Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Political Capacities of Photomontage

Defining Photomontage 

Although you may be unfamiliar with the term ‘photomontage’, you’ve likely come across it, or unknowingly participated in creating one. The term ‘collage’ has a much wider reach — and, though the two art forms are related, photomontage refers to a collage that solely uses images, as opposed to a wider ensemble of mixed materials. Verging towards a definition, Dawn Ades, author of Photomontage, writes that

She adds that ‘the crucial thing is the readymade image’, one ‘more likely than not from popular culture’2 

Whether done as a lighthearted activity or as a means of thoughtful, creative expression, photomontage appears to be an increasingly prevalent art practice. Its low-cost materials, which include mass-produced, ready-made images and a nostalgic trio of scissors, paper and glue, make it highly accessible to engage with. From assembling a mix of printed images, arranging them with a blend of intuition and precision, and pressing them into place with Pritt-Stick permanence, you can’t help but feel like the God of images in the midst of making a photomontage. There’s a Martha Rosler, Clearing the Drapes from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, Printed papers on paper, 43.4 x 59.4 cm, c.1967-72 cathartic kind of rebellion in the act of disrupting and vandalising the measured uniformity of a glossy magazine page, in dismissing the intended purpose and context assigned to an image and dedicating a new meaning to it through setting it amongst a mass of estranged images and symbols. Once we consider the cultural contexts in which photomontage emerges, it becomes obvious why it has retained relevance among a sea of other art practices.

Collage socials in particular seem to have grown in popularity in recent years. In a similar vein to Gen Z’s embrace of analogue technologies like vinyl and film cameras, the physical aspects of photomontage may appeal to this 21st-century longing for tangibility in creative contexts. Plus, being part of the Pinterest generation means positioning ourselves as the creative directors of our own lives—we’re primed for vision-boarding and sorting through images to curate a certain mood or fantasy— of course, fixing these ideas to the page has appeal.

Flos Collective’s Glue & Gab is one such collage social run by Kaiya Bartholomew, a multidisciplinary artist who engages with photomontage as a part of her practice. When I attended the social during Splintr Festival in October, Kaiya began the session by discussing the medium and her relationship to it. Sitting at the head of the table, on which lay an assortment of magazine genres — science, sport, music, culture, art, geography — Kaiya emphasised the recycling aspect of photomontage through

The idea that photomontage is a means of recycling feels particularly poignant in the way we engage with it today. While print media is still alive and continually produced, our assurance that whatever image or article we decide to dismantle has been digitally immortalised may encourage us to breathe new life into what's on the page without fear of losing its contents forever. Equally, it may be this awareness of the ‘constant manifestation of more things’ that makes us want to upcycle and make use (art) out of what might otherwise be thrown away.

Before the group got to dismembering the magazine pages, Kaiya assured us that she doesn’t believe that anyone needs to be taught to collage— that if you can get up in the morning, you’re more than able. Her intention throughout these sessions was more about de-stressing and group regulation than carving out the next big masterpiece. And this relaxed, low-stakes mindset drifted throughout our time collaging, as we mindfully sliced through and stuck down images snatched from magazine pages (glueing) while mindlessly gossiping about the latest headlines in the world of reality TV (gabbing).

Seeing the works of each participant at the session's end reminded me of just how varied photomontages can be. One participant used small, ripped pieces of paper to create a traditional landscape image— an arrangement of blues and greens making the impression of a mountain against the sky. Another person took multiple crosswords from different magazines, and, in the blank spaces, wrote a selection of words to describe our cultural climate, passing the pasted puzzles and a pen around the group so we could each contribute. 

Montage & Modernity 

Photomontage was born in the early twentieth century, during a period when mass-produced, printed images were readily available for public consumption. This proliferation of images and advertisements provided early photomontage artists with both stacks of potential material and a variety of content within these publications to respond to. The “busy” and sometimes chaotic arrangements of early photomontages mirrored the unrelenting advancements of new technologies, media and entertainment. Photomontage essentially materialised as a regurgitation of everything being forced down the figurative throat of a growing consumer society— a montage of life at modern speed. 

Dada, Höch and the Dawn of Photomontage

Early photomontage artists referred to themselves as engineers of images, rather than their creators, as other kinds of artists might declare. Hannah Höch (1889 - 1978) was an early adopter of the distinctly modern art form, and, influenced by her involvement with the male-dominated Dada art group, she ditched the rules of fine art (which she had been studying in Berlin) in favour of something far more rebellious.

The Dadaists are described by scholar Kristin Makholm as ‘a group of young Berlin artists disillusioned with war and politics and the discrepancies between traditional art and modern life’3. The group responded to the shifting, tense social landscape of early 20th-century Germany with revolutionary and sometimes ridiculous forms of art that defied the constraints of traditional bourgeois aesthetics.

Dada was made up of anti-art artists, less opposed to art itself, but instead the institutionalised art world and its rationale. Dadaist art was all about subverting expectations and undermining our collective, learned associations that we attach to images and symbols. As the only prominent female influence within Dada, Höch’s works stand out from the others because they’re more concerned with gender, ascribing Dada’s playfully resistant approach to topics surrounding this and bringing to the forefront the intersection between gender and politics.  

Cut With the Kitchen Knife 

Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (fig.1) is one of Höch’s largest photomontages, both in scale and notoriety. What might initially appear as a directionless scatter of fragmented images is instead an intentionally disarming yet thoughtfully choreographed visual narrative populated by figures of modern life. Here, Höch dismembers tokens of mono-culture using her distinctly feminised ‘kitchen knife’, to reify public figures and objects of modernity with absurdity and inquisition. With the domesticised kitchen knife as her weapon, she cuts through the stomach, or masculinised ‘beer belly’ of Germany’s cultural condition during the Weimar period.

In Cut with the Kitchen Knife, machinery, metal cogs, crowds of everyday people, “exotic” animals, skyscrapers, political figures, film stars, intellectual personalities, and members of Dada itself crowd together on the page, melding together a series of society’s contradictions. In keeping with Dada’s provocative tenor, Höch undermines the power of male political pundits by re-attaching their heads to the bodies of babies and female dancers and pasting ‘Dada’, an ‘essentially antagonistic nonsense word […]’4 throughout the work as if to reframe and label this amalgamation of quintessentially mainstream imagery as nonsensical. The initial overwhelm of viewing the work mirrors Höch’s ‘sensitivity to the power of an explosive media culture’5, as well as displaying it through the use of its papered parts. 

Höch’s Franken-Femmes 

Another recurring subject in Höch’s photomontages is the changing social identity of women and the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ — an archetype of modern womanhood that embodied the ideals of first-wave feminism during the early 20th century. The New Woman’s appearance-based attributes (such as having cropped hair, wearing trousers, smoking cigarettes and riding a bike) refer to her newfound independence and the changing significations of feminine presentation that followed.

In Das Schöne Mädchen (The Beautiful Girl), we get a glimpse of the way that the “design” of the new woman and her financial independence were related to mass production and new mechanizations of capitalist growth. In this montage, Höch’s ‘beautiful maiden’ has a lightbulb, a relatively modern invention, in place of a human head, above which hovers a disproportionately large New Woman-esque short haircut. She is surrounded by the repeated pattern of the circular BMW logo and other machine parts, ‘which were common symbols of progress and modernity in Dada montages’6, likening the figure of this maiden to a manufactured entity. 

Höch’s photomontage could be read as a critique of the New Woman as, rather than a manifestation of feminist progression, a produced, shallow token of this progress that was more concerned with women’s efficiency in participating in a capitalist system than it was with women’s rights.

Mediations on the female subject and subversions of gender performativity and presentation are recurrent throughout Höch’s body of work. She often examined gender relations through patchworking together estranged female and male body parts. In some instances, it feels as though Höch’s intention is to emasculate “powerful” male figures by attaching their heads onto female bodies, or the bodies of babies. 

Perhaps the most overt example of this is in Der Klein Ep (The Small P), a photomontage composed of the slicked-back hair and forehead of a man and the face of a crying baby. The P in the title made reference to a “Parteigenosse”, a German term meaning ‘fellow party member’7 that was adopted by the Nazi party during their rise to power. Der Klein Ep is exemplary of the way that, through the use of photomontage, the Dadaists reconfigured unrelated images in rebuttal to the propagandised imagery being pushed by the Nazi government. 

The power and danger associated with these acts of artful vandalism, and the figurative targets it put on the backs of Dada’s members, underline just how subversive and politically provocative photomontage was in its earliest iteration. Given that this is the context within which photomontage initially materialised, it's no wonder that it’s been used by many artists to criticise the messaging put out by mass media publications, and through using its fragments, evidence it on the page. 

Linder’s Combative Images 

Manchester-born artist Linder Sterling used photomontage to collide two distinctly gendered visual worlds. Linder’s works were composed of images torn from the magazines of the time, primarily showcasing the contradictory representations of women in the media. Her early photomontages encapsulate the general outlooks of second-wave feminism, particularly with their references to anxieties about pornography and the mechanisation of domestic work. They’re interesting to compare with Höch’s, as they’re also critical of contemporary gender relations despite the progress of the women’s movement.

Linder’s images of contemporary femininity contain echoes of Höch’s ‘New Woman’ with references to machinery and the modern woman as she is ‘shaped by fashion according to male demands’8 and constantly catered to by capitalism. Cut-outs of domestic machinery plucked from catalogues designed for housewives are contrasted with pornographic smut. It's a disturbed meeting between the docile female consumer and the objectifying male gaze.

In parallel to Höch’s anomalous position as a woman in the Dada group, Linder was also marginalised within the dominantly masculine world of Punk. Likewise, Linder’s marginal position as a woman gave her a unique, feminine voice within this cultural sphere, merging the anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian punk ideologies with the queries of the women’s movement through this D.I.Y. pop-punk aesthetic. 

Man-Made Machines 

An untitled photomontage dated 1976 is emblematic of Linder’s fusion of ‘domestic appliances’ and ‘abstracted, fetishized motifs of pornography and advertising’.9 The montage depicts the torso and upper thighs of a female figure in a white, corseted dress, with her left arm replaced by a hoover, which, with its tan colouring, almost blends into the model's skin tone, suggesting that this household object is literally an extension of her self.

Peeking through the machine is an enlarged pair of eyes and lips, with each facial feature seeming to tell a different story. The red-lipped, fixed smile is mandatorily content, while the eyes, glancing sideways, appear suspicious of their surroundings and the disproportionately large camera that looms beside her. She is trapped between the camera’s lens, which focuses on her behind, and the similarly sized walkie-talkie that lies on the other side of the room. Each watchful device seems to allude to the social surveillance of women, while also ‘possibly rivalling her in their sexy gadgetry’.10 The montage forces the viewer to consider both the female consumer and the female body as objects of consumption. 

Another untitled photomontage from the same year shows a young couple in an embrace, which is interrupted by the image of a large dinner fork, with which ‘the woman is shown stabbing herself in the eyes with’ in a comedically cynical rebuke to what Peter Jones describes as ‘the self-delusion and blindness of those who readily subscribe to romance and domesticity’11. Similar to Höch’s feminised kitchen knife, the dinner fork being used as an object of destruction channels this restrained anger towards the status quo of gender roles within the domestic sphere. Linder’s rejection of romance as an ideology serves as a critique of the way that notions of romantic love are appropriated in a patriarchal context, as opposed to being a dismissal of love in its most neutral form. 

As well as constituting a visual dissection of the limitations of second-wave feminism, Linder’s photomontages from this period also represented another generation of artists adopting the art form for similarly subversive reasons as the Dadaists did so initially. 

Mounds of Material: Photomontage in the 21st Century 

Given the sociopolitical contexts in which photomontage emerges and re-emerges, it’s little wonder that the art form continues to be relevant today. Photomontage has and will continue to evolve alongside our relationship with media as it changes shape. Just as the Dadaists first adopted photomontage during a surge in media consumption and entertainment, we too find ourselves in a complete overwhelm of information and images— one which has mutated from a once physical form into an infinite digital landscape. The availability of potential material is staggering, to the point that we may wish to assemble photomontages simply for the sake of recycling or memorialising a moment in time, as Kaiya alluded to during Glue & Gab.

As consumers, we’re currently forced to be more media savvy, more aware of which publications serve which demographics, and, what feels like, more image literate than ever. Readymade images float all around us, whether digitally or tangibly, and the Linder, Untitled, Printed papers on paper, 27.9 x 19.6 cm, 1976 increasingly polarising positions of different media outlets make it all the more tempting to cut them apart and force them into confrontation. 

Written by Cicely Kirby-Smith - Cicely is a freelance arts and culture writer based in Bristol - Instagram @cisskirbyysmith

References

1 Dawn Ades, Photomontage (World of Art), Thames & Hudson, 3rd edition, 2021, p.7

2 Dawn Ades, Photomontage (World of Art), Thames & Hudson, 3rd edition, 2021, p.7

3 Kristin Makholm, ‘Strange Beauty: Hannah Höch and the Photomontage’, MoMA, Spring Issue no.24, 1997, p.19

4 Kristin Makholm, ‘Strange Beauty: Hannah Höch and the Photomontage’, MoMA, Spring Issue no.24, 1997, p.19

5 Kristin Makholm, ‘Strange Beauty: Hannah Höch and the Photomontage’, MoMA, Spring Issue no.24, 1997, p.19

6 Hannah Höch, Peter Broswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, (New York: Walker Art Center) 1996 p.11

7 Hannah Höch, Carolyn Lanchner The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, (New York: Walker Art Center) 1996 p.119

8 Dawn Ades, Photomontage (World of Art), 3rd edition, (London: Thames & Hudson) 2021, p.191

9 Peter Jones, ‘Anxious Images: Linder’s Fem-Punk Photomontages’, Women, A Cultural Review, 13.2, (2002), p.165

10 Dawn Ades, Photomontage (World of Art), 3rd edition, (London: Thames & Hudson) 2021, p.192

11 Peter Jones, ‘Anxious Images: Linder’s Fem-Punk Photomontages’, Women, A Cultural Review, 13.2, (2002), p.173