Hanah Höch Episode #9: Man and Machine

As a German Dadaist artist, Hannah Höch was a pioneer, going places, as she was using mass-media images in collages to create new, subversive imagery that was political, social, and engaging for all those who came in contact with her work. 

Höch challenged the norms of the time by bringing printed images together that were controversial. Gender, women's rights, and a female debate were in her wheelhouse. Höch manipulated images to create new narratives that challenged how people saw gender, social constructs, identity, and political discourse. She painstakingly cut images from newspapers and print media to layer and paste new ways of seeing.

Join me as we discuss how she developed artistically from the First World War and beyond, what she had to do to survive the wreckage of the times, and how the mediums she pursued helped carve out her place in history as a dominant force to be reckoned with, how we owe her meticulous nature to photomontages that depicted her life experiences and challenges with her identity, a nod of recognition, as she has shaped our own desire to work with print to inform our creativity and continue to push boundaries.

For more on Hannah Höch: https://www.zenmuseum.com/en/finder/page/who-is-hannah-hoch/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Hoch

**Man and Machine is a study of watercolour, gouache, and pencil on paper from 1921 in a private collection

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Creatively Thinking Podcast. Join Carolyn Botello as she uncovers the inspirations behind some incredibly creative minds that are orbiting our local communities.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

This episode is going to be different from most of my other episodes. I usually talk with contemporary artists, contemporary creative, sort of visual artists. But the last, I don't know, I've done and done it a couple of times now, and I want to continue doing it. But what I'm talking about is where I talk about sort of, I guess, sort of celebrity artists in the past and just what they've meant to me and how they've changed my life. And so for today's episode, I decided to call it my Warhol Obsession: The Factory Foreshadowed YouTube. My obsession with Mr. Walhola started when I discovered more about him in my early days at Ontario College of Art and Design. I was a fledgling wannabe art star. I was the top of my class at my high school, waiting to be chopped at the knees of most of the artificial exuberance and bravado I had mustered from my tiny little high school in eastern Ontario. This is where I had done so well as many other art students had in their own schools. In my late teens, I also had gotten into liking the band The Velvet Underground. I'm not sure why. It may have been, as it was for many of my choices of music, been entirely based on the album cover. There was something strange about their covers that drew me in. I also think I had heard Lou Reed's A Wild Side song, and from that I remembered from my high school art classes, The Soup Painter, Andy Warhol from the 50s, with his silver-haired wigs, which I was really into them too. There was some sense of mystery about it all that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I was hooked. I went down the rabbit hole of his art career, his influences, his family, his colleagues, and his factory. His eclectically run and wonderfully energized factory that had a mishmash of peculiar and decidedly weird and beautiful people that walked up and down those halls. What he called his factory was YouTube for the 1970s. He wrote about it in his diaries. If you know anything about art, design, or celebrities in the 1970s, you know about Andy Warhol. He may be familiar with his silkscreens of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, or many other celebrities. The glam and his extreme uses of color, and of course, his party mentality. This was such a contrast to his family background of Eastern European white-colored workers. They barely knew the language, let alone manipulating images, to represent something else. Yes, of course, he had people who worked for him. What successful artist hasn't? But how did he harness his talent and mold the public perception to be what he wanted? Let's take a deep dive. I better unpack what I shared in common with him. He died from a gunshot wound from Valerie Solanus, a deranged fan. I also had a gunshot fired at me, but thankfully I wasn't hit with the bullet. Mine happened to be a deranged boyfriend at the time. He apparently didn't like me giving him the silent treatment, and I spoke after that, realizing that this guy is a psycho. Andy Warhol's use of repetition is essential in modern art, as no one has any attention for anything anymore. Have you noticed how society is moving in this direction? Our attention span keeps getting smaller and smaller, shorter and shorter. Alas, that's why even the videos we watch on YouTube are called shorts. Warhol understood the power of repetition. Using advertising of soup cans, he translated this into pop art. You may know this, but did you know the personality behind these neon images? He was an almost he was an almost recluse. I read his diaries, and they were very detailed. He was swept away by celebrity and the momentum that it brought. I know that technically we can never truly know what he was thinking or feeling, as he was extremely private. But because he had so many close friends and partners in his factory, there must be a few threads of truth to this. As why would they work together to make all their stories line up? And what would the purpose of that be? I digress. Warhol was a whirlwind. When you walk into a grocery store, you would easily recognize a can of Campbell's soup. But it wasn't until Warhol took it out of the store and painted its portrait that people began to see it differently. At that time in the early 1960s, conceptual art had never been heard of. Taking an image and repeating it fifty times was not done for aesthetic reasons. It was done for the concept itself. Warhol said, the important thing is what each of you thinks. I've already made my statement right there. Warhol taught us to look at the world differently. With this podcast, specifically this Warhol podcast, I want you to see how one artist for me changed how I thought about art and the world around me. As many artists have over the years, from Picasso to Deshop, Man Ray to Monet. Those of course will be other pods for us to contemplate, because this is what we are all about dissecting and analyzing and diving and discussing what creatives are about, what creatives are all about, how they think, feel, move, and imagine. Oh what brought Warhol to the distinctive moment where he took the can out of the grocery store and brought it into his studio? Was it as simple as the repetition of the childhood memory of his mother always serving that very same meal over and over? Was he recreating his youth? Or was he bringing himself and his composition into a new way of seeing? Was he predicting the future of consumerism and mass production, globalization and overproduction? He is an enigmatic artist, that we continue collectively to conjure up an idea of what he believed and how he saw things. Forever a mystery that intrigues us and inspires us. Join me on the Creatively Thinking podcast, where we do deep dives with some contemporary Canadian artists who are currently shaping and changing our social landscape. Visit Creatively Thinking with Carolyn B. Buzzsprout.com to continue to share, shape, and transform our creative social dynamics. Share this with your friends and family. All of us are a part of the contemporary art sphere. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me rant on about Andy Warhol. I'll see you next time as I take you down another rabbit hole of cultural complexity in today's ever changing fabric of creativity.