An emergent consumer capitalism, facilitated by novel technologies of photographic reproduction, printing, and distribution, was creating a new visual landscape of the everyday. ![]() In Germany, the work of the early generation of Dada artists emerged in response to a new form of mass image production in the early years of the Weimar Republic. ![]() Each further cut got sharper, refining the frame as she turned the paper in her hands. The first cuts she made were crude and hasty – the blades cut from hilt to tip, carving a broad straight line through the text, tearing verb from subject, until the blackened image sat as an inland sea amongst the story. It was just one part she wanted, a square photo where the low contrast of the image was made even worse by a thumb-smudge across the page. First she scored a line close to the newspaper’s spine, and tore the leaf from the folded bundle. Her coffee growing a skin, and the blade cold in her hands. It felt like the news was escalating rapidly, or descending on her slowly, beyond what she knew, or could know. Faced with horror, anxiety, uncertainty, she picked up her scissors. Wake up before it’s too late and you have dreamt your way into oblivion.In Stop Making Sense Huw Lemmey looks at "the image as political tool" through the works of Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Bertolt Brecht's War Primer - a series of photo-epigrams revealing the truth of war. It is only those who are asleep who let this happen over and over. ![]() “The ‘American dream’ does not include wreaking violence with weapons of mass destruction upon our neighbors. “This image serves to remind us that humanity is being crucified daily throughout the world-at fast-food joints in Southern California, at children’s schools, at office buildings, in shopping-center parking lots, at suburban cinemas near Denver, at rock shows in Paris, at country-music festivals in Las Vegas, and on, and on, and on. For this collaboration, Smith took inspiration from one of his own most famous pieces, the 1981 album cover of the Dead Kennedys’ In God We Trust, Inc. Smith is perhaps the most legendary of 20th- and 21st-century American collage artists, and for good reason: his work has adorned the covers of magazines such as the New Yorker, as well as albums for artists such as Green Day and George Carlin. Though some used Heartfield’s works as direct inspiration for their own pieces, all were influenced by his flair for marrying the tragic, comic, and bracingly uncomfortable. ![]() “My grandfather understood that one of the strongest tools of fascism was propaganda, the unchallenged ability to distribute nonsense in the media to discredit facts.” (The younger Heartfield built and maintains an online exhibition devoted to the work of his grandfather.)įor our November issue, Topic joined forces with artist Michael Tunk (the artist behind this story’s lead image, which he titled “Well Done”) and asked 11 other contemporary creators to submit political collages commenting on the current political climate in the United States. Courtesy of and copyright by the Heartfield Community of HeirsĬalled “the greatest political artist and graphic designer of the 20th century” by the late British art collector, historian, and graphic designer David King, Heartfield’s photomontages were not just reactions to fascism, but warnings-“road maps,” says his grandson, John J. Never Again!, Adolf the Superman, Swallows Gold and Spits Junk, The Executioner and Justice, and War Profiteers and Their Puppets.
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