The Dada Cyborg

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The Dada Cyborg

Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin

Matthew Biro

Table of Contents

$29.50 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3620-4

$88.50 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3619-8

Finding the cyborg in early twentieth-century German art

In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I.

In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic.

Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.”

Matthew Biro is professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

400 pages | 50 b&w photos | 7 x 10 | 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Cyborgs, Hybridity, and Identity

1. Berlin Dada: Origins, Practices, and Institutions
2. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Photomontage, Signification, and the Mass Media
3. Raoul Hausmann’s Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Cyborg
4. The Militarized Cyborg: Soldier Portraits, War Cripples, and the Deconstruction of the Authoritarian Subject
5. The New Woman as Cyborg: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch

Conclusion: Dada Cyborgs in the Twenty-first Century

Notes
Index

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The Dada Cyborg *Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin* Matthew Biro Table of Contents		$29.50 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-3620-4 $88.50 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-3619-8
Finding the cyborg in early twentieth-century German art In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I. In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic. Biro’s unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group’s poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a “new human.” Matthew Biro is professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. 400 pages \| 50 b&w photos \| 7 x 10 \| 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Cyborgs, Hybridity, and Identity 1. Berlin Dada: Origins, Practices, and Institutions 2. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Photomontage, Signification, and the Mass Media 3. Raoul Hausmann’s Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Cyborg 4. The Militarized Cyborg: Soldier Portraits, War Cripples, and the Deconstruction of the Authoritarian Subject 5. The New Woman as Cyborg: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch Conclusion: Dada Cyborgs in the Twenty-first Century Notes Index