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| | Books | The Spirit of Our Time - Mechanical Head, Raoul Hausmann (1919) |
 | | Artist: Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) was a leader of Berlin Dada, along with George Grosz, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch - Hausmann's lover from 1915 to 1922 - and Richard Huelsenbeck. |
 | | Dead of eye and moronic of mouth, the head is given identity only by the objects stuck to it: a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacles case and a piece of metal, which could be a plate plugging the damaged skull of a soldier. |
 | | Yet Hausmann's pitiable, mutant sculpture, in its summing-up of the death of an entire notion of self, has a tragic poetry that makes it exactly what the Dadaists repudiated: a timeless masterpiece saying something fundamental about the human condition. |
| books.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4761321-110738,00.html (577 words) |
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