Woman, Man, or Machine: Adrogynous Imagery in Bohemian Art

In nineteenth-century Paris, a bohemian was, by definition, a man. Women who associated with bohemians were called grisettes. Henry Murger, often credited with popularizing the concept of the bohemian, described the grisettes as “lovelorn working-class women and artists’ models…who played supporting roles in the artists’ dramas of male friendship and creativity” (Chisholm 205). Women have had a problematic role in the bohemian movement from its inception. Even in later incarnations of bohemia, which afforded women more agency, female bohemians continued to occupy a tenuous position. Artists Hannah Höch and Laurie Anderson both forged a place for themselves in a male-dominated bohemian world, and they both utilized a strategy of androgyny to position themselves far away from the “supporting role” of the grisettes.

Hannah Höch was an artist associated with the Berlin Dada movement. Dadaists, like the nineteenth-century bohemians before them, sought out a more authentic life by challenging social conventions and promoting a radical critique of bourgeois society. In their art and in their lifestyles, they “embodied dissidence, opposition, criticism of the status quo…” (Wilson 4). Although Höch participated in every major exhibition of the Berlin Dada movement, she still remained marginalized within that group. The Dadaists resisted all manner of social convention yet still refused to allow women equal status in the art world. Höch was, in fact, the only woman to exhibit with the Berlin Dadaists, and she faced a great deal of opposition. Most notably, George Grosz and John Heartfield strongly objected to her inclusion in the Erste International Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) of 1920. She was only allowed in after Hausmann, her lover at the time, threatened to withdraw his own work from the exhibition.

Male artists and critics often belittled Höch’s work. Hans Richter described her as “‘a good girl,’ whose main contributions to the Dada movement were the ‘sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed to conjure up despite the shortage of money.’” Even Hausmann, who was willing to include Höch in exhibitions, showed little respect for her professionally. He went so far as to ask Höch to “support him financially, because he, as an artist, should not have to waste time earning a living by doing something other than making art” (Noun 21). Hausmann would also accuse Höch of lacking commitment to the bohemian lifestyle, calling her bourgeois when she wanted him to leave his wife and marry her.

Despite Höch’s difficulties with the other Dadaists, she managed to continue to make and exhibit work and was quiet prolific. She remained an outsider even among those with whom she was most closely associated, so it is no wonder her work reflected a concern for the position of women in modern society. Her critics called her a “whimsical observer of social conventions” even though her work was keenly political. She worked from the position of a woman existing on the margins of the radical world of the bohemian Dadaist (Noun 13).

Höch favored a technique commonly known as photomontage. Several Dadaists worked with the same technique, and Arthur Danto proclaimed it “the chief artistic invention of the Berlin Dada movement….” This technique emerged as a response to the ever-increasing amount of mass-produced images in a mechanized, industrial world. As Danto speculates, … they thought that photomontage exemplified "machine art," for it assembled cutout fragments of photographs and words from newspapers and mass-circulation periodicals, and both photography and printing were exemplary mechanical processes, conspicuously contrasted with the kinds of pictures the expert hand might make by drawing or painting (Danto 2). Höch used this “machine art” to depict the fragmented identity of the “new woman.” Weimar Germany saw “a rapid growth in the mass print media and … a dramatic redefinition of the social roles of women” (Lavin 1). Women could now vote, and they often worked outside the home. They were more sexually active and made use of both contraceptives and (illegal) abortions. Media images of this “new woman” permeated society, but such images did not acknowledge the problems a “dynamic modern woman” faced, such as Germany’s “demobilization policies, whereby working women were shuttled into lower-paying, unskilled jobs or fired altogether to make room for returning soldiers” (Noun 15). Höch countered the cheerful, active, mythic images of women presented by the media with fragmented images that deconstructed the “new woman.” She took pieces of stilled smiles and affected poses, sometimes recombining them with mannequins or dolls, but more often recombining them with images of men to create androgynous creatures.

Höch utlilized the androgynous subject in many subtly subversive ways. She used androgynous imagery to resist oppressive gender roles and to ridicule or challenge male domination, as in Da Dandy of 1919. In this photocollage, Höch built the silhouette of a man’s profile from fragments of fashionably dressed women. (These women were the female version of the dandy, richly costumed in pearls and high heels.) The male profile is hunched and rounded. He has been emasculated. The words “dada” and “da dandy” are pasted on the image, perhaps labeling the male figure as one of her contemporaries. Another work that questioned the power of men is Und wenn du denkst der Mond geht unter (If you think the moon is setting). A photograph of Rockefeller is placed on the body of a woman and stands next to the head and torso of an orangutan pasted above the legs of another woman. In this work, the shapely legs of a woman support the head of a man, and this association deflates the man’s power. Höch further complicates this representation of male power by placing the image of a powerful man next to that of an animal.

The aptly named Tamer is a work in which the male and female merge more seamlessly. Here the head of a female mannequin is grafted to the torso and hips of a woman with decidedly masculine arms. The pose is elegant. The mannequin face looks down demurely, but the arms, muscular and hairy, are folded across the chest with strength and confidence. Höch’s repeated use of androgynous imagery helped destabilize the male/female duality and moved women out of the margins into a space shared with men.

Laurie Anderson began working with sound and performance art in the 1970s. She was living in New York surrounded by other avant-garde artists tying to find a way out of the gallery system by exploring work that was not object based. Galleries became the “enemy,” a part of the bourgeois capitalist world. Performance art emerged as one of the key strategies to escape this system and inspired events or happenings at downtown clubs and alternative art venues like the Kitchen in Greenwich Village and Artists Space in Soho. The thriving New York music scene also influenced Anderson: “I think the energy infusion brought to the art scene by the music is the most exciting thing that’s happened in art for years” (Sandler 416). Her comments about this time in her life resonate with the bohemian spirit: “As a member of the avant-garde, I was of course committed to making work that was as vivid, surprising and inventive as I could make it… And the avant-garde is a safe place for artists to work out ideas that seem a bit peculiar to the general public (whoever they are)” (Sandler 417).

Anderson also became more politically engaged as she watched society growing more conservative. And although she did not face the kind of opposition or open ridicule that Höch did, she still encountered discrimination in the art world. This discrimination seemed even more pronounced because Anderson worked with electronics and digital technology, two fields generally dominated by men.

Like Höch, Anderson used androgyny in her work. She too presented images of ambiguous figures that combined the masculine and the feminine, images designed to upset conventional expectations of gender norms. However, Anderson did not create these figures with material culled from magazines and newspapers. Instead she used her own body. Hers was a performative androgyny. She had short hair, and on stage she wore a suit and tie. She also used technology to help create her persona. She used a harmonizer to lower her voice by an octave. She referred to this as her “voice of authority.”

In most of her works she would occupy different roles and hold conversations with herself. She would switch back and forth between her own feminine voice and the mechanized male voice. In the work titled United States, she speaks in her natural voice: “Hello. Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?” She then turns on the masculine voice to reply: “You can read the signs. You’ve been on this road before.” The female voice is lost, and the male voice offers cryptic guidance. It is as if the female voice represents a fragile humanity facing the powerful inhuman voice of technology (Anderson 162).

United States was an elaborate performance that took place over two nights and lasted nearly eight hours. It was her Gesamtkunstwerk, combining electronic music, image, and theater. One scene from the work was titled “O Superman” and was dedicated to the composer Massenet. It contains references to his opera Le Cid. She refers to it as her “cover version” of the song “O Souverain.” (Sayre168) In her version, she converts the line: “O sourverain, ô juge, ô père” into “O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad.” Here “Superman” seems also to reference Nietzsche’s more evolved man. Ironically, Anderson’s superman is not really man or woman and is as much machine as human (Sayre 150). In this piece Anderson uses a vocoder in addition to her “voice of authority” to make her voice sound robotic: “Anderson presents us, then with the specter of an Information Age Superman wandering, in Nouveau bohemian style, through postindustrial America” (Sayre 151).

Anderson frequently exploits the convention that assumes the masculine represents culture’s dominance over nature. In her work she masculinizes her persona by associating it with technology. She often combines not just her voice but also her body with technology or a machine. In the piece Home of the Brave, Anderson placed battery-powered lights in her mouth and the palms of her hands. This created the sense that she was glowing with an unnatural light. She also wore a drum suit, wired with sensors to synthesize the sound of a drum when she struck different parts of the suit. In this performance, Anderson becomes her own musical instrument, both subject and object, both animal and machine, both woman and man.

The Bohemian lifestyle had an obvious appeal to women, whether in the 1920s or the 1970s. Bohemia was a way to challenge social convention and restrictive gender roles. The promise of bohemia was not easily obtained. While it attempted to carve out space separate from bourgeois culture, it maintained that culture’s restrictive attitudes towards women. Women like Laurie Anderson and Hannah Höch worked against these restrictions. They challenged reductive gender roles with their androgynous images of women constructed with parts from man, woman, and machine.

Works Cited

Anderson, Laurie, Stories from the Nerve Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Chisholm, Dianne. Queer Constellations : Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Danto, Arthur C. “Art after the End of Art.” Artforum, Vol. 31, April 1993 .

Lavin, Maud. Cut With The Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Noun, Louise R. Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Hoch, Kathe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen. Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1994.

Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Wilson, Elizabeth. Bohemians : The Glamorous Outcasts. London: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited, 2001.