ART AND THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA
- The huge gush of experimental photography after the was propelled by that buoyant, sometimes militant perception that the war's devastation shattered Victorian convenient with the social world.
- In this heady atmosphere, creators working in film and photography underscored the notion that their media were not only similar to each other but also like the proliferating illustrated newspapers and magazines ready by the public.
- As mass-markets illustrated journals proliferated, the word " photojournalism" entered common usage.
- While mass-manufacuted images, in the form of carter-de-visite and stereographs, had been common in the home in the late nineteenth century, these were chosen by viewers, arranged in personal albums or collections, and could be looked at repeatedly.
- Newspaper and magazine images, by contrast, were selected by photo-editors or advertising designers, circulated for a short time, then superseded by more images.
- Technological improvements boosted the range of pictures that could be taken.
- The Leica camera, developed before World War I as a device to test movie film, was introduced to a wider audience in 1924.
- Newspapers aimed at middle-class audiences were also lavishly illustrated.
- The interwar period witnessed the rapid development of journals largely devoted to pictures, especially the Tabloid newspaper, a compact journal featuring eye-catching pictures and far less text than the earlier broadsheet newspapers.
REVOLUTIONARY ART: THE SOVIET PHOTOGRAPH
- Lissitzky's The Constructor (1924) shows the artist in his new role as builder or engineer.
- It features the austere geometric overlays frequently used by Russian avant-garde image-makers, who favored non- realistic, intersecting planes that flattened Renaissance perspective and thereby condemned the older art of morally bankrupt elites.
- Many Soviet artists were also writers and theorists addressing national and international audiences.
- The prospect of a revolutionary art was eagerly taken up by Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), a russian painter and sculptor who had absorbed the geometric abstractions of Cubism and who valued the process of collage, pioneered by the Cubists on the decade before World War I.
DADA
- During World War I, a group of writers, artists, and poets met at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, a cultural outpost in a politically neutral country.
- The origins of the name "Dada" seem to owe to a moment when two enthusiasts thrust a paper knife into a French-German dictionary, and it pointed to the word, "dada," or hobby horse.
- Through the visual arts and performances, Dada accentuated the disruptiveness of chance collisions of images and sounds.
- Another group of Dada artists met in Berlin as GErmany was disintegrating towards the end of the war.
- Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978). Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919-1920.
- The origins of the photomontage have long been debated, but it seems that Hannah Hoch (1889- 1978) and Hausmann were two of the earliest Dadaists to make such images.
- In Paris, Dadaists turned away from the Berlin group's political activism in order to take up a wider cultural criticism.
- It was in Paris that Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache on a photographic reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's (1452- 1519) Mona Lisa, and relabeled it with a title that sounded lewd when read aloud in French.
- Andre Breton (1896-1966), one of the leaders of Paris Dada, praised Ernst and ;aided his photography, relating it to the Dada practice of automatic writing.
- Man Ray (1890-1976), the American artist born Emmanuel Radnitzky, maintained that there was ni such thing as New York Dada, and indeed conditions there were markedly different from those in Europe.
- The first and only issue of the magazine New York Dada appeared in 1921 with a photograph of Duchamp, disguised as his female alter ego Rrose Selavy, which had been affixed to a recycled perfume bottle.
- The New York Dada movement had little enduring impact on photography in the United States.