The current exhibition at the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) displays a series of surprisingly ordinary artifacts – film posters, advertisements, postcards and magazine covers line the walls of Photomontage Between the Wars (1918-1939).
However, this private collection of American Merrill C. Berman, is hardly an ordinary one. CUAG education and outreach co-ordinator Fiona Wright explained that Photomontage Between the Wars “traces the rise of photomontage mostly in Germany and the Soviet Union between World War One and World War Two.”
Wright explained that photomontage “was a technique where artists would take [photograph] sections like heads or hands or texts and put them all together,” to create, “a composite image, pre-photoshop.”
Items found in the exhibit include “movie posters, magazine covers, postcards, and advertisements that today we’d throw away” Wright said.
In a panel discussion moderated by former CUAG director Diana Nemiroff, Carleton history professor Jennifer Evans and art historian Adrian Sudhalter explained that the items in the exhibit are rare historical artifacts as well as influential works of art.
Sudhalter, who has worked on exhibitions at the Museum of Modern art in New York, talked about the unique experience of looking at an interwar photomontage.
“When we normally look at photographs we tend to focus on the subject matter over the medium to consider what is depicted rather than how it’s depicted,” she said.
“But when photographed fragments are combined . . . with other elements, their identity as mechanically produced images becomes apparent.”
The montages in the exhibit were created in the 1920s and 30s, a time when the camera was still a very new, invention.
“In the wake of the first world war [the machine] had come to define the modern age,” Sudhalter said.
Some montages in the exhibit advertise products and others are film posters, but many of them are also Soviet and German political propaganda.
Pieces discussed included a postcard by German George Grosz entitled “the Dance of Today,” which features an image of Grosz and his wife, surrounded by a fragments of text, labels and money.
Grosz and his wife are labeled with price tags, something Sudhalter said indicated the artists critique of capitalism at the time.
Jennifer Evans said that photomontage became a mainstream form of art in Europe because of changes Europe experienced after the destruction of the First World War.
She described propaganda posters of the period as a “convergence of politics and art.”
Evans talked about how in the 1920s and 30s photomontage grew in popularity along with cinema and print culture, because of the new role of “art, as a political tool.”
On the topic of the panel discussion Sudhalter said that it was especially interesting for her to talk to experts outside of the field of art history. “As an art historian I have very specific ways of looking at things,” she said.
“[Evans] is really coming from . . . a historical and sociological perspective, especially with the study of gender . . . [Nemiroff] as a museum person looks at things more the way I do. So it was a good mix.”
Evans was equally interested in Sudhalter’s perspective.
“[Sudhalter] knows how to read [the montages], as documents, as texts, and it’s the mark of a good art historian to really bring together the historical with the visual in interesting ways and that’s what she does,” Evans said.
Though they were created in the 1920s and 30s, Sudhalter said that the images presented in these photomontages aren’t in fact so far from the protest and dissent seen today.
Both the Occupy movement and the Arab spring were mentioned in the discussion.
“It was a time of revolution and rupture and even though it’s almost a century away, there are parallels to our own time,” Sudhalter said.
