CRITIQUE: COLLAGE AND THE POLITICS OF THE CUT

Abstract

The technique of collage is not strictly aligned with the transgressive forces of the avant-garde; it can just as easily serve the most reactionary and conservative desires, and this fact is brilliantly illustrated at least one story about the invention of that most politically charged form of collage, photomontage.1 In Courrier Dada, Raoul Hausmann recalls that the summer of 1918 he was vacationing the small town of Heidebrink and noticed on the walls of almost every home color lithograph depicting the image of a solider front of a barracks. To make this military memento more personal, place of the head, one glued on a photographic portrait. In a flash-1 saw instantly-one could make a tableau entirely from cut-up photos.2 What is remarkable about this story is not Hausmann's sudden insight that one could do photomontage-this technique was inevitably being developed by many3-but rather the anonymous practice of these unknown families who not only cut up photographs of loved ones but interpolated them into ideological fantasy. The shocking power of this gesture is rooted the reality of the photograph and the power of mass media to concentrate and amplify ideological fantasies.The mass media of the early twentieth century had grown vastly scope and power, and it was a major force constituting the modem nation-state. Benedict Anderson maintains that the newspaper structured the time of the nation, allowing people who had never met, who more often than not had conflicting interests, to imagine themselves as part of a single, abstract entity to which they owed allegiance. The colored lithograph functions as a fantasy of this national unity as well. The image of the brave and erect soldier standing before the barracks is essentially a cartoon, a mere paper tiger unless a family sends one of its sons to stand that place of fantasy. However, that colorful but abstract image creates a place and models a nationalist desire, and the actual inclusion of the photograph makes it something more-it interpolates reality into the fantasy. W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that military recruiting posters are so powerful, part, because they can be reproduced in millions of identical prints, the sort of fertility that is available to images and to artists. The 'disembodiment' of [the] mass-produced image is countered by its concrete embodiment and location as picture relation to recruiting stations (and the bodies of real recruits) all over the nation.4 In Mitchell's example, what makes it concrete and individually effective is the singular location, but the families Hausmann observes go much further by hanging the image their home and then inserting the photographic portrait of their son. There is something eerie this gesture, since so clearly the lithograph is a fantasy, its unreality unwittingly unmasked by the inclusion of the photographic medium that concretizes and particularizes not only the image, but shows us how the fantasy image has done its work and found a real stand-in for the colorful but two-dimensional soldier now given a real face. While the state could simply print up any number of such images, they would only become meaningful as disparate and much less docile humans took their places. Though many critics repeat Hausmann's story, no one has reproduced the mementos he found. While what he saw might have been simply a local phenomenon, more than likely they were examples of reservistenbild. These nineteenth- and twentieth-century mementos are fantastic, colorful, and playful mass-produced posters, often ornate frames, celebrating patriotism and military service. Often they were explicitly designed to include a personal photograph, leaving a space cut out for the individual's photographic portrait.5It is this complex play of colorful fantasy and stark black-and-white reality that makes Hausmann's example and the reservistenbild phenomenon so telling, for it is a perfect synecdoche for the essential operation of ideology which a fantasy structures a reality. …