The Dada Movement
My main inspiration for this historical artifact was the Dada movement. As I researched the different artists during this period, I was specifically inclined towards Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield’s works, primarily on their composition and political topic. I initially had the idea of creating a piece surrounding modern-day feminism, like Hannah Hoch’s works, however, I decided to change it to climate change. Instead of copying someone else’s broad topic, I thought I could apply another socio-political issue, as it still would highly link to Dadaism.
Artmaking Process
When deciding the images I needed for this piece, I noticed that most Dada collages included a portrait of someone as their main subject. For instance, Heartfield’s works included Adolf Hitler as his subject, or Hannah Hoch would often have women for hers. When tackling a topic as broad as climate change, I thought about the leaders that were actively against climate change, and the first person I thought of was Donald Trump. I also wanted to include at least an image from the industrial revolution, as that was when humans started to exceed large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, resulting in long-term damages to the earth. On the lower left of my collage, I struggled to fill in the negative space at first. However, I thought that adding the climate clock, a countdown to when the Earth will be irreversibly damaged, was a good tie to my theme.
Images used
As for the materials I used, I mainly went to drugstores and supermarkets to search for magazines I could use for cut-outs. During my search, I only found one magazine that had the images I envisioned in my sketch, however it was out of my budget. This was when I decided to just find images online and print them. I used both images online as well as images I had taken previously to create my collage. I also edited the images to have a sepia-toned or black and white tone to them as I noticed this was a common technique from a lot of Dada collages.
When deciding how to display my image, I thought that having someone hold it up outside would be appropriate. This enforces the idea of someone protesting using the collage I made, which further relates to Dadaism and political art.
In the end, I think I did a decent job at recreating a Dada collage with the materials readily available to me. Although I could have used more materials, such as newspaper and magazine cut-outs, not having access to them made this process harder. While researching more about the Dada movement, however, I did find that the whole point of a Dada collage is to use what materials were available to oneself. Thus, it’s not a surprise that most Dada artists relied on magazines since this was a time before computers and technology weren’t readily available to them. I would rate myself around an 8/10 for this project. I did enjoy assembling the images together, and I think it made me appreciate the art of collage-making.
Additional sources for research
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/dada-and-surrealism/dada2/a/dada-collage
https://www.moma.org/artists/2675