typography
Dadaists
delighted in uncoventional typographic design, frequently mixing fonts employing
unorthodox punctuation, printing both horizontally and vetically on a single
sheet, and sprinkling texts with randomly chosenprinters' symbols. This experimentation reflects their fascination with the
newly ubiquitous print culture. Tristan Tzara, describing the Dada revolution
with graphic describing, noting: "Each page must explode, either by deep
and weight seriousness—the whirlwind, the vertigo, the new, the eternal—by the
crushing jokes, by the enthusiasm for the principles, or by the manner of being
printed.
Photomontage
Collectively developed by the
Berlin Dada group, photomontage is a variation of collage in which pasted items
are actual photographs or photographic reproductions culled from the press. The
appropriation of the mass media provided endless fodder for the dadaists
scathing critiques, and the disjunctive cuts of photomontage effectively
captured the fissures and shocks of modernity. Substituting scissors and glue
for brushes and paint, and calling themselves monteurs (mechanics) rather than artists, the
Berlin dadaists employed photomontage in their radical assault on
traditional art.
Artists outside of Berlin also
experimented with the new technique. In Cologne, Max Ernst frequently used military photographs
as source material for photomontages. Pasting together images of planes or
bombs with humans, he created haunting machine figures that reflect the
destructive capacity of the new technologies used in World War I.
