The Mad Square - a short review

Hannah Höch's, Liebe (Love) 1931: rephotographed from Surrealism by Night catalogue.

Yesterday I visited the NGV International to see The Mad Square, a ticketed exhibition of 200 works (paintings, photographs, prints, films and sculptures) by August Sander, Christian Schad, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Karl Hubbuch, Kathe Kollwitz, Kurt Schwitters, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Rudolf Schlichter spread over four large rooms.The exhibition, named after Felix Nussbaum’s 1931 painting includes the original lithograph movie posters from Metropolis, footage from The Degenerate art exhibition as well as furniture and pottery from the Bauhaus.
The exhibition is divided into categories, such as World War 1, Dada, Bauhaus, Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic, New Objectivity & Power and Degenerate Art. I was advised as I purchased my ticket, that the exhibition 'was not for everyone' and that it was 'unsuitable for children' - this was expected since some of the imagery in the exhibition deals with death and sexuality as well as exposure and mutilation of human flesh. This is an exhibition that reveals how people were traumatized by war and the establishment of the Nazi Third Reich.
Apart from  the works by John Heartfield who created powerful images satirising Hermann Goering as a butcher in 1933 and Hitler with a spine of gold coins. For me the most interesting works in the exhibition were  photomontages by Hanna Höch who questioned the status of women in society post WWI. Her work depicts not only the fragmentation of the female body, but her own marginalization as the only female Berlin Dadaist.  Höch's works reveal the paradox of being female in a world in which the mass media depicted woman as having sexual freedom, but which simultaneously  subjected women to male dominance and low paying jobs. Many of her works raise issues about the identity and sexuality of the so called, new woman. The relationship between the female body, industry and machines in many of her works is most seductive, however,  I have to admit that my favorite has always been Hannah Höch's, Liebe (Love) 1931, which confuses the racial identity of the woman lying prone, being approached by a flying woman with a cicada head. Both women appear winged (the arms of the horizontal woman attached to wing-like appendages patterned to a certain degree like those of the cicada wings) and suggest the fluidity of woman to express lesbian desire? Having said this, I was most taken and interested in her painting Imaginäre Brücke (Imaginary Bridge) 1926 that revealed an angularity noticeable in the Bauhaus works and had uber-realistic eyes. More than this, the work demonstrates a post-human, hybrid human/insect, the female form vector of freedom and transformation, one that opposes the notion of the post-human as perfectibility of the human form through eugenics. I would highly recommend this exhibition on until March 2012.