The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (review)

The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin is a thoroughly researched account of one of the essential stops in the network of international Dada—perhaps the first art movement to appear more or less spontaneously at points in northern Europe and North America at about the same time. By constraining himself to Berlin, Matthew Biro announces the strategy that reveals the strength of the book—allowing in its focus a subtle, detailed exegesis—while exposing its area of weakness as well. Dada, as we are correctly told, incorporated dispersal and connectivity among its chief strategies; obviously demonstrated in the inter-relationships of its collaborating participants but also in the "distracted" principles of the work they achieved. These are to be seen particularly in the photomontages of Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, around whom the central argument turns. We never examine, however, the implications of these strategies as they were manifested further afield and so, through his own process of selection, Biro ignores the activities of equally important Dada exponents in Switzerland, America and then progressively in Europe when the war came to an end. It is this fertile period when the movement of people and ideas began again that Dada developed into a relational and intriguingly joined-up practice that is ignored in the book. Why in Chapter 3, for instance, in an analysis of Hausmann's montage Elasticum do the terms "popocabia" and "pipicabia"—distortions of Francis Picabia's name—appear without further explanation other than that they were used scatologically? That much we might deduce for ourselves but, less obviously and perhaps more importantly, what was Hausmann's relationship with Picabia at the time? Was the epithet intended to cause offense? Was Picabia even aware of it? Picabia, after all, had included or was about to include Hausmann in his own internationally engaged, frequently scurrilous "391" review in that same year. And again in Chapter 5 Biro includes a fascinating discussion on a form of reverse colonialism in Germany, when the French army sent Senegalese troops to occupy the Rhineland in 1919. This was an action that was calculated to exacerbate racial tensions; to illustrate this, Biro shows Gulbransson's cartoon of a German girl carried off by a marauding African gorilla in a French military kepi, without problematizing its origins in an academic sculpture by Émile Frémiet, made in 1859 but so controversial that it was first shown at the Paris Salon of 1887. Such issues could have been addressed but doing so would have necessitated an extension of the remit of Biro's inquiry to the interconnected world beyond Berlin. Nevertheless Berlin Dada, in his analysis, emerges as relevant to us today through its methodology and subject matter, as it seemed disturbing and defining to its commentators and audiences at the time—the "gallows humour of a perverse and confused epoch" as stated by the largely sympathetic Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (October 1919).

The argument is set across five chapters of approximately equal length; after an initial survey of the post-war scene, subsequent chapters are devoted to the book's central protagonists, Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, with a more peripheral, yet excellent, chapter on "The Militarized Cyborg," which situates the trauma of post-war conditions in Otto Dix's painting Forty-five Percent Fit for Work (The War Cripples). More than elsewhere, this chapter confronts the reader with the visible evidence of the war in its shocked and devastated combatants adapting to the prosthetic devices they have been fitted with. These body extensions, the conjoined identity of machine parts and bio-organisms that Biro applies to Berlin Dada figuration, most readily give rise to the "cyborg" appellation. However, his definition includes more than the pitiable war wounded or medical...