Hannah Hoch photomontages at the Auckland Art Gallery

By T.J. McNAMARA

The exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery of photomontages by Hannah Hoch, originated by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations in Stuttgart, is more than an interesting footnote to art history. Hoch was an original member of Dada.

Dada was born out of the Great War of 1914-18 that changed everything. It unloosened every anchor in people's thinking, not the least in art. The war seemed against all logic and common sense. Its aftermath was not just disillusionment but also hysteria and shock.

Dada was established first in Zurich and Berlin. It was a poetic and artistic movement with an absurd name chosen at random, a movement against the accepted values in art. They were all tainted with smugness. Its manifestations were nonsense poems and the ready-made art object.

Dada in its original form was so extreme its works were ridiculous but out of the ridiculous emerged new freedoms and new techniques and a spirit that has never completely disappeared. Dada grew into Surrealism which is still with us, not least in Monty Python.

One of the new techniques released by Dada was collage. Hoch throughout her long life (1889-1978) devoted herself to collage, especially photomontage. Early in her career she did many paintings but it is for her collages that she is remembered and the show gives an impressive range of her work from 1918 to 1967.

The earliest work in the show is called Heads of State and the technique of photograph collaged on to drawing shows the vein of social commitment that was part of the Berlin Dada movement, led by founder John Heartfield. He went on to develop Dada photomontage into savage social satire against the Nazis until he was forced to flee to England.

Hoch did not flee. She continued working, making paradoxical strange images in many ways reminiscent of the writings of Kafka. Such a piece is The Coquette, where the heads of man and dog are transposed as they beg for the attention of a woman.

By 1925 her political work had given way to the creation of images that generally show the strangeness of the world. Her work is very varied. Realistic and abstract elements combine in Hungarian Rhapsody (1940). About this time she left Berlin for a refuge in the countryside where she kept her own work and that of her famous friends who had been labelled "degenerate artists". If her collections had been discovered she would certainly have been jailed, possibly executed and the work destroyed.

After the war her work becomes increasingly abstract and takes on the rhythmic quality of music, notably in Vivace (1955) and Composition in Grey (1965). But she always retained her interest in gender roles and in mockery of fashionable ideas of beauty. Strange Beauty (1966) and For a Red Mouth, done a year later, are as inventive and as modern as anything produced today. They retain the potent sense of alienation that was part of Dada.

This fascinating exhibition is given even more strength and contest by some of the gallery's works. There are immensely powerful prints by Kathe Kollitz, a greater artist than Hoch but one who shared her political commitment, and woodcuts by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a founder of the Expressionist movement, whose hacked angularity expresses the tense dissonances of the time. And the show is completed wonderfully by a tape of the old silent movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari also full of hectic angles and mad, staring eyes.

The freedoms conferred by Dada are still with us as we can see in the lovely exhibition called A Teaspoon of Grace by Marissa Bradley at FHE Gallery. The works are done on thick recycled kauri planks which give piquancy to their delicate symbolism and impressive lettering. And it can be seen around the corner, at Oedipus Rex Gallery, where David Sarich shows works painted on wood shaped like comets and badges.