Part Two: 2.0

John Heartfield's anti-fascist photomontages produced for the German Communist Party's (KPD) AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung - Workers Illustrated News) magazine are seen by many as the pinnacle of an effective avant-gardist critical intervention in social reality. Before I move to explore John Heartfield's interventionist work, it will be worthwhile briefly charting the practices from which his critical montage emerged.

The Dada art movement (1916-24) was one the first group of artists to seize upon the potential of montage as a critical device to engage with the reality of a 'discredited culture', seen as responsible for the mindless slaughter of the first world war. The most radical participants of the Berlin group- George Grosz, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield and Raoul Haussman- seized upon this new technique: the random combination of found photographs 'together with cuttings from magazines, newspapers, lettering and drawing...formed...a chaotic, explosive image, a provocative dismembering of reality'35 (Fig 1). Montage, as Hausman put it, 'tore a visually and cognitively new mirror image from the period of chaos in war and revolution', and observed that 'they knew that their method had an inherent propagandistic power that contemporary life was not courageous enough to absorb and to develop.'36

Aiming to produce work which was 'a stab in the eye of good taste'37 they rejected all methods and identifications with a 'bankrupt' bourgeois art world with its unrepeatable, private and exclusive production of the art object. The term 'artist' was rejected in favour of one more in keeping with the new productive practice of montage which, according to Hausman, 'translates our aversion to playing the artist, and thinking of ourselves as engineers .... we want to construct, to assemblage our work.'38 Turning their back upon bourgeois culture, the Dadaists opened themselves up to reflecting the transforming modern world of mechanisation, industrialisation, mass communication and revolutionary developments in the sciences. By appropriating and re-combining fragments from this world, the Dadaists sought to 'subvert the voice of society by saying in pictures what would have been banned by censors had it been said in words.'39

But in doing this the Dadaists were not seeking to reveal the dialectical 'inner reality' of this new culture- instead they sought to detonate and distort it by 'a refusal of harmonising perspectives' and played upon the 'discontinuities and shock-effects that montage allowed.'40

The Dadaists confused the chaotic and essentially reflective characteristics of an experiential and perceptual reality with reality itself and, combined with a practice which still led to the production of the disdained art object, they found themselves up a intellectual dead-end. Heartfield himself acknowledges as much: 'our mistake was to have concerned ourselves with art at all...we saw then the insane end-products of the prevailing social order and burst out laughing...we did not yet see that a system underlay this insanity.'41 Nevertheless, Dada's centralisation of photomontage, and with it, its transformable and re-constructive potential proved to be instrumental in developing the highly articulate, emotionally charged and mass circulated realist montage work which Heartfield went on to produce.

The acceleration of the German economic and political crisis, which manifested itself as both heightened social instability and a rapid explosion of political extremism on both the left and right, was reason enough for Heartfield to join the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1922. This had a profound impact upon Heartfield's work - he later recalled this transition from Dadaist to communist as 'a change from a protest against everything to a systematic and consciously guided art propaganda in the service of the working class movement'42 and it was here that he found the intellectual tools which provided a coherent and radical world view which allowed him to produce such unified and focused work.

The continuation of the photomontage techniques developed during his Dada years enabled Heartfield to produce biting political satire which found its way onto numerous dusk-jackets, into advertisements, street posters and the worker's press, allowing him to create an instant 'instruction' or critical revelation about a particular aspect of contemporary reality. Louis Aragon observed:

As he was playing with the fire of appearances, reality itself took fire around him.....John Heartfield was no longer playing. The scraps of photographs that he formally manoeuvred for the pleasure of stupfication, under his fingers began to signify. 43

It was the combination of the manner of signification with the method of its distribution that is an important component to the realist nature of his work. Vehemently spurning the trivialities of the art world, Heartfield explored the mass distributive potential of the press to intervene, inform and enlist its readers in the fight against fascism. In effect he was seeking to transform the relations of cultural production in a way which would democratise that production in favour of the working class which (for him) ultimately moved towards a socialist transformation of society. With his method the singular production of the 'art object' was displaced as the work itself existed as photogravure reproductions. As Walter Benjamin put it: 'the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.'44 Benjamin developed his ideas about the importance of understanding production (itself derived from Brecht's phrase of 'functional transformation'45) in his 'Author as Producer' where he emphasises that it is not enough to produce revolutionary content to have realist effect but to attempt to transform the very methods and practices of the productive processes. What was most important for Benjamin 'was not the 'attitude' of a work of art towards the existing mode of production, but how it in fact stood in relation to production.'46 Citing the capabilities of the bourgeois press in 'assimilating, indeed of propagating, an astonishing amount of revolutionary themes without putting into question its own continued existence or that of the class which owns it'47 as evidence for the need to transform this means of production for the ends of socialism, Benjamin was theorising what Heartfield himself was attempting to do in practice with his work in AIZ. Heartfield attempted to transform the audience from passive viewer to active collaborator, 'to transform the institutional relations in which the realist works would circulate and be consumed' and 'therefore transform 'consumers' into 'collaborators.''48

The montage work itself fused disparate photographic images into a fictitious but spatially convincing form and aimed to penetrate the ideological shroud of bourgeois reality, reveal the hidden structures of class relations and 'lay bare the real menace of fascism'49 in a popular and accessible way. For this effective visualisation of the Marxian dialectic Heartfield continued to centralise the photograph as being the most suitable medium by which to uncover the manufactured myths of the bourgeoisie. As John Berger notes, 'the peculiar advantage of photomontage lies in the fact that everything which has been cut out keeps its familiar photographic appearance. We are still looking first at things and only afterwards at symbols'50 and it was surely this immediate referent quality that qualified it for Heartfield's special attention.

Heartfield's use of allegories, reliance on word play, his exemplary satirical edge and his almost organic assimilation of elements into a near seamless whole ensured the visual success of the work. Heartfield maintained several key themes through his work which reflected the Comintern's51 own analysis of fascism which saw it as the 'final manifestation of capital.'52 'Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk' (Fig. 2) was one such direct reference to the huge financial support that Hitler received from the German bourgeoisie- Heartfield sought to make it clear that Adolf himself was just a mere tool of the giant industrialists, financiers, and landowners. In this montage Hitler is typically portrayed delivering his Nazi rhetoric but his body has been transformed by means of an x-ray which reveals that he has gold coins for vertebrae and a swastika for a heart.53 The documentary element is subverted by this x-ray effect which serves to indicate that a deeper reality is at play beneath the surface of the image. Similarly in 'Instruments in Gods Hand? Toy in Tyhssens hand!' (Fig. 3) we can see a variation of the same theme whereby Heartfield again employs the device of creating a unified and symbolic visual space which plays on the technique of the documentary by which to counter the rhetoric of Nazi propaganda. Here we see industrial giant Thyssen as the puppet master, clearly pulling the strings of a jumping-jack Hitler, with his mechanical, cardboard body. Mikhail Bakhtin has observed that 'the essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.'54 Heartfield, by taking the very tokens of the Nazi's ideological hegemony and transforming them into an object of ridicule, revealed the constructed nature of reality itself through such a 'lowering'. Thus, with such a juxtapositional use of the caption, the work clearly deflates the divine aspirations of that 'superman'.

Fig.2 . John Heartfield, ADOLF THE SUPERMAN: Swallows gold and spouts junk. AIZ 11, Number 29, 17 July 1932, Page 675

Fig.3 . John Heartfield, INSTRUMENTS IN GOD'S HAND? TOY IN THYSSEN'S HAND!IN AIZ 12 Number 31, 10 AUGUST 1933, Page 529 Acomp text: "in the fulfilment of his task, the führer percieves himself as God's instrument."

Heartfield also fought the Nazis on the cultural terrain which was all important in establishing ideological hegemony. In 'Der Krieg' (Fig. 4) we can see Heartfield appropriating and transforming one of Hitler's favourite paintings by Franz von Stuck of the same name (1894). Depicting a Teutonic horseman crossing a corpse-ridden field, complete with swastika shaped lightning and Hitler riding pillion, Heartfield re-interprets and transforms Hitler's 'noble' romanticism into the reality of Nazi militarism. David Evans points out the importance of the context of Heartfield's insertion in AIZ: this particular image is intended to be seen 'as a scripto-visual epigraph' to play off against an accompanying article 'Against the East we want to ride! The Third Reich arms for war.'55 Further more, it can be seen to be a direct comment upon Hitler's real aims as stated in Mien Kampf 'to revive the drive to the East in emulation of the Teutonic Knights of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.'56

Fig. 4. John Heartfield, THE WAR
A Painting by Franz von Stuck. A Timely Montage by John Heartfield, in AIZ 12 Number 29, 27 July 1933, Page 499

Many of Heartfield's photomontages produced for AIZ were designed specifically to be seen 'in context', juxtaposed with neighbouring articles, the poignancy of which would be lost if viewed outside of the publication.57 It is the ability of his photomontages to engage directly with specific socio-political circumstances by use of the pseudo document, caricature and satire combined with his attempts to transform the methods of production and distribution through AIZ which constitutes another important factor in the realist nature of his work.

Heartfield's use of montage at this point in time enabled him to engage with popular sensibilities, avoid the isolation of much avant-garde practice and thus function as an 'ideological interrupter' when inserted into the specific context of pre-nazi Germany.58 Fundamentally, it was the existence of both a large (and international) workers movement which provided the cultural structures which he could utilise and, crucially, the theoretical rigour of the communist party which provided the intellectual springboard from which to launch his work. Critical realist art, as Lovell suggests, must pre-suppose some 'knowledge of the nature of that reality to be shown' and then 'transcribing that which is known, through art by using the rules and conventions, or 'signifying processes' which are held appropriate to the work.'59 It was the combination of the theoretical position of Marxism with the experimentation, fluidity and independence of the leftist avant-garde that enabled Heartfield to produce work of such impact, coherence, and social relevance which is still of vital importance to the realist debate today.

51 The Comintern was the abbreviation of the Third Communist International, set up help bring about international revolution. The controlling force was the Soviet Union because of its political prestige following the 1917 revolution.

53 Harry Graf Kessler, one of Heartfield's early patrons, was so taken by the power of this particular montage he funded the production of a full-size poster to be posted upon Berlin's kiosks which again emphasises the distributive aspect of his work

57 The need to establish the object in art is very powerful. In the recent 'Art & Power' exhibition (at the Hayward Gallery London, 1996, touring) which included numerous examples of Heartfield's work, it was evident that great lengths had been made to present the original 'camera ready' montage work rather than the mass produced/circulated reproductions that they were meant to appear as.

58 Although Heartfield continued to produce biting political montages after he fled to Prague following the Nazi's seizure of power, the availability of his work in Germany was seriously restricted after this period.