Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (2005) [English/German]

28 January 2019, dusan

Marianne Brandt (1893–1983) is celebrated for her Bauhaus metal designs, beautiful and mass-reproducible objects created to revolutionize modern interior spaces. Much less well known are her photomontages, which constitute a critical complement to her metal works. In these pieces from the mid-1920s and early 1930s, Brandt focused an analytical gaze on contemporary society and politics. Drawing on the vast array of visual material made available by the Weimar Republic’s burgeoning illustrated press, Brandt’s photomontages relied upon the technologies of modern visual culture to challenge pictorial conventions, to denounce the dangerous side of modern technology that had become so apparent in the First World War, and to image new roles for women in interwar society. Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt is the first publication to present, document and analyze the full range of Brandt’s work in photomontage.”

Edited by Elizabeth Otto
Publisher Jovis Verlag, Berlin, and Bauhaus-Archiv Museum of Design, Berlin, 2005
ISBN 3936314551, 9783936314557
175 pages
via Academia.edu

Reviews: Marion Deshmukh (H-Net, 2006), Melissa A. Johnson (Woman’s Art Journal, 2008).
Exh. reviews: Grace Glueck (New York Times, 2006), Ben Davis (Artnet, 2006).

Exhibition (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA)
Exhibition (International Center of Photography, New York)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (7 MB)

Apparatus, 6: Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s (2018)

5 October 2018, dusan

“The construction of the historical narrative of film editing has the cultural invisibility of women and of collaborators embedded within it. Film histories regularly spend whole chapters describing editing as a significant revolution in the medium. However, while the names of “great directors” are evoked in these discussions, the names of editors are not mentioned: “…for the most part, the women who cut film in the silent era remained unacknowledged in film credits or the trade press. Their work was considered to be merely technical rather than creative.” […]

Collectively, the articles in this issue are shifting understanding of the editor’s work from ‘merely’ technical or ‘just helping’, which is a gendered erasure of women’s work, to understanding it as expert collaboration in filmmaking. In other words, creative work. Why is this important? Because by obscuring the creativity of the work of the hands of women who watched, sorted, cut and pasted frames of film together we obscure the women themselves.” (from Editorial)

Texts by Karen Pearlman, John MacKay, and John Sutton, Lilya Kaganovsky, Natalie Ryabchikova, Nikolai Izvolov, Adelheid Heftberger, and Esfir Shub.

Edited by Karen Pearlman and Adelheid Heftberger
Publisher Apparatus, Berlin, August 2018
Open access
ISSN 2365-7758

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Photomontage Between the Wars, 1918-1939 (2012) [EN, ES]

15 December 2016, dusan

This publication offers an overview of the birth of the photomontage process specifically in Germany and the Soviet Union. The extensive range of posters, collages, maquettes, postcards, magazines, and books attests to the large influence of photomontage in politics, social protest, and advertising, while also demonstrating the popularity of the technique among avant-garde members during these two decades.

The catalogue features an essay by Adrian Sudhalter, as well as a chronology of the era, a selection of period texts—several published in translation for the first time—by some of the represented artists, and facsimile reproduction and translation of the catalogue of one of the most important exhibition devoted to this artistic technique at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin in 1931 (with essays by Curt Glaser, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, and Gustav Klutsis). The exhibition is drawn primarily from the Merrill C. Berman Collection in the United States.

Publisher Fundación Juan March, Madrid, 2012
ISBN 9788470755972
184 pages

Review: Paul Messaris (Advertising & Society Review, 2014).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

English: PDF, PDF (23 MB), View online
Spanish: PDF, PDF (24 MB), View online