All consuming: The tiller -effect and the aesthetics of Americanization in Weimar photography, 1923--1933.
Item
-
Title
-
All consuming: The tiller -effect and the aesthetics of Americanization in Weimar photography, 1923--1933.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3311254
-
identifier
-
3311254
-
Creator
-
Young, Lisa Jaye.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Geoffrey Batchen
-
Date
-
2008
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Art History | Fine Arts
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation will examine the social and political consequences of the intersection of Neue Sachlichkeit photography and Amerikanismus in late Weimar era Germany. The German term Amerikanismus refers to the lifestyle, ideals, and ideology associated with the so-called Americanization of the German economy. In 1923, in response to widespread hyperinflation in Germany, an Allied commission, initiated by Charles G. Dawes and a group of American bankers, was formed which would result in the August 1924 enactment of The Dawes Plan. This plan brought temporary stability to the post-WWI German economy by providing cash, loans, and new industrial techniques to stimulate efficiency and production. The frenzied growth of capitalism stimulated by this new American-German business alliance is responsible for a culture-wide association of capitalist efficiency (and all that it entails) with what was perceived as an American process, or the process of Americanization. This "importation" of Americanization coincided with an unprecedented proliferation of photography in the German illustrated press. Simultaneously, a "machine aesthetic," emphasizing industrialization and its products, referred to as Neue Sachlichkeit photography, was becoming ubiquitous. Amerikanismus is inseparable from this growing photographic, image-based culture of the commodity and is therefore more significant for an understanding of Neue Sachlichkeit than has been previously understood. The reigning notion of this era as one of "machine age romanticism" will be contested and put into the context of advertising and the aesthetics of consumption. This dissertation seeks (1) to define the impact of Americanization upon Weimar photography; (2) to consider Siegfried Kracauer's writings about the "mass ornament" and how Taylorization manifested itself visually in the ubiquity of serialization as a photographic compositional device (referred to here as the Tiller-Effect due to the broad influence of the "American" precision dance format born of The Tiller Girls); (3) to contextualize Neue Sachlichkeit photographic projects as seen in the Werkbund's industrial design journal, Die Form, concentrating on the serial composition and its political implications; and finally (4) to consider the work of Bauhaus photography student, Elsa Thiemann, whose repetition of objects suggests the popularization of industrial serialization and the aesthetics of Americanization.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
