Steadfast Matter: Paper's Affects

This paper maps the ways in which the European interwar avant-garde sought to manage paper. Kurt Schwitters nurtured paper's various textures in his layered collages, using its fragility to summon delicate aesthetic effects that counteract the vulgarity of assembled detritus. Otto Dix, cultivated paper's various thicknesses in his 1920 The Skat Players, ranging from nearly translucent newspapers to stubborn card stock, to invoke a range of affects in a single picture. Lying on her deathbed in Cologne, Angelika Hoerle ripped and gathered paper fragments about her to draw on, companions in loneliness lending their surfaces in supportive witness. Max Ernst and Hans Arp's FATAGAGAs (FAbrikation de TAbleau GAsométriques Garantis or Fabrication of Paintings Guaranteed Gasometric), which take recontextualized paper and photographic fragments and rephotograph them, seek to do away with paper's obstinacy to generate hallucinations that confuse internal and external reality. While John Heartfield, seeking to address a mass audience, embarked on a practice that was wholly dependent on paper and its expediency. His technique focused on suppressing most of paper's haptic three-dimensionality to, paradoxically, summon illusory worlds on paper, convincing the viewer with the dystopic fantasy of their becoming. Paper here became adamantly social, political, communal, robust, but also ephemeral, disposable, and for many decades, devalued.