History of Photography

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Cut and Paste

David Evans

To cite this article: David Evans (2019) Cut and Paste, History of Photography, 43:2, 156-168

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2019.1695408

Published online: 17 Feb 2020.

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† David Evans

Published posthumously, this article begins with a discussion of the historiogra- phy – and a related exhibition history – of the terms collage, photo-collage, and photomontage; and of the criteria that have been used to distinguish them as techniques, as visual idioms, and for their political implications and resonances as images of fine or applied art. The article then moves on to the work of two living artists who have been cutting and pasting photographs for more than forty years, Martha Rosler and John Stezaker, and the ambiguities of their being described as collagists, monteurs, or photomonteurs. In rethinking these categories, Evans argues for an expansive history of photomontage and collage that has continuing resonance today. Keywords: Martha Rosler (1943–present), John Stezaker (1949–present), collage, photo-collage, photomontage, John Heartfield (1891–1968), Hannah Höch (1889–1978), El Lissitzky (1890–1941), Alexandr Rodchenko (1891–1956)

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has become – amongst many other things – an † incommensurable photographic archive, providing a rich resource for an unpre- See the entry on David Evans in the sec- cedented number of amateurs and professionals who wish to ‘cut and paste’, tion on Contributors at the end of this often using editing software like Photoshop. At the same time, the pervasiveness issue. Our thanks to Fred Poinat and Chloe Evans for their help and permission of electronic media has encouraged a renewed enthusiasm for working with real to publish this. scalpels and scissors, paper, and paste, as well as an engagement with the history of the combined photographic image across the twentieth century. There is an abundanceofneologismsthatseektocharacterisethiscontemporaryphenom- enon – mash-up, remixing, and sampling are some obvious examples, all regis- tering the influence of DJ culture on contemporary art. In addition, however, the ongoing use of older terms like collage, photo-collage, and photomontage is associated with the activities of the historic avant-gardes in the first half of the twentieth century. The contemporary combined image has been the theme of numerous international surveys in recent years. Much of the related critical writing offers a bewildering mix of old and new concepts, adding to the confu- sion by often throwing in notions from the mid or late twentieth century like assemblage, détournement, and appropriation. An overall assessment of the whole of this thicket of terms, however, is not my aim in this article. Rather, I begin by considering the terms collage, photo- collage, and photomontage. This discussion then informs my case studies of two artists who have been ‘cutting and pasting’ photographs, literally and sometimes virtually, for more than four decades, and who both regularly feature in shows on contemporary collage. Case study one: Martha Rosler, sympathetic to the history of photomontage, but not opposed to being in exhibitions devoted to collage. Case study two: John Stezaker, currently happy with the label collagist, and generally averse to being described as a monteur.

History of Photography, Volume 43, Number 2, May 2019 https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2019.1695408 # 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Cut and Paste

Past Differentiating collage, photo-collage, and photomontage according to technical criteria continues to be highly influential, exemplified by the writings of American curator and scholar William Rubin. He associates collage with pasting diverse materials onto paper or canvas; photo-collage is a collage in which photographic fragments are an important component; and photomontage involves some form of darkroom work like making sized prints, or sandwiching negatives in an enlarger. In the catalogue of the 1968 exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, Rubin writes of the Dadaists in Berlin: ‘The most significant contribution of the Berlin group was the elaboration of the so-called photomontage, actually a photo- 1 1 – William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and collage, since the images were not montaged in the darkroom’. His emphasis on their Heritage, New York: Museum of what artists did, rather than what they said they were doing, continues to Modern Art 1968, 42. reverberate. Rubin’s distinctions are implicitly endorsed in Peter Galassi’s essay about the photography of Alexandr Rodchenko for a catalogue accompanying a major exhibition on all aspects of the artist’s work, held at New York’s MoMA in 1998. Three decades after the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, Galassi describes work that artists in 1920s Germany or the Soviet Union would have called photomontage, as ‘photocollage’ (without Rubin’s hyphen). Thus, he 2 2 – Peter Galassi, ‘Rodchenko and discusses Raoul Hausmann’s reflections on ‘the rise of photocollage’, even though Photography’s Revolution’,inAleksandr the former Berlin Dadaist did not used the term in ‘Photomontage’, a talk he gave Rodchenko, ed. Magdalena Dubrowski, at the 1931 exhibition also titled Photomontage.3 Elza Adamowicz similarly Leah Dickerson, and Peter Galassi, ’ New York: Museum of Modern Art 1998, deploys Rubin s distinctions in her major study of interwar Surrealist collage. 107. She, too, assumes that collage is the basic category, and photo-collage and photo- 3 – Raoul Hausmann, ‘Photomontage’,in montage are subcategories, that is, forms of collage with a photographic dimen- Photography in the Modern Era: European sion. For Adamowicz, the main criterion for distinguishing a Surrealist photo- Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips, collage from a Surrealist photomontage is whether or not the image was created in 4 New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/ a darkroom. Aperture 1989, 178–81. The limitations of the technical orientation particularly associated with – 4 Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Rubin was implicitly challenged in the ambitious 1991 exhibition Montage Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite – Corpse, Cambridge: Cambridge University and Modern Life 1919 1942 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston. Press 1998, 142–44. Its material was mainly from Germany, the Soviet Union, and the USA, in a period roughly framed by the two world wars. ‘Original’ photomontages, which often used photographic fragments taken from the illustrated press, were juxtaposed with mass-produced examples that often used the illustrated press as an outlet. Celebrated avant-garde practitioners rubbed shoulders with anon- ymous or barely known figures, and wide-ranging work from various countries was displayed in bold thematic sections.Inaddition,theinclusionofafilm programme as an integral element of the exhibition drew attention to the links between cinematic editing – or montage – and photomontage. Overall, the exhibition sought to prove that montage, still and moving, effectively registered the basic characteristics of modern life such as discontinuity, fragmentation, repetition, and simultaneity. In his preface to the catalogue, Matthew Teitelbaum claims that the exhibition Montage and Modern Life ‘invokes the 5 5 – Matthew Teitelbaum, ‘Preface’,in discontinuous and the ruptured as the talismans of our century’. In a similar Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942, ed. vein, the introduction by Christopher Phillips presents montage as an innova- Matthew Teitelbaum, Cambridge, MA: tive technique that also functioned ‘as a kind of symbolic form, providing MIT Press 1992, 7. a shared visual idiom that more than any other expressed the tumultuous 6 6 – Christopher Phillips, ‘Introduction’,in arrival of a fully urbanized, industrial culture’. ibid., 22. Montage and Modern Life successfully responded to the widespread view that photomontage is a mere footnote in the history of collage, but the exhibition was not without problems. Firstly, giving equal weight to material from Germany, the Soviet Union, and the USA drew attention away from a central paradox: in Weimar Germany, especially, the USA was so widely associated with ‘modern life’ that the neologism ‘Americanism’ was often used as another way of saying

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Modernism, yet photomontage emerged there far later than in either Germany or the Soviet Union. Significantly, Sally Stein’s contribution to the exhibition catalo- 7 gue is subtitled ‘American Resistance to Photomontage between the Wars’. 7 – Sally Stein, ‘American Resistance to Secondly, the thematic presentation ended up obscuring how photomontage sig- Photomontage Between the Wars’, in ibid., – nificantly evolved in the interwar period. Thirdly, the exhibition left unanswered 128 89. how photomontage related to collage. I address these issues in reverse order, starting with a consideration of two earlier exhibitions dealing with collage and photomontage, respectively. An exhibition of collages by twelve artists was held in 1930 at the Galerie Goemans in Paris, with a tie-in publication by Surrealist poet Aragon called La Peinture au défi. The ‘challenge’ he identifies is two decades of collage experi- mentation, beginning with Cubism, developed by Dadaism, and consummated by Surrealism. Paris is assumed to be the site of this revolution, although many of the major participants – Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, for instance – are born outside France. Aragon also makes a brief reference to photomontage:

Several believed they could resolve the problem of art’s inutility by adapting artistic means to the ends of propaganda. Thus, in Russia and Central Europe, collage gave birth to those photomontages particularly employed by the constructivists.8 8 – Louis Aragon, La peinture au défi, Paris: Galerie Goemans 1930, 22. The plates section of the catalogue includes two Soviet examples which were not in the exhibition but relate to this quotation. Plate XIV is Encore une tasse de thé by Alexandr Rodchenko, selected from his visual contribution to the book of 9 Vladimir Mayakovsky’s love poem Pro Eto (About This). Plate XI is El 9 – Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pro Eto, Lissitzky’s Tribune or The Lenin Podium (1924), incorporating one of a series of Moscow: LEF 1923. famous press photographs of Lenin addressing Red Army troops, about to leave Moscow for Poland in 1920. In the original photographs, Lenin speaks from a temporary wooden rostrum in a crowded Sverdlov Square, but in the new version, the Soviet leader is isolated and elevated, addressing the workers of the world from the top of a sweeping structure designed to emphasise the gesture of the orator. For Aragon, the two works sum up the transition made in the Soviet Union from collage or photo-collage (Pro Eto) to photomontage (The Lenin Podium), with the latter distinguished by its explicitly partisan message. Overall, he links photomontage to: a region – Central and Eastern Europe; a moment – the dynastic collapse provoked by the First World War; a new type of politics – the revolu- tionary wave across the region, inspired by the success of Lenin and the Bolsheviks; and a new type of applied art commensurate with the breach in reality represented by the 1917 revolution. In short, photomontage is the outcome of a novel encounter between artistic and political vanguards. Fotomontage, at the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum in 1931, was curated by Dutch artist César Domela-Nieuwenhuis and included around fifty contributors. In his catalogue essay, Domela-Nieuwenhuis presents photomontage as a Dada– Constructivist innovation stretching from Holland to the Soviet Union, via Germany, with its capital in Berlin. Historically, the German capital is associated with the ‘invention’ of the medium by Berlin Dadaists. In the 1920s, it becomes the base for many contemporary practitioners, often migrating from abroad or other parts of Germany. Furthermore, its overall importance and location in Central 10 Europe makes it the main outlet for Soviet experimentation. 10 – César Domela-Niewenhuis, In a related talk, former Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann offered a brief ‘Fotomontage’,inFotomontage, Berlin: history of a new form in which photographs and printed texts are combined to Staatliche Museen 1931, np. make something like what he memorably calls ‘static film’. Basically, he contrasts Dadaist photomontage – an ‘explosion of viewpoints and a whirling confusion of picture planes’–with more recent work within commercial and political contexts 11 where the emphasis is on clear, unambiguous messages. Examples of commercial 11 – Raoul Hausmann, in ibid., np. photomontage were well represented in Domela-Nieuwenhuis’s exhibition by the

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work of the Ring neuer Werbegestalter (Circle of New Advertising Designers, often referred to as the RNW or Ring), an international group of artist-designers or designer-artists in existence from 1927 to 1931, and coordinated from Hanover by Kurt Schwitters. A rich selection of new political photomontage was also in the exhibition, primarily work by the Soviet collective October (1928–32), and by ASSO (1928–33), a group of artists and graphic designers based in Berlin who were responsible for the visual publicity of the German Communist Party. In the catalogue, Hausmann is dismissive of those who claim that photomontage is outdated and at a dead end, and predicts a great future for it. One could present the two exhibitions as a continuation of World War One on the cultural front: collage versus photomontage; Paris versus Berlin; France versus Germany. Indeed, Aragon implies that Soviet photomontage evolved from (Paris-based) collage, and the absence of any reference to collage in Domela- Nieuwenhuis’s essay, or Hausmann’s speech, for Fotomontage is striking. Yet what is even more striking is the common ground. No one is interested in the technical classification offered much later by Rubin. Rather, the shared assumption is that photomontage became photomontage when it evolved into a form of applied art. For Aragon, this evolution was exemplified by Soviet developments in the 1920s. Fotomontage endorses this perspective with its inclusion of work by the group October. Its name was a conscious allusion to the October Revolution of 1917, registering the belief that members were helping to complete an unfinished revolution. Lenin had led the first successful challenge to capitalism, it was assumed, and from 1928 Stalin was initiating an economic revolution – the First Five Year Plan – that would complement and complete Lenin’s project. Appropriately, the manifestoes and statements of the October group are domi- nated by military terminology, with professional artists redefining themselves as the cultural equivalent of the ‘shock troops’ of industry, using art as a weapon to generate mass mobilisation. Similar bellicosity underpins the activities of ASSO. Like their Soviet counterparts, ASSO members regard themselves as combatants in class warfare, using art to educate and arouse the German masses, and to protect 12 12 – Leah Dickerman, ‘Lenin in the Age of the Soviet Union. Mechanical Reproduction’,inDisturbing Aragon, Domela-Nieuwenhuis, and Hausmann all agreed that within the Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the political sphere, photomontage was exclusively associated with the Communist Twentieth Century, ed. Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, Los Angeles: Getty cause. Unlike Aragon, however, the organisers of the Berlin exhibition were also Research Institute 2001, 77–110. keen to foreground how photomontage was being used to address consumers as a well as comrades, and members of the Ring were strongly represented. Fotomontage included seven of its thirteen founding members, as well as five regular guests. Most members and guests lived and worked in Germany, or neighbouring countries like Holland and Czechoslovakia. Overall, the Ring aimed to define and promote the new profession of commercial design. It included artists whose interests extended to graphic design, and graphic designers with an interest in art, but there was a shared assumption that a traditional division of labour between fine and applied artists was increasingly irrelevant. The Ring, ASSO, and October all contributed to Fotomontage, but only the two Communist associations had separate sections, implying that an unbridgeable gap existed between proletarian and bourgeois cultures. In practice, things were less clear-cut. Take October member El Lissitzky: for Aragon, he exemplified the militant monteur, but he also did commercial work in Germany, most notably for the Pelikan pen and ink company in Hanover. Or take John Heartfield: he was a member of ASSO, but also a guest contributor to various exhibitions organised by the Ring. Max Gebhard was another ASSO member whose activities in the graphics workshop of the German Communist Party were subsidised by daytime work in the commercial studios of Hebert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy. Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema were prominent members of the Ring, but also did

159 David Evans graphic work in their spare time for the Dutch Communist Party. Also, the curator of Fotomontage, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, combined commercial and political work, although his sympathies lay with the anarcho-syndicalist traditions of Holland. So far, I have argued that photomontage emerged across the 1920s as a distinctive form of applied art in Central and Eastern Europe, used for both commercial and political ends, with the latter overwhelmingly Soviet or Soviet-oriented. Rather than technique, it is these practical tasks, and their regional specificity, that provide a historically grounded way of differentiating collage, or photo-collage, and photomontage, I assume. However, proving the rule depends on recognising the exceptions. A number of figures juggled applied work and private experimentation, such as Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart. Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch stand out as rare figures who never used photomontage for applied purposes. Take Höch. She was a Berlin Dadaist, and her photomontages were included in the group’s consummative ‘fair’ Dada Messe, in Berlin in 1920. Across the 1920s, her public reputation was mainly based on her painting, but she continued to make photomontages, ‘primarily as a private passion after the dissolution of 13 Dada’. She only began to exhibit her secret works in the late 1920s and early 13 – Peter Boswell, ‘Hannah Höch: 1930s, in shows like Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929 and Fotomontage in Berlin Through the Looking Glass’,inThe in 1931. In 1934, the first solo show devoted to her photomontages was held in Photomontages of Hannah Höch, ed. Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, Minneapolis: Brno, Czechoslovakia. Containing thirty-four works, this was to be the most Walker Art Center 1996, 11. comprehensive public display of her photomontages until her rediscovery after the Second World War. The Brno exhibition also provided the opportunity for her to reflect on photomontage in an article published in a local cultural journal. There, she distinguishes ‘applied’ and ‘free-form’ photomontage. The former is associated with advertising and photojournalism, whilst the latter lacks utilitarian goals. She is only animated by the latter, and she particularly stresses that the ‘free- form’ artist must recognise and value the ‘beauties of fortuity’, in other words, the 14 creative accident. 14 – Maud Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Hausmann’s talk as transcribed in the catalogue for Fotomontage concludes Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of with a confident prediction about a great future for a new form that many thought Hannah Höch, New Haven: Yale University Press 1993, 219–20. had run its course. His optimism was to be proven unfounded, it has often been argued, primarily because Hitler and Stalin were soon to suppress all forms of innovative art in Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. A sophisticated reformulation of this familiar view is found in the writings of Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh acknowledges that avant-garde experimentation flourished in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s when Stalin was already in power. Indeed, he regards El Lissitzky’s photomontage-based installation for the Soviet contribu- tion to Pressa, the international Press exhibition held in Cologne in 1928, as epochal. Cultural closure, however, followed the First Five Year Plan, he argues, especially after the success in 1933 of a National Socialist leader whose hostility to 15 – Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From the Soviet Union was matched by a hostility to modern art.15 Faktura to Factography’, October,30 – Yet Hausmann’s upbeat prognosis in 1931 was more right than wrong, it (Autumn 1984), 82 119. 16 – See, for example, Michael Tymkiw, could be counterargued. In part, this is because film, photography, and photo- Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism, montagewerenotgenerallyassociated with avant-garde art in Stalin’sRussiaor Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Hitler’sGermany.Rather,bothdictatorstreated them as modern technologies 2018; Margarita Tupitysn, Gustav Klutsis that could provide sophisticated ways of consolidating and extending power and Valentina Kulagina: Photography and 16 Montage after Modernism, New York: and authority. One notable development in the 1930s, I suggest, is the International Center of Photography 2009; attempt by all political currents to make use of photomontage to offer rival Sabine T. Kriebel, ‘Photomontage in visions of the popular. National Socialists, for instance, advanced in the name the Year 1932: John Heartfield and the ’ of the Volk, drawing on the intellectual authority of eighteenth-century National Socialists , Oxford Art Journal, 1:1 (2008), 97–127; and Sabine T. Kriebel, German philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder, who defended an Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical understanding of culture that stressed specific forms of life, inherited from Photomontages of John Heartfield, Berkeley: University of California Press 2014.

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ancestors, and transmitted by a distinctive language. Herder’sideaswere developed as an alternative to those emerging from Britain and France, espe- cially, that foregrounded civilisation as potentially a universal condition if the monsters of religious superstition and irrationalism could be banished. The contemporary analogies would have been obvious to the National Socialists: the Soviet Union and its international network of supporters had replaced Britain 17 17 – David Evans, ‘Spanish Heartfield’,in and France as the main threat to the Volk. The Thirties: Theater of Cruelty, Place of The Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 gave Hitler’s government a perfect Encounter, ed. Ruth Gallego and Ángel opportunity to counter recent bad press, and an elaborate exhibition celebrating Serrano, Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia 2013, 171–86. life in the Third Reich was held not too far from the Olympic Stadium. The Deutsche Ausstellung (German Exhibition), designed by former Bauhaus Master Herbert Bayer, made extensive use of photomontage, and recent critical writing has emphasised the extent to which he shamelessly adapted ideas about photo- graphically based installation pioneered by El Lissitzky at the 1928 exhibition 18 18 – Ulrich Pohlmann, ‘El Lissitzky’s Pressa. In addition, Bayer was also commissioned to design a tie-in prospectus. Exhibition Designs: The Influence of His He produced a booklet of duotone photomontages in a range of techniques that Work in Germany, Italy and the United deal with German countryside, cultural history, and contemporary life. In this, States, 1923–43’,inPublic Photographic Spaces: Propaganda Exhibitions from Pressa Bayer tends to combine photographs and pre-photographic engravings for topics to The Family of Man, 1928–55, Barcelona: related to the German past; when dealing with the present, his style is far closer to Museu D’art Contemporani de Barcelona Weimar and Soviet experimentation of the 1920s and early 1930s; overall, he offers – 2009, 182 88. an airbrushed portrait of Hitler’s Germany that omits any reference to disturbing aspects of domestic and foreign policy. Instead, he inventively deploys photomon- tage to present a benign Volk, happy with a kultur in which the sensitive pre- servation of a national heritage is combined with an embrace of modernisation, all 19 19 – David Evans, ‘The Holiday of wisely overseen by the Führer. a Lifetime’, Eye, 53 (Autumn 2004), 2–3. Against Volk and kultur, the theorists of the Popular Front strategy – adopted by Moscow in 1935 – posed the democratic and universal values associated with the French Revolution, with the Soviet Union as their rightful custodian. Hence, the significance of Stalin’s new constitution of 1936 in which the Soviet Union is treated as the standard bearer of Western civilisation, under threat from fascist barbarism. The constitution was the subject of a special issue of the illustrated journal USSR in Construction, published in various languages to attract audiences outside the Soviet Union. This issue was particularly sumptuous, in part because of its important theme, but also because it was to be distributed at the World Fair in Paris, 1937. The designers were El Lissitzky and his wife Sophie Lissitzky Küppers, 20 20 – Special issue ‘Stalin Constitution’, credited as the Lissitzkys. USSR in Construction, 9, 10, 11, and 12 The combination of photographs, here, is relatively prudent: overlapping – (October December 1937). portraits of Communist heroes, or a photomontage in which an image of Vera Mukhina’s giant sculpture of a worker and peasant, made to top the Soviet Pavilion at the World Fair, is astride a globe on which the Soviet Union has been clearly marked. Innovation, rather, involves the complex juxtaposition of photographic and non-photographic material. Photographs and combined photo- graphs abound, but it is very important to note that the designers used reproduc- tions of oil paintings to illustrate the heroic days of the Russian Revolution and the relatively minor medium of caricature to illustrate the iniquities of capitalism. Particularly striking is an extravagant use of detachable colour reproductions of carpets in the section devoted to the various republics that together comprise the Soviet Union. On one level, the Lissitzkys are pinpointing national diversity, supposedly protected under the Soviet constitution of 1936; on another level, they are identifying a success story – an industry associated with women weavers, in decline under the tsars, and now reviving; and on a third level, the detachable colour plates parody the luxurious publications associated with the capitalist art world. In this politically charged issue of USSR in Construction there is a conscious mixing of high and low art forms, and old and new media. The strategy is

161 David Evans deliberate, presenting the Soviet Union as a sophisticated, future-oriented culture that respects the past, as well as democratic values. It is doubly eligible, therefore, to defend Western civilisation against its Fascist enemies. For design historian Victor Margolin, the work of the Lissitzkys on this issue merits the new label ‘full- 21 blown epic narrative style’. 21 – Victor Margolin, The Struggle for To recap, photomontage emerged in the 1920s as a new type of applied art, Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, – especially influential in Central and Eastern Europe. In this first decade, political 1917 1946, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997, 196. photomontage was particularly associated with the Soviet Union and its foreign supporters like the German Communist Party. In the 1930s, however, the mono- poly came to an end, with Right and Left using photomontage to both define and appeal to the people. This was also the era when photomontage lost its regional specificity, in part because the establishment of the Third Reich generated a creative brain drain, with the USA as a popular destination. A key mediator between Old and New Worlds was Herbert Bayer, who left Berlin for the USA in 1937. One of Bayer’s specialties was exhibition design in which photomontage, expansively defined, was a major element, and he quickly got to work in the USA on prestige projects. In 1938 he designed the Bauhaus 1919–1928 exhibition at MoMA, New York. During World War Two, he was a crucial adviser to Edward Steichen, whose official exhibition Road to Victory, during May–October 1942, adapted and developed the photomontage techniques pioneered by El Lissitzky at 22 Pressa in 1928, now to mobilise American support for the war effort. 22 – Christopher Phillips, ‘Steichen’s “Road to Victory”’, Exposure, 18:2 (1980), 38–48.

Present The exhibition Montage and Modern Life had aimed to be more than a historic survey. It had also been intended as a contribution to contemporary art debates in the USA, where photography was often assumed to be an important com- ponent of a new postmodern practice. Significantly, the exhibition organisers were advised by Benjamin Buchloh, whose writings across the 1980s, such as the article ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in 23 Contemporary Art’, treated Walter Benjamin’snotionofallegoryas 23 – Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Allegorical a concept which bridged interwar, modernist photomontage and contemporary, Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in ’ postmodern experiments with the photographic fragment. In practise, Montage Contemporary Art , Artforum, 21:1 (1982), 43–56. and Modern Life did not attempt to explicitly develop Buchloh’ssearchfor a usable past. No recent work was included in the exhibition and the organisers appeared divided about the relationship between art of the past and that of the present.Thelinksaremademostexplicitlyinthecatalogueprefaceby Matthew Teitelbaum:

At the unspoken center of this exhibition lie the various ways contemporary artists have acknowledged two related goals of montage techniques in the 1920s: the goal of finding a means to represent the modern metropolis developing at that time, and the goal of building a mass media culture designed for consumption by growing urban classes. The search for a means to reflect and complicate our understanding of the realities of a modern, urban lifestyle, and the search for a means to play with the fantasy and desire of a consumer age is fundamental to this investigation.24 24 – Teitelbaum, ‘Preface’, 11. Christopher Phillips, however, is more guarded about the contemporary relevance of interwar montage. He cites with approval the sceptical claim of Theodor Adorno that familiarity with montage had already neutralised its shock value by the 1950s. At the end of the twentieth century, Phillips adds, ‘montage may in fact no longer offer the most satisfying or audacious way to represent our own “culture 25 of fragments”’. 25 – Phillips, ‘Introduction’, 35. Yet at the start of the twenty-first century there is a renewed excitement about ‘cutting and pasting’, and well-established terms like collage, photo-- collage, and photomontage are given a dusting and set to work again. Collage:

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The Unmonumental Picture, at the New Museum, New York in 2007, was a symptomatic group exhibition. It included eleven artists, mainly from the USA, but the presence of contributors from five additional countries con- firmed that the show was dealing with an international phenomenon. The works exhibited were overwhelmingly post-2000, although their creators spanned several generations. Texts in the catalogue all stress dimensions of contemporary reality that encourage the return of collage. For Lisa Phillips, ‘it is a most appropriate medium in a world where words and images bombard us in rapid succession and conspicuous consumption is tied to personal 26 26 – Lisa Phillips, ‘Preface’,inCollage: The happinessaswellaspatrioticduty’. In a similar vein, Laura Hoptman Unmonumental Picture, ed. Richard Flood, relates collage now to ‘contemporary fractures caused by vast political, social, London and New York: Merrell/New and cultural unrest, technological change on an unprecedented scale, and Museum 2007, 5. ’ 27 27 – Laura Hoptman, ‘Collage Now: The vicious, multi-national war . Richard Flood too is confident about the future Seamier Side’, in ibid., 11. of collage since it currently exists as a mass phenomenon in everything from the Internet to the many contemporary bodies adorned with eclectic collec- tions of tattoos. Indeed, ‘we are all changing parts in the respirant collage’,he 28 28 – Richard Flood, ‘Tear Me Apart, One concludes ominously. Letter at a Time’, in ibid., 9 (original Collage: The Unmonumental Picture included Martha Rosler (USA) and emphasis). John Stezaker (UK). Both have been combining photographs in inventive ways for more than four decades, and in his catalogue essay Massimiliano Gioni treats them as outstanding examples of two fundamentally different approaches to collage. Rosler, he suggests, is the ethically responsible artist, reworking the medium to analyse, and critically comment on, the so-called War on Terror. In other words, she is the citizen-artist, aiming to address fellow citizens about pressing issues of mutual concern. In contrast, Stezaker values ‘ambiguity’, 29 29 – Massimiliano Gioni, ‘It’s not the Glue ‘obscurity’,and‘opacity’, to use the terms used by Gioni. Is he right? Rather that Makes the Collage’, in ibid., 13. than answering Gioni directly, I wish to note that he considers Rosler and Stezaker as collage artists and does not mention photo-collage or photomontage, even though both artists primarily work with found photographs. (One could speculatethattheywouldhavebeenconsidered for the abandoned contemporary show that was supposed to complement the historic Montage and Modern Life at the ICA, Boston, in 1991.) My discussion does not automatically assume that collage is an unproblematic, umbrella term. Rather, I wish to reflect on a monteur who is a reluctant collagist (Rosler) and a collagist who is a reluctant monteur (Stezaker). Firstly, Martha Rosler. Her contribution to Collage: The Unmonumental Picture was the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (2004–2008), prompted by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and it is described in the accompanying catalogue as photomontage. Relentlessly, her fourteen works dis- rupt images of domestic tranquillity ‘here’ (the USA) with war and mayhem ‘there’ (Iraq). The Internet is a major source for her photographic imagery in which cell phones and flat screens abound, but her working methods are deliberately pre- digital. Instead of software, she deploys a scalpel, cow gum, and paper, and there is no attempt to disguise joins through retouching. It is a calculated ruse, with Rosler hoping that her crudity (in the positive, Brechtian sense) will encourage viewers to forget their various electronic prostheses for a moment, and instead reflect on the basic brutality of contemporary reality, despite its high-definition, digital mediation. House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home is also the title of an earlier series Rosler made between 1967 and 1972, in response to American involvement in Vietnam. Here, too, the aim is to interrupt a lazy tendency to clearly differentiate home (represented by photographs from the interior design magazine House – ‘ Beautiful) and abroad (war photographs from Life). In the mid 1990s, she retro- 30 Martha Rosler, Place, Position, Power, ‘ ’ ‘ ’ Politics’,inDecoys and Disruptions: Selected spectively described this series as antiwar montages or antiwar agitation , aids to 30 Writings, 1975–2001, Cambridge, MA: MIT mobilisation that were made to be used in street protest or the underground. The Press 2004, 355.

163 David Evans series was not intended for an art context, she states emphatically. Yet the new series is. A contradiction? No, the artist would insist. She continues to agitate with works that are strident and unambiguous, but already in the 1990s she feels obliged to respond to a dramatically changed situation in which operating outside 31 the ‘gallery-museum-magazine system’ risks invisibility. 31 – Ibid., 355–56. The catalogue for Collage also contains a statement from Rosler written in 2007 in which she oscillates between the words collage and montage, or photo- montage. In her opening paragraph, she characterises collage as a ‘productive fiction’ that ‘suspends the perceiver between the possible and the impossible or unlikely’ and declares a preference for works that draw attention to space. Mid- way, she comments that her collages are more properly described as photomon- tages. In her concluding paragraph, she finally admits that she prefers the word montage to collage because it is less static, suggesting all kinds of temporality, as well as drawing attention to printed sources –‘It suggests sequences held together 32 by things other than glue’. 32 – Martha Rosler, in Collage, ed. Flood, 96. It is instructive to relate this statement to the contents of her book Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001. Not much on collage, I note straightaway, and more on photomontage! In the important article ‘Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations’ (first version, 1989), photomontage is described as an ‘aesthetic-political technique’, pioneered by Dadaists and Soviet Constructivists, and exemplified by John Heartfield whose work still provides 33 ‘an unsurpassed example of political photomontage’. She particularly praises 33 – Martha Rosler, ‘Image Simulations, his work in the 1930s for the Communist magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung Computer Manipulations’,inDecoys and and selects the 1935 photomontage Hurrah,dieButteristalle!(Hurrah, No Disruptions, 279. 34 Butter!) as a full-page illustration. The montage shows a family at the table 34 – Ibid., 280. (figure 1). Everyone, including the pet dog, is eating iron, and a bicycle appears to be the main dish of the day. Swastika wallpaper, a portrait of the Führer on the wall, and a cushion depicting President Hindenburg on the sofa all signal the Third Reich, as does the quotation from a recent speech by General Goering: ‘It is iron that makes an empire strong. At best, butter and lard make a people fat’. In many ways, Heartfield’s work is different from that of Rosler (figure 2). Hurrah, die Butter ist alle! gains its sardonic dynamics by responding literally to the rhetoric of Goering, but her photomontages never use text in this way; Heartfield’s work of the 1930s involves elaborate preparatory artwork, with considerable retouching, to exploit the nuances that were possible with copper- plate rotogravure, but Rosler favours rough edges; he is Old Left, committed to Soviet Communism, but she is New Left, marked by Feminism. Nevertheless, there is common ground. Both have a shared belief that photomontage can have a popular appeal, reaching and influencing audiences beyond the art gallery or museum. Rosler makes no comment on Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!,butonecan assume that she sees a rapport between Heartfield’s blurring of public and private worlds in this work and her two series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home. Secondly, John Stezaker. For Collage, he supplied thirteen works, all made in 2005 and described in the exhibition catalogue as photo-collages. Most are titled Film Portrait and incorporate publicity shots of movie stars. Each photo-collage makes a single ‘grotesque’ out of two portraits, although there is variation in the ways in which the two are combined. Sometimes the starting point is the removal of a wedge from the main portrait, for example. On other occasions, the composite face is made by bringing together two equally sized fragments or by placing a fragment on an underlying portrait. Nominal attempts are made to create a single portrait from two, often by aligning eyes or mouths or hairlines, but Stezaker simultaneously wants his viewers to mull over the separate elements. Overall, the editing is very restrained,

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Figure 1. John Heartfield, Hurrah, die Butter ist alle! (Hurrah, No Butter!), 1935. © The Heartfield Community of Heirs/ DACS.

often giving the impression there has been a chance encounter between images, with the artist merely supplying the worktable. Stezaker’stextintheCollage catalogue does not straightforwardly sup- plement the main theme of the show. It is an interview from 2006 that begins ‘Much of your work seems not really to involve collage so much as an economy of cutting and removing’,hereplies:‘Yes, and that is something that occurred to me very early on as what I saw as an apocalyptic possibility for art: that it could be reduced to a process of subtraction from the media 35 35 – John Stezaker, ‘Interview’,inCollage, image’. He gives as an example a work from the 1970s in which he clips ed. Flood, 118. a photograph of Big Ben plus an ‘apocalyptic’ sunset from a giant tourist postcard of London. Nevertheless, his international profile at the moment rests primarily on him being hailed as a major collagist. He is given promi- nence in the historic survey Collage: The Making of Modern Art by Brandon

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Figure 2. Martha Rosler, Photo Op, 2004. From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, 2004–2008. © Martha Rosler, image courtesy of Martha Rosler.

36 Taylor, as well as regularly appearing in publications such as Collage: 36 – Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making Assembling Contemporary Art by Blanche Craig37 or The Age of Collage: of Modern Art, London: Thames and Contemporary Collage in Modern Art edited by Dennis Busch and others.38 Hudson 2004. 37 – Blanche Craig, Collage: Assembling In addition, he contributes to many group exhibitions similar to Collage: The Contemporary Art, London: Black Dog Unmonumental Picture, and there has also been a cascade of recent solo Publishing 2008. shows, most notably at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2012. The latter 38 – The Age of Collage: Contemporary was a retrospective of photographic-based works over more than three Collage in Modern Art, ed. Dennis Busch, Henni Hellige, Robert Klanten, and Silke decades, with an emphasis on Stezaker as a key figure behind the reemer- Krohn, Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2013. gence of collage. In the substantial Whitechapel catalogue of 2010, Stezaker’s work is cate- gorised as collage, found image, or image fragment, and the term photomontage is notably absent. It is therefore intriguing to come across an essay in the catalogue by art historian Dawn Ades that is titled ‘John Stezaker: Monteur’. She states quite categorically that he prefers the term collage to photomontage because the latter has now become firmly associated with a certain type of hard-hitting, politically engaged imagery that eschews ambiguity – 1930s Heartfield, for instance. On the other hand, Ades informs us, Stezaker would not reject the term montage artist or Monteur if that encouraged viewers to link his work to another former Berlin Dadaist whose photomontages never tried to be weapons of political propaganda – 39 Hannah Höch. 39 – Dawn Ades, ‘John Stezaker: Monteur’, Höch, like Stezaker decades later, was fascinated by cinema, collected film in John Stezaker, ed. Dawn Ades, Michael ephemera, and drew on her collection to make new work. Take Indische Bracewell, and John Stezaker, London: Whitechapel Gallery/Ridinghouse 2011, Tänzerin (Indian Female Dancer), a 1930 photomontage that combines the 27–28. mask of an Indian goddess with a still of French film actress Jeanne Falconetti playing Joan in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc from 1928 (figure 3). As noted earlier, Höch aims to generate multiple meanings in her ‘free-form’ photomontages, which does not necessarily mean that her work lacks identifi- able preoccupations. Indische Tänzerin, for instance, relates to a widespread belief amongst artists and intellectuals in the 1920s that film (and the

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Figure 3. Hannah Höch, Indische Tänzerin (Indian Female Dancer), 1930. © DACS 2019.

illustrated press) employed the most advanced methods of mechanical repro- ducibility, yet the end result seemed to be a return to a preliterate, pictographic form of communication. In other words, modern, mass culture had primitivist dimensions and Höch was an archaeologist or ethnographer of the present. There are some obvious parallels with the work that is on the cover of the Whitechapel publication that accompanied the Stezaker show. Called Mask xxxv (2007), it is a further example of a second item being placed onto a film publicity portrait, although in this case the added element is an old, tinted postcard of Lydstep Cavern, near Tenby, and it is the shapes of the rock formations that are aligned to the underlying face, especially the lips (figure 4). This could be another comment on imperfect beauty, but equally plausible is an interpretation that stresses different temporalities – the long duration of nature versus the short duration of modern culture, and both versus the even shorter duration of human life. My sketches of Rosler and Stezaker have served their purpose if they query two widespread assumptions informing Collage: The Unmonumental Picture. Assumption one: both are simply collagists. Assumption two: Rosler is transparent

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Figure 4. John Stezaker, Mask xxxv, 2007. Courtesy of Bona Montague, London.

and political, whereas Stezaker is opaque and apolitical. Instead, I have made the case for relating both artists to an expansive history of photomontage that con- tinues to have contemporary resonances.

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