![]() ![]() ![]() The desire to act and produce, and the idea of political practice, recede behind a generally dominant attitude of melancholic contemplation. In his analysis of the historical conditions that generated allegorical practices in European Baroque literature, Benjamin suggests that the rigid immanence of the Baroque-its worldly orientation-leads to the loss of an anticipatory, utopian sense of historical time and results in a static, almost spatially conceivable experience of time. It is the theory of montage as it is developed in the later writings of Walter Benjamin, in close association with his theories on allegorical procedures in Modernist art, that is of significance if one wants to arrive at a more adequate reading of the importance of certain aspects of contemporary montage, its historical models, and the meaning of their transformations in contemporary art. Parallel with the emergence of montage techniques in literature, film, and the visual arts, we witness the development of a theory of montage in the writings of numerous authors since the late 1910s: Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Sergei Tretiakov in the Soviet Union Bertolt Brecht, Heartfield, and Walter Benjamin in Weimar Germany and later, Louis Aragon in France. The dialectical potential of the montage technique that Hausmann refers to found its historical fulfillment in the contradiction that is exemplified on the one hand by the increasing psychological interiorization and estheticization of collage and montage techniques in Surrealism (and their subsequent, still continuing exploitation in advertising and product propaganda), and on the other hand by the historically simultaneous development of revolutionary montage and agitprop practices in the work of El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Heartfield, and the almost complete disappearance of these practices’ public social function from history, except for the isolated pursuits of the contemporary avant-garde. ![]() In the medium of photography they were the first to create from structural elements of often very heterogeneous material or locales a new unity that tore a visually and cognitively new mirror image from the period of chaos in war and revolution and they knew that their method had an inherent propagandistic power that contemporary life was not courageous enough to absorb and to develop.” 3 The Dadaists, after having ”invented“ the static, the simultaneous and the purely phonetic poem, now applied the same principles with consequence to pictorial representation. “In the conflict of opinions people often argue that photo-montage is only possible in two ways: one being the political, the other being the commercial. This is apparent, for example, in Raoul Hausmann’s recollections of 1931 of the development from phonetic Dada poems to the political polemics of the Berlin Dada group: The inventors of collage/montage techniques understood that they performed operations on the pictorial or poetical signifying practice that ranged from the most subtle and minute interference in linguistic and representational functions, to the most explicitly and powerfully programmatic propaganda activities. Historically, this can be seen as being embodied in, for example, the opposition between the collage work of Kurt Schwitters and the montage work of John Heartfield. He outlines its materials as much as he points to the dialectic of montage esthetics: to range from a meditative contemplation of reification to a powerful propaganda tool for mass agitation. In a highly condensed form, Grosz charts the terrain of montage as well as its allegorical methods of confiscation, superimposition, and fragmentation. On a piece of cardboard, we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student songbooks, and dogfood, labels from Schnaps and wine bottles and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will, in such a way as to say in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.” 2 we had no idea of the immense possibilities or of the thorny but successful career that awaited the new invention. “In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage. FROM THE VERY moment of its inception, it seems that the inventors of the strategy of montage 1 were aware of its inherently allegorical nature: “to speak publicly with hidden meaning,” in response to the prohibition of public speech.
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