Dada's Women (review)
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Ruth Hemus's study focuses on five women of the Dada movement in Zurich, Paris, and Berlin: Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber, Hannah Höch, Suzanne Duchamp, and Céline Arnauld. She emphasizes the key issues in their work: rejection of mimesis and traditional narrative structures; the role of the author; the material qualities of media; integration of technological and mechanistic imagery, photomontage and geometric painting; mixture of genres and art forms; performance; and "collaborative working and experimentation with language" (196).
Dada women artists ran up against the obstacles set before women in the early twentieth century and the general lack of recognition surrounding their work (particularly that of Céline Arnauld). Dada, on the other hand, offered greater freedom for women to innovate in poetry and prose, dance, tapestry, puppetry, doll making, collage, and photomontage—aesthetic modes that eroded high cultural and artistic norms.
Emmy Hennings excelled as an artiste, cabaret performer, singer, dancer, and reciter. Her mixture of genres and art forms on stage at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich reflected the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) theorized by Wagner and Kandinsky and envisaged by her companion, Hugo Ball. Her erotic appeal and "the physicality of her performance and her visual presence as body on stage" (27) led at least one journalist to speak of her as a star attraction.
The output of Sophie Taeuber, also active in the Zurich group, was prolific and innovative: her Dada heads, marionette and puppet shows, her work with embroidery, textiles and papiers collés, her painterly compositions that explored geometric forms, her choreography and participation in experimental dances in the soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire. Taeuber created a vibrant interchange between different genres and art forms that fed into each other, between what was considered high and low culture.
Hannah Höch's work among the Berlin Dadas, as Hemus asserts, has been more widely recognized than that of any other female Dada artist (91). Hemus points to the questioning of German culture and art in Höch's work, particularly in her contribution to the radically innovative form of the photomontage, which "challenged accepted notions about artwork, the artist and the reception of art." Photomontage was the most striking innovation of Berlin Dada and one of the "most important legacies of Dada, indeed of the historical avant-garde more broadly, and Höch was at the centre of these endeavors" (96).
Her best-known photomontage—"Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany"—consists of a plethora of everyday life images clipped from magazines and newspapers, "juxtaposed in size, colour and position" and interspersed with words, phrases and letters that change their context and lend them new meaning (97). The kitchen knife is metaphorically that wielded by the artist herself, with which she severs the context of these very images and through reassemblage reveals a radically "new attitude by, and towards, the artist" (99).
Höch also expanded her use of materials in transforming handicraft clothing patterns and, like Hennings and Taeuber, in experimenting with dolls and puppets that drew attention to agency, identity and gender (123). In brief, her work "foregrounds social norms of patriarchy and the representation of women in art and popular media in ways that do not simply scandalize but raise subtle and complex questions about ways of seeing. Thematically, this was Höch's unique contribution to Dada endeavors" (126).
Suzanne Duchamp's work clearly aligns itself with Dada, both taking from and contributing to its development in Paris and elsewhere during the period 1916-1922. Hemus sets out to show how her work extends and exposes the limits of visual/verbal sign systems, introduces unaccustomed [End Page 134] materials and artistic techniques, and investigates "new ways of depicting identity and sexuality" (163).
Duchamp questions the reigning modes of representation. In communicating her concept of the human condition she "drew on symbols and structures of the industrial world" through machinist images. Often she invested her work with an ambiguous feeling of threat, signifying the...
