Work No. 775; Mechanical Head II

Mechanical Head II; (The Spirit of our Time ).  After Raoul Hausmann

c. Art Axis 2015
A4 Photo Montage based on German Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s adapted Tailor’s dummy Work; Mechanical Head ( 1920 )
Created by London Dada to mark the first Conservative budget since 1996, delivered by George Osborne, a robotic man on a mission to wipe out the nation’s deficit by increasing it year on year, targeting the needy and vulnerable by slashing for a second time the welfare and care budget.
Osborne and his Bullingdon club ilk – impersonal machine heads pandering to their corprorate masters, penetrated and governed by brute external financial and political forces and functioning in the guise of socially responsible human beings.

Original; One Worldwide, signed by the Banksy of Dada
£ contact the gallery

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The most famous work by Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, Mechanischer Kopf (Der Geist Unserer Zeit), “The Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time)”, c. 1920, is the only surviving assemblage that Hausmann produced around 1919–20. Constructed from a hairdresser’s wig-making dummy, the piece has various measuring devices attached including a ruler, a pocket watch mechanism, a typewriter, some camera segments and a crocodile wallet.[13]

Dead of eye and moronic of mouth, the head is given identity only by the objects stuck to it: a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacles case and a piece of metal, which could be a plate plugging the damaged skull of a soldier. If this is a “mechanical head”, the prototype for humanity become robotic, it is a crude, Frankensteinian early experiment, in which the emotions and the soul survive only as a heart shape engraved on the empty tin cup.

“Der Geist Unserer Zeit – Mechanischer Kopf specifically evokes the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). For Hegel…everything is mind. Among Hegel’s disciples and critics was Karl Marx. Hausmann’s sculpture might be seen as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose “thoughts” are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it. However, there are deeper targets in western culture that give this modern masterpiece its force. Hausmann turns inside out the notion of the head as seat of reason, an assumption that lies behind the European fascination with the portrait. He reveals a head that is penetrated and governed by brute external forces

* Related LD Work from 2014; Spirit of the Age