Sometime during the late 1930s, the former Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann created an unusual photograph that offers unexpected insight into the central concerns of his ongoing practice. Remarkable at ...first glance for its seeming abstraction, the image presents a central, roughly square form that itself appears to serve as a source of illumination, blanketing its darker frame in a gauzy light. An extensive caption penned directly on the photographic negative compensates for this obscurity. Using a photographic emulsion sensitive to infrared, a range of the electromagnetic spectrum with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, the artist staged the apparent dematerialization of the board, making its surface seem at once to withdraw from view and to expand into an uncontained atmospheric presence. In negotiating the boundary separating the visible and the invisible, the photograph in fact models the transformation of human perception that Hausmann hoped to achieve through his work. As his writings of the early twentieth century attest, Hausmann was captivated by the idea that much of what we take for granted about the world's appearance actually originates in our own biologically and culturally determined system of cognition. Together, he argued, art and technology could help propagate a new means of perceiving and understanding the world more sensitive to the actual patterns of its organization. Considered in these terms, Hausmann's untitled photograph does not merely fail to reveal the facture of a wooden board but instead succeeds in staging the disappearance of solid matter, displaying a new possibility for human eyesight in the perceptual field it thereby clears. Indeed, in the apparent absence of this substance, electromagnetic radiation itself takes on an unexpectedly forceful visual presence.
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The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can't make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After ...the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible.An insightful and entertaining exploration of art's most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, "people's art, " the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist's philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.
This article argues that Hausmann's poetry and performance practices of 1918 and 1919 prepared the ground for the cybernetic imagery that became prevalent in his caricatures, photomontages and ...assemblages of 1920. Through an examination of Hausmann's poetry and performance strategies, his concept of human identity, and his understanding of the relationship between sexuality and social revolution, a new understanding of Hausmann's visual concerns is developed. In particular, this article investigates why Hausmann's portraits often undermined their sitter's identity; why Hausmann sometimes emphasized sexuality in his representations; and why, in addition to reminding their viewers of mechanized war, Hausmann's images of the human–machine interface anticipated many of the ideas inherent in the concept of the cyborg developed in the later twentieth century.
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This essay argues that just as revisionist studies reframe World War I as an "epicenter," in which unresolved disputes continue to inform Europe's physical, national, and ideological landscapes, the ...artistic responses that were produced within its shatter-zones, and particularly within "loser-nations" such as Germany, captured the war's indelible volatility and continue to shape and leave traces within many different visually critical practices today. The essay closely considers the decidedly antagonistic and unabashedly raw responses of the avant-garde group that was, arguably, most caught up within an epicenter and most embroiled in a shatter-zone.
According to Jeremy Adler and Ulrich Ernst a sort of undulatory motion is produced by the alternative use of italics and roman type, while the left column produces a soothing effect by using a ...homogeneous type and small letters, thus bringing about a classical balance in the whole composition.4 But the visual arrangement (for instance concerning the dynamic process) is not a good start for the interpretation of this sound poem. Because of the tone colour I later eliminated the m ii of the first poem and replaced it by the qu i ie of the second. According to Hausmann the reader was expected to hear the intended sounds with the help of the optical structure of the poem. CHRISTIAN SCHOLZ Rothenberg Weinberstrasse 11 D-90587 Obermichelbach Germany --Christian Scholz is a scholar of sound poetry. Since the mid-197os he has been a publisher of this form of oral research.
In Berlin, as in Paris, London, and New York, skirts got shorter in the 1920s, exposing legs swathed in shiny, synthetic silk stockings. "Legs have emerged after centuries of shrouding, and adult ...woman at last frankly admits herself to be a biped ... her ankles, calves, and knees (all the more dazzling in their suddenly revealed beauty after their long sojourn in the dark) are her chief erotic weapons,"
1
wrote the psychoanalyst J. C. Flugel in his 1930 study, The Psychology of Clothes. After the First World War, Flugel argues, men's fashion did not keep pace with the modernization of women's wear. Tailors failed to answer demands for increased comfort, convenience, and cleanliness, and many men succumbed to cowardice and clubby conform-ism in refusing to give up their stuffy suits. Flugel's account of the attention to the limbs that characterized women's fashions of the 1920s was written al a moment when reactionary dressmakers and authorities on haute couture had already regrouped to launch a campaign aimed at lowering hemlines, and his text speaks in the name of the sartorial emancipation of both women and men.
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9.
Raoul Hausmann Hatt, Étienne
Art press (Paris, France : 1981),
12/2017
450
Magazine Article
Hatt reviews an exhibition of the works of Raoul Hausmann at the Le Point du Jour in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, France.
Sheppard reviews "Scharfrichter der burgerlichen Seele: Raoul Hausmann in Berlin 1900-1933: Unveroffentlichte Briefe Texte Dokumente aus den Kunstler-Archiven der Berlinischen Galerie" edited by Eva ...Zuchner.
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