Looking at some DADA work from our not-so-distant past, I spent some time thinking about the changing context of their ideas. Raoul Hausmann was an artist born in Vienna in 1886, but by the time he was 14 he was a resident of Germany. By 1917, he found himself co-founder of the Berlin DADA movement. He was a buddy of Hannah Hoch...John Heartfield....(Already I need to wonder from the subject and ponder about how utterly powerful it is when artists get together. Imagine getting to hang out with on a daily basis your most favorite inspiring artists. Imagine the rush you would get off of a daily feed of creative and interesting ideas, not to mention the gentle nudge of competition that would edge your work even further to new directions.) Together these famous people started the process that is now my passion. In Wiki, it says that they "pushed the idea of the photographic collage and the use of mass-printed source material by inventing photomontage." I can't say that I am a photomontagist, but I can directly relate to the idea of using the mass printed resources available to me. It was a different time back then, and the idea of using non-traditional methods and materials wasn't exactly popular. (And now it's popular, but illegal!) Photomontage is "when a photographic collage—made by arranging and gluing photographs or other found illustrative material onto a surface—is photographed so that the final image is converted back into a photographic print." This reverse photography idea has been blown far and wide now with computers at our fingertips and digital cameras against our eyeballs. Photomontage is now miles from where it was.
And so is our ability to network and communicate with each other. The idea of hanging out down in my local town with other creative thinkers coming up with new art movements is pretty far-fetched in this rural place I call home. But thru the internet things have changed. It's a new world we are living in and I think it's great. Not only can I have friends in art, they can live all over the world, we can collaborate on projects in new ways and maybe discover something new and share it with each other. I am not sure about starting an art movement...but who knows maybe we are living it and don't know it! We are living in some amazing times. Sometimes it pays to sit back and think about all the good things that are coming our way daily.
1 comment:
Nice post Julie. I think it's difficult for people to really understand how "crazy" these new techniques were at the time. In some ways, we take it for granted nowadays that anyone is even open to the idea of collage. At the time, it was seen not only as irreverent, but actually artistically "corrupt". One thing for sure, these folks had some pretty powerful design sense. Similar to modern times, collage is not simply stuff "thrown together". I am still in awe of the Schwitters collages that I saw this spring and summer. We should still think about getting a Central NY collage society going. Monthly meetings would be cool!
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