Matthew Garcia Art & Politics February 2, 2012 In The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin

Dada, Doherty first lays out a disagreement that arises between two Dadaists, George Grosz and John Heartfield and Expressionist painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, who makes a statement that implored those involved in violent political conflict to avoid damaging works of art (73). Grosz and Heartfield were opposed so such thinking. The primary reason this was unsettling to the Dadaists is because the Dadaists were anti-art. Through with this ongoing disagreement, one main argument seemed to surface within this text. According to the Dadaists, the idea that art could be a means to preach the flight of feelings and thoughts, away from the unbearable circumstances of life on earth, to the moon and the stars, to the sky (75), seemed unattractive to them. The Dadaists seemed to take on a more concrete, less aesthetically pleasing approach to this so-called art. The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Spie brger) featured in the First International Dada-Fair became an iconic piece that encapsulated bourgeois society. Its light bulb for a head, mouth for a crotch, one-legged, boy-sized torso, and objects for appendages, all pointed to its message- how we are living must change (88). In addition to The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild, other works portraying machine-like war-torn soldiers, a pig-headed mannequin suspended from the ceiling dressed in uniform and dada slogans were equally as impactful at keeping the idea of the war tangibly close. This leads to the question: Why were the Dadaists anti-art? In a time where fighting and chaos was all around them, whos to say that art as an escape from the tragedy is such a bad thing? Did this kind of art have its place among society at the time? Or should it have been susceptible to open fire and tossed to the wayside?