Cutting Through Ideology: Fragmentation, Media, and the Politics of Form in the Avant-Garde and Contemporary America

This thesis examines how the European historical avant-garde mobilized formal experimentation as a mode of political critique, focusing on Berlin Dada’s development of photomontage in the aftermath of the First World War. Rather than locating the political significance of avant-garde art in explicit ideological messaging or representational content, this study argues that its political force lies in the transformation of perception and spectatorship. Through fragmentation, montage, and the appropriation of mass-media imagery, artists such as Hannah Höch and John Heartfield disrupted the visual coherence through which ideology presents itself as natural and unquestioned. Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by Peter Bürger, Walter Benjamin, Lisa Siraganian, and Gavin Grindon, the thesis reframes avant-garde practice as a form of structural activism that intervenes in the perceptual and institutional conditions of modern visual culture. By compelling viewers to assemble meaning from disjunctive visual fields, photomontage transforms spectatorship into an act of interpretive labor and critical judgment. In doing so, Berlin Dada anticipates contemporary debates about media circulation, image manipulation, and the political agency of viewers within today’s networked visual environment.