The properties of the photographic media were to be employed to affect and alter human perception of life and thereby encourage the implementation of changes into experience of life. This implies the ambition for a new type of art as well as a new type of audience and a new type of artist.
Use of Mass Media Imagery
For example, John Heartfield worked with photomontage because it was a modernist form and combined it with the mass media imagery to address the modern audience. His images are often compositions of two or more originally unrelated photographs, previously published in a newspaper or magazine, and clearly manipulated by photographic techniques.
In this sense, we can say that his photomontage The Meaning of the Hitler Salute was not conceived as a work of art but a physical construction as it foregrounds its own techniques, materials and procedures, thereby emphasizing its own constructedness.
Photography and Photomontage in Critique of Capitalism
This was a deliberate strategy whose aim was to direct the viewer’s attention to the artificiality of the image and thus alert his/her perception to the paradoxes and contradictions of capitalist society. The critical perception is also enabled by the overall composition which is reduced to its essential elements. This accentuates its political content and the overall effect is more concentrated and forceful.
Heartfield believed that the realism of standard photographs would not be capable of the intended impact as they were just records of external reality. The impact on the audience was then to be conveyed through the reconfiguration of familiar images. To expose the motivations behind Fascism, Heartfield’s constructed a reality in order to provoke a new critical perception. This was one of the strategies used by the German avant-garde to undermine the Nazi ideology.
Subverting Artistic Individualism by Mass Imagery: A Lesson From Marcel Duchamp's Ready-Mades
The use of mass media images in Heartfield’s photomontage negates the mode of production of autonomous work of art. This is, according to the German art historian Peter Bürger, another avant-gardist strategy for eliminating art as an institution whereby the individual creation is radically opposed to. Heartfield uses the images and slogans known from the contemporary press in the way Marcel Duchamp used his ready-mades.
But Bürger suggests that a mere repetition of Duchamp’s gesture of selecting a mass-product and conferring onto it a status of work of art would mean the adaptation to the art market system rather than a provocation, simply because strategies of provocation such as Duchamp’s would sooner or later become absorbed in that system.
Duchamp's Bottlerack and Heartfield's The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Mass Products and Art
As Duchamp used the Bottlerack, Heartfield used the photograph of Hitler and his iconic gesture as a photographic ready-made, as it had become a kind of a mass product. By using mass media images, Hearetfield’s work was in line with the avant-garde notion of negating the individual production and authenticity of self-expression. However, the technique of photomontage allowed him to manipulate the mass produced image in such a way as to maintain its critical potential.
The specific combination of images and texts in Heartfield’s work generates a new reading and the viewer’s focus is assisted by the simple, almost austere composition, devoid of any superfluous details. Both, pictorial and textual components constitute references from the mass media of the period so that viewers would have been familiar with them.
Edwards, Steve and Wood, Paul (ed.), Art of the Avant-Gardes, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2004
Gaiger, Jason (ed.), Frameworks of Modern Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2003
Gaiger, Jason and Wood, Paul (ed.), Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2003
Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul (ed.), Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, 2003
Perry, Gill and Wood, Paul (ed.), Themes in Contemporary Art, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2004
Wood, Paul (ed.), Varieties of Modernism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 2004
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