Mechanical Head

When Dadaists did choose to represent the human form, it was often mutilated or made to look manufactured or mechanical. The multitude of severely crippled veterans and the growth of a prosthetics industry, says curator Leah Dickerman, "struck contemporaries as creating a race of half-mechanical men." Berlin artist Raoul Hausmann fabricated a Dada icon out of a wig-maker's dummy and various oddments—a crocodile-skin wallet, a ruler, the mechanism of a pocket watch—and titled it Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age). Two other Berlin artists, George Grosz and John Heartfield, turned a life-size tailor's dummy into a sculpture by adding a revolver, a doorbell, a knife and fork and a German Army Iron Cross; they gave it a working light bulb for a head, a pair of dentures at the crotch and a lamp stand as an artificial leg.