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Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.1995.0033

1080-6601

Michael Davidson,

Photography and Visual Culture

Reviewed by: Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 Michael Davidson Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942. Matthew Teitelbaum. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Pp. 207. $27.50 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Montage emerges as something of a scandal in the development of modern visual culture. Its ability to link disparate objects, persons, and places disrupts the integrity of single-point perspective and the sculptural autonomy of the object. Its fusion of mass-produced materials (whether through cubist papier collé, dadaist “Merz” collage, or constructivist design) into new organic totalities challenges the idea of an autonomous aesthetic realm. As Sally Stein points out, many U.S. artists deprecated photomontage as a “bastard medium,” aligned with [End Page 104] bolshevism and the breakdown of rural life. But if it was a scandal, montage was also a kind of master trope for modernism, both in its technical applications in painting, literature, and photography and in its epistemological implications for the viewing subject. Not surprisingly, Theodor Adorno worried over the challenge that montage offered to autonomous art: “Viewed aesthetically, montage was the capitulation by art before what is different from it.” 1 Writing some thirty years after his initial debates with Walter Benjamin over the critical uses of new reproductive technologies, Adorno may have had good reason to feel that the shock of montage had “lost its punch” and that “the products of montage [had reverted] to being indifferent stuff or substance” (223). The curators of the 1992 Boston Institute of Contemporary Art exhibit “Montage and Modern Life” view montage not as a capitulation to instrumentalized, administered reality but as a constitutive feature within it. According to the exhibit’s organizer, Matthew Teitelbaum, photomontage not only represented the new realities of industrialization, urbanism and speed; it also extended “the idea of the real to something not yet seen” (8). Montage and Modern Life, the exhibit and the catalogue, attempts to make visible that “something not yet seen” by studying a particular stage of modernism—between the two World Wars—as refracted through photomontage. Although individual essays in the volume refer to developments in France, Spain, Holland, and elsewhere, emphasis for the exhibition is limited to Germany, Russia, and the U.S. Juxtaposing advertising, political posters, documentary projects, newspaper images, and other forms of mass media with work by El Lissitzky, Gustav Klutsis, Alexandr Rodchenko, and John Heartfield, the catalogue provides a much-needed cultural study of photomontage at a moment when its strictly aesthetic uses were being adapted to commercial and industrial purposes. Unlike MOMA’s “High and Low” Exhibition of 1990 that treated mass cultural productions as sources for work by Léger or Picasso, Montage and Modern Life refuses to assign priority to either mass or elite culture. Rather, the exhibition describes a constructive, if at times contentious, dialogue between the two spheres. The contradictions created by this synthesis are evident in the work of German Ring neuer Werbegestalter (Circle of New Advertising Designers). Although the group’s members included major artists like Kurt Schwitters, Piet Zwart, Willi Baumeister, and Cesar Domela, much of their work was devoted to commercial design and advertising. As Maud Lavin says, most of the participants shared leftist political views, but nevertheless “espoused rationalized production and communication techniques” as part of their technological romanticism” (41). Taylorist work management had its adherents on both the Left and the Right, and Lavin documents how artists of differing political views adapted constructivist typography and grid composition to corporate interests. While such interchange between avant-garde art and capitalist production was exactly the sort of complicity that Adorno feared, it indicates a side of modernism seldom included in more partisan art histories. Unlike Peter Bürger, for whom modernism is synonymous with aestheticism and formalism, the Ring neuer Werbegestalter regarded it as the “culture of contemporary life”—its speed, distractions, and dynamism. By endorsing certain aspects of industrial efficiency and functionalism, artists of the Left reconciled “conflicting political practices . . . through a utopian belief in rationalized technology” (49). The debate over the ideological function of montage is usually associated with the work of Sergei Eisenstein, but it can be seen as well in the work of LEF artists like Osip Brik, Vladimir...