Little Sun 1969

Curator: Let’s take a moment to consider Hannah Höch’s “Little Sun,” a photomontage from 1969. What are your immediate impressions? Editor: Uneasy glee! The large sun-like shape in hazy yellows...it feels like something familiar turned strange. That single eye and those teeth really do give it a mischievous kind of feeling. Curator: Höch was, of course, a central figure in the Berlin Dada movement, known for her pointed and often humorous critiques of society through collage. The way she pieced together disparate images culled from magazines and newspapers. She forces the viewer to rethink how women were represented during the interwar period and continues to do so even in her later works like Little Sun. Editor: Right, this later piece shows she was always thinking about mass media and its impact. By literally deconstructing and reconstructing printed matter, she was dissecting the processes of cultural production, I mean where else are these images from? Someone shot the picture of an eye, and someone manufactured the magazine to put it in; someone went to the dentist, perhaps, and now Höch has captured a mouth and some teeth in her menagerie of paper materials, glue and ingenuity. It also feels distinctly feminist somehow... Curator: Definitely, the jarring juxtaposition of disembodied body parts disrupts traditional portraiture and challenges conventional beauty standards. It makes one think about visibility, perception. You’ve got that disembodied eye looking straight out at you. What does it mean to be looked at, and by whom? The composition is almost cruelly lighthearted too, though. There's something unsettling but captivating about its fragmented, dreamlike quality. Editor: And those textures! I mean collage itself is so tactile. Höch is practically daring us to think about the layers of labor embedded in its making – from the harvesting of wood pulp for the paper, to the printing and circulation of the source imagery, and finally, her own hands shaping the composition. And you almost never see collage given its proper due. In some sense it has never escaped being branded as craft or 'low art,' when figures such as Höch embraced it precisely for these conditions of creative ingenuity from limited material options. Curator: “Little Sun” invites us to question not only what we see but also how we see. Its whimsical, uncanny energy makes me think about the enduring power of Dada to unsettle and provoke. Editor: Yes, and the materiality—that constant recycling and recontextualizing—makes the work all the more vital. Höch asks us to consider the lives embedded in the paper, ink, and glue, not just her own artistic gesture.