Abstract

In her pioneering photomontage Hannah Höch demonstrates
her ambition to transform the viewer’s perception through imagination, both hers and theirs. In the process of making 
photomontage complex relationships between the artist, viewer, and original source material arise in which the displacements involved create distance. Her use of the idea of the cross-section by contrast allows otherwise disparate elements to be brought into close proximity. This paper explores Höch’s use of the spatial metaphors of the bridge and the abyss in relation to Salomo Friedländer’s concept of Creative Indifference, the Die Brücke group and the influence of Nietzsche’s use of the bridge metaphor and his use of the idea of polarity. Höch’s metaphorical use of the image of the abyss could imply spatial relationships but these begin to break down and are replaced instead by irreducible and unbridgeable differences in conceptions of reality that imagination allows to coexist simultaneously.

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DOI: 10.14324/111.2057-2212.022

Keywords

irreducibility, imagination, metaphor, cross-section, photomontage

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