Raoul Hausmann’s Self-portrait of the Dadasopher, collage- photomontage, 1920.
Raoul Hausmann, Austrian (1886-1971)
Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age), ca. 1920
Hairdresser’s wigmaking dummy, crocodile wallet, ruler, pocket watch mechanism and case, bronze segment of old camera, typewriter cylinder, segment of measuring tape, collapsible cup, the number “22,” nails and bolt
12 13/16 x 8 1/4 x 7 7/8 in. (32.5 x 21 x 20 cm)
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle, Paris
Purchase, 1974
© CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
© 2006 Raoul Hausmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photo © Philippe Migeat
I’ve been looking for “Definition of Photomontage” by Raoul Hausmann and this is all I’ve been able to find so far:
In his article “Definition of Photomontage”, Hausmann seems to pin down its power: “…its contrast of structure and dimension, rough against smooth, aerial photograph against close-up, perspective against flat surface, the utmost technical flexibility and the most lucid formal dialectics are equally possible…The ability to manage the most striking contrasts, to the achievement of perfect states of equilibrium…ensures the medium a long and richly productive span of life…”
Ø3 Says:
June 14, 2009 at 9:51 PM
From “Lecture on Dada” [1922], translated from the French by Robert Motherwell
“As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it’s no use, that all this doesn’t matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.”
Tristan Tzara
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/tzara.html
Two Young Girl’s Promenade Across the Sky, 1920 Collage using wood engravings, Max Ernst
I took this photo influenced for my love of the avant-garde. It’s a telephone pole cover with a lifetime of flyers (probably photographed alot, always changing). June 2009
Early O3 image (slide) influenced by DADA and The Mothers of Invention.
O3 Archive 
“For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.”