engaged also exhibition, imperceptible in the catalogue repro- tion of ideological and aesthetic choices. What is proliferate. And yet nowhere within these cata- ductions, was the varied character of his surfaces. interesting in this is that although both Heartfield's logue essays are such issues even mentioned. Ernst's unevenness of production at the level of artistic intentions and his politics were clearto him though they certainly could be analyzed even painterly control and achievement is itself inter- throughout his career, his work has been subject within the terms of the psychoanalytic paradigm. esting in visual terms and should solicit some criti- to continual recharacterization, a point made in Some sense of Ernst's politics and the conflicts of cal discussion-after all, he was an artist for careful detail in Hubertus Gassner's essay dealing identity that he experienced as a German in post- whom the process of making was as significant as with the brief period (1931-32) that Heartfield war France would provide a context for these the image made and for whom facture (one has spent in the Soviet Union. Here Heartfield's work works, which the continual elaboration of bio- only to think of his frottage technique) was an was regarded as too negative and critical, op- graphical information in fact only sidesteps by active aspect of production and signification. posed to the spirit of positive imagery that was describing circumstances but providing no anal- But if the mythic view of the politics of then increasingly a mainstay instrument of Com- ysis. The second point is that the continued asser- Surrealist aesthetics is given little play in the dis- munist party propaganda. Heartfield's life is only tion that radical innovation in form constitutes a cussion of Ernst's works, the carefully nuanced minimally discussed in this work; instead the an- subversive strategy needs to be seriously exam- examination of the many ways in which Heart- alyses and discussions of his images proceed from ined. What are the terms of radicality invoked in field's images intersected with, conflicted with, observations about their context and reception. such an assessment?The implication is that radical and were promoted by and rejected by thevarious and the many interactions he had with peers and form was both the requirement and the sufficient factions of the activist Left in the course of his colleagues through his professional activities. The condition for radical social activity-l refrain from long, productive life forms a central theme of the reproductions in the catalogue are accompanied 83 using the word "political" here since it would be volume edited by Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Hon- by excerpts from contemporary materials- patently absurd to discuss Ernst's works in termsof nef. From the very outset, the ironies and para- articles, essays, reviews, and so forth-which help any realpolitik. Butthere is an intellectual tradition doxes of the historical circumstances in which the build an intertextual context. The one thing miss- in the twentieth century that links the subversion exhibition itself was being produced are marked ing from this catalogue is a discussion of the spe- of the norms of symbolic form with the subversion within the essays. The most striking, and sophisti- cificsof each of the reproductions-in many cases of the norms of social form-making them cated, feature of these discussions is the recogni- visual references are no longer immediately re- equivalent-which has typically formed one of tion of the extent to which the politics of aesthetic cognizable, and a textual gloss could have sup- thecornerstonesfor arguments aboutthe political form are always contingent. One theme that plied useful information about the pictorial nature of avant-garde art. Ernst's work clearly emerges from these discussions is the way in elements. shows up these argumentsas without foundation, which Heartfield's work was variously used as the One of the most refreshing aspects of the since it could not support such a position. Neither sine qua non of politically activist-or as he ter- treatment of Heartfield in this catalogue is that it is do Camfield;Hopps, or Spies attempt to make it med it-operative art and then dismissed as too utterly without sentimental romanticizing of the do so. They avoid the issue of politics and its links bourgeois, too totalitarian, too this or too that utopian project of Marxist politics. Pachnicke and to aesthetics in Ernst's work and life. The result, depending upon the shifting agendas of various Honnef, like Heiner Miiller and the other contrib- however, is that Dada becomes seriously qualified interest groups he encountered. Heartfield's utors, are Germans for whom a purely theoretical as a movement and mutated as a term in this means were deemed effective, populist, commu- endorsement of Marxism, so easy for American discussion. Breton is simply a positive figure who nicative, and accessible, elitist, esoteric, anti- academics, is rendered impossible by their own channeled the anarchy of Dada, rather than a worker, and anticommunist, radical, subversive, historical experience. They see the value of Heart- qualified figure who banished the Dada sensibility and excessively Marxist depending on the field's critical method in terms of its capacity to entirely. Breton's Surrealism was a French literary circumstances-often with these judgments for- unmask the structures that make power function enterprise that blended poetic lyricism and Sym- mulated exclusively on the basis of his formal in capitalist as well as communist regimes, not as bolist mysticism in a new hybrid-none of which methods and without regard for the images transcendent ideologies, but as historically spe- related to the anti-humanistic project of Dada. As themselves. cific circumstances. There are no simplistic asser- a consequence, Camfield dates the beginnings of What is irrefutable with respect to Heart- tions of Marxism as a theoretical tool; rather, care- Dadaart with the period in which the major Dada field, however, is that he was intent upon using ful analyses of the manner in which particular publications had already peaked, 1920, and, also aesthetic means to political ends. Heartfield was insights into relations among power, repression, typically, does not include the radical typographic not merely interested in mechanical print produc- and representation can be effectively communi- and design features of these early works within his tion as aesthetic source material. In fact, he had cated in visual terms. Heartfield was passionately historical notion of the activity that constituted most of the images he used produced for him by a committed to critiquing the abuse of power wher- visual art in Dada practice. Dada art existed only photographer with whom he worked very closely. ever he saw it. Pachnicke gives an indication of the between 1920 and 1923 in this account, rather supplying detailed sketches, maquettes, and in- origin of this passion in the abusive circumstances than extending to the activities and publications structions. His focus was on making images that of Heartfield's childhood, his empathic relation to initiated in 1916. could communicate effectively through the mass conditions of oppression, and his moral righteous- Ernst's aesthetic inventiveness and origi- media. It was Heartfield's technical understanding ness in the face of any and all suffering. Heart- nality produced a group of collages and collage- of the processes of transformation through which field's aesthetics constituted a political rhetoric, inspired paintings with a disturbing dream-world an original work was rendered in the medium of not merely a rhetorical politics, and the contribu- credibility. That world asserts the quality of photomechanical reproduction that in fact made tors to this catalogue display a canny understand- timelessness, the unto-itself life of the psyche- his work so successful. Pachnicke's expert discus- ing of the distinction between the two. All of the but it is, in fact, highly linked to the historical sion of the intersectionsof technical manipulation, work in this exhibition is from an archive that was moment in which it was itself produced as a con- ideological critique, and aesthetic skill in Heart- located in the former German Democratic Repub- cept. Ernst's work defines a zone of the collage field's work subtly articulates the real complexity lic, the Akademie der Kunst zu Berlin, and the

ART JOURNAL organizers of the exhibition were clearly aware of Maud Lavin's study has the advantage subtext that, again, seems most suggestive in the ironies of this presentation as an immediate that it is a full-length work exclusively concerned methodological terms. post-cold war export. After all, Heartfield faced with Hoch's Weimar collages, and thus has the Briefly stated, this subtext is the way in very real difficulty in the reception of his work luxury of adequate space for a developed and which the apparatus of ideology functions from the 1930s on. The more obviously charac- complex discussion. It is at a disadvantage only through the interior life of individuals, forming terizable villainy of the Social Democrats that with respect to production; though the book is and transforming private desire through a relation caused Heartfield to flee Germany is familiar. But well illustrated, its smaller format makes the with public imagery. Here imagery must be under- the more ins~diousm uting of Heartfield's voice images-themselves often the composite of stood in the broadest sense, not merely as picto- under both the free enterprise system of British many smaller images-frustratingly constrained rial elements, but as social categories, concepts, publishing and the systematized regulation of the by the dimensions of the page. This is a minor and constructs. For Lavin, the lived experience of cold war German Democratic Republic, to which point, and to have this body of work available in the personal isan inflected form of the social-the he returned in 1950, are also brought t o the published form permits a serious reconceptualiza- private imaginary links to the social imaginary reader's attention by the acerbic, if too brief, com- t ~ o nof the range of montage practices. through processes of identification, negation, and ments of Honnef, Pachnicke, et alia. In certain respects, the conceptual prem- projection. There is no loose, speculative work in There is a certain irony in the fetishization ises that underlie Lavin's text areeven more radical this book; every analysis and assessment is of these original mockups as art objects and origi- than they appear to be-which is to say that the grounded in solid research and demonstrable links nals and of Heartfield as an artist in the face of his clearly feminist aspect of Lavin's analytical meth- between sources and socially produced mean- dedication to undoing such mythology. By his odology, while definitely suited to her purpose ings, between statements made by Hoch or her standards such a posture reeked of everything he and appropriate to Hoch, is already a familiar art close associates and the images she produced. As systemat~callyopposed, and this point has gone historical approach. More original, though also a consequence, there are some questions that without comment in the catalogue. This isn't well suited to its object here, is Lavin's attempt to came to mind as I read that Lavin did not entertain surprising-it would be very much at cross pur- examine the relations between what she terms In her study. For instance, I wondered about 84 poses to produce an exhibition catalogue that in- "private desire and public images." The difficult Hoch's body image in relation t o the mass- terrogated the very legitimacy of the premise of project of formulating an analytic method suffi- produced images of the New Woman, an issue the exhibition. Again, the rich material character ciently sophisticated to deal with the interpolation that is so much a part of contemporary feminist of the mockups is lost in the reproductions in sp~te of the individual artistic subject into the social politics in media studies that it would be interest- of their excellent quality, and the visual informa- order through the mechanisms of representation ing to know how and ~fi t had been operative for tion in those originals was so rewarding, partic- has been so daunting that there are few art histo- Hoch. Lavin does not make use of psychoanalytic ularly for the insights it provided into Heartfield's rians who have attempted it. I am not talking here theory, and this component will eventually need understanding of the art of making images for about the activity of social history, or of what elaboration if the social theory of the artistic sub- reproduction, that I for one was glad that this passes for "context" in the old-fashioned sense- ject is t o be fully developed. Lavin's critical paradox had not presented an obstacle to mount- the endless supply of external events that are sup- strength is her clear-headed insight into theories ing the exhibition. The greatest shortcoming of posed by implication t o "explain" imagery of modernism, the avant-garde, mass media, and these essays is the same as that in the Ernst through personal events or external circum- cultural production, and her discussions of major catalogue-the absence of comparisons of the stances. Instead, I am suggestingthat amethodol- texts in these areas provide well-thought counters work of Heartfield in formal and social terms with ogy of cultural criticism blended with astute anal- to many positions that have become established in that of contemporaries with whom a useful con- ysisof visual images as social forms must be in turn the received tradition. trast might have been made, such as Alexandr sutured to a theory of the artistic subject for such Lavin's book shows the extent to which Rodchenko or Raoul Haussman or Hannah Hoch. a methodology to become developed. Though feminist scholarship has matured. The work of This leaves his work suspended in a vacuum, ex- Lavin doesn't manage to completely synthesize Hoch does not have to be recuperated only on the cept for Gassner's important examination of the this methodology, or articulate it outside her anal- grounds of its former neglect, but can be dis- Soviet excursion. ysis, much of what she has succeeded in doing in cussed in terms of issues germane to both Hoch's Heartfield and Ernst had in common that this work makes a significant contribution in this work and art historical methodology in general. their use of fragmentary elements resulted in a direction. The themes that link Lavin's book to the exhibition highly synthetic image. Neither were content with More overtly, Lavin has situated Hoch's catalogues on Heartfield and Ernst are, again, either the raw cut-and-paste look characteristic work within the context of Weimar Germany's both the use of formal means of montage that of, for instance, pieces by Kurt Schwitters, nor the mass-media print productions and the various as- these artists share and the passage through Dada very graphic, designed quality of the work of cer- pects of gendered identity to which Hoch was as a formative experience. For Hoch this passage tain Soviet artists, such as Gustav Klutsis. In this being exposed in the period. In particular, the clearly galvanized her awareness of gender as a respect, both made use of fragmentation to con- mythic image of the New Woman, very much a politicized aspect of identity. Personal politics and struct an image with certain features of visible media product linked to consumerism, labor prac- the machismo of the historical avant-garde no wholeness, but where Heartfield's images func- tices, and social agendas such as child bearing and doubt intensified her awareness of the limits of tion to reveal the fissures and contradictions in the so forth, serves as the field in which Lavin places supposedly radical movements in which male fan- social structure, Ernst's images reflect the compo- Hoch's work for assessment. In so doing, she tasies and male power determined the course of nent elements of a psychic drama, an interior life traces the origin and significance of the many artistic events, replicating the gender relations of that was lived only in that imaginary realm. In the elements of Hoch's collages. Here the figures are mainstream culture. But Dada also provided Hoch work of Hannah Hoch, these two domains overlay well identified (unlike in the Heartfield catalogue), with the impetus to create collage, to make use of one another. Hoch's means have formal and con- and the developed discussion permits Lavin to its fragmentary assault on the illusions of whole- ceptual elements in common with those of both flesh out the various themes through which no- ness promoted by rational systems of representa- Heartfield and Ernst, but her project was in a sense tions of gender, particularly female gender, were tion. Language and other symbolic systems impli- morecomplex than either of theirs-for Hoch was being worked out in the public press. While this cated in the production of social order were all involved with investigating the intersection be- would be a sufficient achievement on its own, and under assault in Dada technique. That Hoch's tween the private imaginary and the production serves to introduce an English-readership to the work was both political and personal, produced of identity as a social category. much neglected work of Hoch, it IS the recurrent from mass-media materials but exhibited as artis-

WINTER 1993 STEVEN 2 . LEVINE tic originals, suturing an individual imagery from Eunice Lipton. Alias Olympia: A Woman4 their "flatness, tonalism, foreshortened shadows, thestuff of illustrated papers made for wide public Search for Manet4 Notorious Model and Her and peculiar perspective," but that his images of consumption, shows that Dada offered versatile Own Desire. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, women were radical in their acute realism as well. formal solutions, not merely formulas, to the art- 1992.181 pp. $20.00 No biographical evidence was adduced for ists for whom it had been a formative experience. Otto Friedrich. Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet'salleged subversion of theetiquette, ritual, The political stakes in the reassessment of Manet. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 335 pp.; protocol, and convention that governed the roles the character and effect of Dada, and of its formal 8 color ills., 14 black-and-white. $28.00 of women in French bourgeois society, but his means, come down to the bases on which the Criselda Pollock. Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888- paintings were interpreted as evidence of just links between aesthetics and politics are theo- 1893: Gender and the Color of Art History New these attitudes all the same. Thus, of Olympia: rized. The wish dream of Surrealist politics, for York: Thames and Hudson, 1993. 80 pp.; 50 She is not voluptuous i n a traditionalsense nor is instance, when posited as constituted in an aes- black-and-white ills. $14.95 she served up to the viewel: Quite the contrary. thetic act (the subversion of traditional pictorial She is aloof, self-contained and almost disdain- strategies), rings hollow and amnesiac, repressing ful; she dares her visitor and stares him down. . . . the violence of Breton's aesthetic party line and rt historians have been seeking to meet Olympia arrogantly confronts and gives the lie to his policies of exclusion and control. Surrealism in the gaze of Olympia for years-of every Venus, odalisque and courtesan figure ever fact had little to do with Dada, beyond its superfi- Olympia, Edouard Manet's notorious painted. She undermines tradition and stares out cial dismissal of conscious reason, since Dada was painting from the Salon of 1865, now in the at history as the self-contained model Victorine intent upon a deconstruction of rationalization as Musee dtOrsay, Paris; of Olympia, the fictive Meurend [sic] posing as a classic nude. Manet4 an ideology and upon subverting the bourgeois courtesan, if that's what she is, set within the undermining, his subversion, of an ennobled and 87 humanism that served as the basis of myth of the shallow representational space of a curtained defended convention of femininity was surely a artist and artistic careerism. But in the case of each boudoir along with her blackserving maid, if that's major, i f unconscious source of spectator outrage individual artist, work, and publication, the ques- what she is, and her (but whose?) black cat; and of in 1865.3 tion of politics must be framed in relation to effect Victorine Meurent, Manet's model here and in and change, not merely aesthetic abstractions, eight other paintings made between 1862 and What Lipton has now come to realize nearly thus the paradoxes involved in the assessment of 1873, a "real" historical personage whose forgot- twenty years after writing these lines is that the formal means as an index of political activity. ten life embodies the narrative desire of all three of unconscious that she has powerfully placed in There remains, then, the difficulty of discussing the authors under review. question is not only that of the presumed male the meaning of photomontage as a medium. Eunice Lipton is by farthe most explicit in spectator (and, indeed, of this we know little), but Dada's expressed position circa 1916-17 in Zurich confessing the impulse, rhythm, and trajectory of it is also, and crucially, her own. was to disturb the symbolic systems of represen- her desire. In her short confessional memoir titled In Alias Olympia Lipton still writes of tation and language as a means of destabilizing Alias Olympia: A Woman4 Search for Manet4 Olympia's "steady gaze," her "unflinching gaze," the rational basis of social order, thus resulting in Notorious Model and Her Own Desire, the for- her "blunt stare": "Locked behind her gaze were thedevelopment of fragmentary, chance-directed mer university professor purports to come clean thoughts, an ego maneuvering" (pp. 2-4). But productions. But in themselves, these techniques where others before her have preferred, in her now she acknowledges, as she could not in the cannot guarantee an ideological value, thus the view, to remain academically obscure. Her exam- art-writing idioms of 1975, that the Olympia who shifting terms on which Heartfield's montages ples are Theodore Reff and T. J. Clark, "the most said "I will not be the object of your gaze" was have been interpreted. Hearffield, however, was dazzling bad boy in the Art History community, perhaps less Manet's Olympia of the 1860s than intent upon effect, not merely changed aesthetic [who] published a notably long, obfuscating, and an emblem of Lipton's own 19705, of "those or social consciousness, but the revolutionary re- tortured essay on Olympia in his bookon Manet" opening salvos of the Women's Movement" (p. structuring of society. The work of Hoch shows (p. 15).' Clark's well-known essay since its publica- 15). "The dare of her gaze" may still have been the difficulties of deconstructing a society in tion in Screen in 1980 and in book form in 1985 historically situated for Lipton in Meurent, "a real which one is oneself an ongoing formation. In her has largely set the terms for our disciplinary en- woman of the nineteenth century," butas Lipton's hands the formal means of Dada fragmentation counters with Manet's painting. His argument is search for the living circumstances of that gaze effect a critique of unified pictorial form as the "that in depicting a prostitute in 1865, Manet and that dare proceeded throughout the 19805, image of unified selfhood, while Ernst was capa- dealt with modernity in one of its most poignant the unnarrated life of Victorine Meurent became ble of recuperating his collage fragments into a and familiar, but also difficult aspects," and, ad- increasingly entangled in her own self-fashioned highly personalized mythology. In the work of dressing the formalist account, that if "the paint- tale of an ambiguous present, an uncertain future, these three artists, the formal means are an inte- ing insists on its own materiality, [it] does so in and and a concealed past. After all, weren't their gral aspect of the meaning of the images, but the through a prostitute's stare, a professional and names the same, "Eunice" meaning "Happy Vic- way the links between this representational strat- standardized attentiveness, with the self reserved tory" in Creek (p. 16)? And as she finally and egy and ideological or political values are con- from the purchaser's l ~ o k i n g . "It~ is this resewed searingly admits: strued must be grounded in an understanding of self of a working-class woman caught up in the I'm struggling to pull Victorinek life out of the their real circumstances and effects. - capitalist web of the bourgeois "game of prostitu- demeaning narratives that were written and the tion" that Clark sees at stake in Olympia's naked disgusting paintings made of her, but Iknow it4 I body and naked stare; and it is this reserved self who am stuck, Iwho am trying to pull free of that Lipton now seeks to return to Victorine some ancient sludge. Iwho am caught i n a tale of J O H A N N A D R U C K E R ~sass~stantprofessorof Meurent. twent~eth-centurya rt and cr~ticaltheory at Columb~a longing and blame, with neither beginning nor Back in 1975 Lipton challenged the pre- Univers~ty Her book The Visible Word: Experimental end (p. 110). Typography 1909-1923 1s forthcoming from the University vailing view of Manet's modernism by insisting of Chicago Press. that not only were his formal innovations radical in So Lipton's unceasing professional search for Vic-

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