Hannah Höch: Photomontage as a Cartography of Violence

Abstract

This article is based on a reading of Hannah Höch’s 1920s photomontages from the point of view of violence and as a consequence of the traumatic experience of the First World War. The political crisis of the Weimar Republic and Berlin Dadaism are addressed through the ideas of Salomo Friedlaender, Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin, as well as aspects such as the grotesque, irony, and the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility, subjectivity and otherness. Germaine Krull’s photography, primitivism in dance, masks and the importance of ethnography are also evident in this reading of Höch Dadaism, together with a gender interpretation in which the figure of the woman is represented in a completely innovative way in terms of struggle and resistance, starting with the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. The concept of Atlas or Lebenscollage is treated as a conceptual work from the new readings of artists’ archives, highlighting their importance  in 20th and 21st century art and inaugurating a new post-photography concept of contemporary artistic practices.