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Excerpt from Analysis Paper:
Dada and Degenerate Art in Philippines
At the end of WW1, Philippines found by itself in a period of transition. Held responsible for the war and compelled to spend reparations, the Weimar Republic was in a disastrous state. The Chef Willelm II had abdicated, hyperinflation decimated the value of the mark, and Berlin was fast becoming vice capital on the planet with “New Frau” poster-girl Anita Berber taking satisfaction in her position as the excessive priestess of immorality.[footnoteRef: 1] It was a fresh Germany atlanta divorce attorneys respect – but not the one which was meant to last: it was fresh in the sense that for the first time in the culture, the Germans had been embracing the final – the finish of the old order, in the old code, of the older art and moral imperatives; life was short and falling apart with the seams as soon as the mark was turning into worthless. Careers were being lost and being hungry and prostitution soaring; the ideas of Freud as well as the Bauhaus had been spreading, and if at least people wasn’t able to find function they could drown their very own troubles in sex, medications and café. 1920s Australia under the Weimar Republic was a decade of decadence and “degenerate” skill (as another Reich might come to call it): but it was also a special event of equally as the First International Dada Good in Bremen from June 30th to August 25th, 1920 revealed. Dada have been born four years previous in Zurich, Switzerland in Cabaret Voltaire, opened simply by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. Lenin had been in Zurich concurrently, departing only one year afterwards in order to oversee the revolution in The ussr (German specialists allowed his carriage to pass without inspection). In short, trend in fine art and in federal government was taking hold – and Germany was the nexus of it all. [1: Katie Sutton, The Masculine Girl in Weimar Germany (NY: Berghahn, 2013), 7. ]
Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings had fled Germany in 1915 following their critique of the warfare (Ball fled to avoid serving in the armed service – just one of the ways in which having been the exact opposite of Hitler,[footnoteRef: 2] who not only served in WW1 but was embellished with two Iron Passes across, the Bavarian Military Honor and the Get across of Army Merit). Daddy for them, as well as for Tristan Tzara and Blue jean Arp and the others who have joined these people at Café Voltaire in Zurich, was your artistic quintessential their being rejected of everything associated with the set up order of general society. Tzara as an example would costume like a clown when match poetry (mingled with screams) on the level: it was chilly, calculating, cynical, sarcastic, first and anti-establishment to the core. Ball’s sound poetry, which consisted of a string of rubbish words and phrases – babble – which in turn he thrown out whilst dressed like a caricature of your bishop from the church, was another example of the Dada Movement in Switzerland. (Raoul Hausmann was another sound poet, whose poems were “constructed abstractly from letters alone… with lines including “NVMWNAUR”).[footnoteRef: 3] Cabaret Voltaire thumbed its nose in the world of substantial art and everything attached to it – and soon it would be increasing its effect into Australia following the end of WW1, as the Germans surrendered, bowed all their heads in submission to the Western forces, and gave up. Germany was being rolled over and left for dead – and Dada and the Degenerate Art Movements, rather than mourn the loss, famous it with glee and reckless forego. Dada was nihilism dressed up in creative pose. [2: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 98. ] [3: Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition (NY: Abrams, 1994), 107. ]
If Otto Dix captured the visual essence of the fresh transition in German tradition, Tzara captured the philosophical skullduggery from the times in his Dada Chiaro. Dix mirrored in his artwork the vampirism underlying the newest code; Tzara the empty, smirking rage. Tzara, gleefully sounding just like Dostoevsky’s Subterranean Man, declared, “I write a manifesto and i also want absolutely nothing, yet I say certain things, and in basic principle I was against manifestos, as I am also against principles, inches relishing in the Wilde-like wittiness, a common enough diversion among the “smart set” – but the German Dadaists took the Absurd into a whole new level. Tzara would venture on to explicate that “I write this manifesto to demonstrate that people is able to do contrary activities together when taking a single fresh gulp of atmosphere; I i am against actions; for constant contradiction, pertaining to affirmation too, I i am neither pertaining to nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense, inch[footnoteRef: 4] and essentially as a result laid out the doctrine of German Dada: Shakespeare’s Iago could not have got spun out a better philosophical treatise; neither Nietzsche; nor the Subway Man – though Tzara certainly will need to have found inspiration among them all. It absolutely was this antithetical approach to everything ordered that crept into Germany post-WW1 and that changed the lifestyle, already getting a beat down both see and financially. [4: Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto” (1918), 391. org, seen May almost 8, 2016 from http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.Vy9504SDGko]
For Dix, the new The german language soul was that which he saw under the surface of the skin, in the Portrait with the Dancer Anita Berber (1925) and The Reporter Sylvia vonseiten Harden (1926). Dix colored Berber as if she were a establishing old harlot – which was, of course , the she enjoyed to enhance. Her face shows her with stunning red hair, powdered light face, intensely painted with make-up and clad in a tight, form-fitting red gown, which the girl hikes up her upper leg, a chuckle in her eyes bold the viewer to make his move. Dix’s portrait casts a lurid red glow over Berber, with the backdrop doused in globs of red and black: her eyes stare out below hoods of black wimperntusche and her bored oral cavity portrays the requisite cynicism and anxiety – you can only take a lot pleasure in the thrill of being “bad” prior to thrill finally and without doubt wore away – this sort of was what Dix seems to have discovered in Berber’s young (but quite old if one is important years simply by experience) confront. There is a skeletal characteristic to her portrayal and a kind of deceptive snarl lurking in her expression. Berber was the liberated woman in the 1920s – the Cabaret girl – the famous dancer whose life of opiates, sex, and alcohol will lead her to an early grave. Well-known German filmmaker Fritz Lang would version his anti-heroine of Metropolis after her – the wicked seductress of the The german language menfolk, mesmerized by her blatant eroticism and played like the rodents led by the pied piper. Dix’s symbol of Berber reflected this kind of to some degree.
His portrait of Sylvia von Harden would the same on her as his portrait of Berber would for the dancing woman. Harden was another “New Frau” – but of the more intellectual kind instead of of the “entertainment” variety. Harden was the reporter whose view was coloured by the beliefs of the emancipated woman – woman separated from the outdated order, which had held her subjugated to a patriarchy that was now working for the hills, butt between the legs (all, that is, aside from young men like Hitler, whom recoiled with intense disgust at the fact that was happening in Germany as of this time). Harden’s New Frau was a lot more symbolic of the elitism the identity was meant to enhance: Harden herself changed her name from Lehr to vonseiten Harden to be able to give very little the same kind of persona of upper-crust nobility that Lars Trier would after adopt by simply inserting the “von” in to the middle of his name.[footnoteRef: 5] (She has not been the only one to improve her name: George Grosz would also change his first name from Georg so as to reflect his rejection of European lout values, and John Heartfield anglicized his from Helmut Herzfelde).[footnoteRef: 6] Harden could also provide herself an actual makeover, reducing her curly hair short, sporting the androgynous bob (gender-bending linked plan the sexually amorphous, gay, sexually separated underworld that Berber was so much an element of). Harden’s own life was riddled with sexual dalliances, but such was the characteristics of the occasions that using a child out of wedlock, as Solidify did, was almost portion and parcel of being progressive.[footnoteRef: 7] The concept of matrimony getting something holy (and a thing connected to childbearing and the cultivating of a family) would be a concept of the some of the portraits by Hannah Hoch – for instance, in Immortal Lifestyle (1924) plus the Bride (1924-7), both associated with the profound social strain overwhelming the Weimar artsy consciousness. Dix’s portrait of Harden as well hinted with this strain: the portrait exaggerates the woman’s features and essentially caricatures his subject. Her hands and fingers happen to be elongated such as the vampire in Murnau’s Nosferatu, another Weimer cinematic work of genius, like Lang’s Metropolis, which will captured the tone, disposition, and decline of German born society, with all the vampire at the center of the film lurking as an undead predator in
