Page 88 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 88/146
George Grosz: Collage/Drawings
I admit that this is stretching the ‘expanded photography’ theme - but photographic-newsprint images are an important evidential component in Grosz’ art-work, as are the letterforms and words, the num- bers, the words Kapitalism, (Grosz was an early member of the German Communist Party founded in 1918) - and as Barbara McCloskey notes in her book George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 : “In the aftermath of World War I, the November Revolution, and the founding of the German Communist Party in 1918, Grosz also became the Communist Party's leading and most notorious artist. His bitterly satiric drawings of bloated capitalists, sadistic militar- ists, and fatuous government and church officials served as the focus of public controversy that landed Grosz in court on three separate occasions during the 1920s. In the 1930s, the Nazis de- nounced him as Germany's "Cultural Bolshevist #1.” (McCloskey 1997)
It’s the fusion of the sharp precision of the drawing, the carefully selected images and print cuttings, the messages and ‘poetry’ of the selected words (both printed and hand-drawn) that I find really inter- esting - it’s a multimedia work - in tune as it were with Hausmann’s Optophonetic poems, and the mixed-media arts of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. These are indicators of one of the underpinning drives of 20th century modernist quest - the search for the ‘total art work’ hinted at by Richard Wagn- er 50 years earlier. Of course, there are other indicators too - the synaesthesia-strand indicated in the work of Kandinsky (from c1913), in the Optophonetic Piano developed by Vladimir Baronoff Rossine in 1916; in the composite artwork strand of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (from 1909); in the Movies; in De Stijl, in Russolo’s Art of Noises (1913); in expressionist cinema (Weine’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) - and many others. Tracing the emergence of these underpinning drivers - of immersion, of multimedia, of the total art work (gesamtkunstwerk), of the blending of the senses (synaesthesia) - and later of interaction - all the emerging features of the 21st century total art work. Note also that the ‘cut and paste’ methodology long preceded its use in the ‘cut, copy and paste’ analogues deployed by 1970s and 1980s personal-computer interface designers.
Christian Schad: photograms (or Schadographs) 1918.
You can see I think, that Schad’s photograms were highly original in the context of the pho- tomontage revolution - they were photographic photomontage - collages made with objects of various translucency compiled by the artist on a photo-sensitive sheet of paper and exposed to sunlight or electric light - he was making a collage of shadows!
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/50006