Hannah Hoch: Dada Artist Or?

Have you ever felt out of place? Like you didn’t belong? Do you think art sometimes doesn’t make sense? Welcome to the Dada art in the 2oth century. In the fever of WWI, a group of artists banded together and began to create work that questioned the limits of art and of humanity. Their emphasis was on chance, accidents, the insane, the absurd – responding to the horrors of the war. Hannah Hoch’s photo collage is a perfect example of the chaos the Dadaist attempted to illustrate. Photo collage, or photo montage works so well here in its strange skewing of reality. Hoch takes images from newspapers and combines them in irreverent and nonsensical ways – distorting what is real and what is imaginary. It is actually a quite cutting example of the power of propaganda as well – as often the newspapers were (or some would argue are still) It is as if Hoch jumbles around the news to give us a more ‘true’ version of reality – or at least what her reality felt like during her historic moment.

Dada was not a catalyst in inspiring Hoch’s work. She had a love of design and absurd disjunction. Hoch is not considered a contemporary artist. Many artists are stuck in historical brackets that limit our appreciation of their life’s work, and Hoch is very much stuck.

Courtesy of “Too Much Art” Writings on Visual Culture by Mario Naves

Courtesy of www.wordpress.com/hannah-hoch

—Molly McQuillen

Molly McQuillen is currently an art teacher at a Catholic School. She works with Pre-Kindergarten through eighth grade students. She is also a part time Educational Technology teacher at the school as well. She insists on educating students on technology through the arts. It’s essential to her to have knowledge and attain skills in many art techniques.  She enjoys experimenting with various art materials as much as possible. She brings unique techniques in every art work she creates. She is expecting to receive her Masters in Educational Technology from Buffalo State in 2016.