The Spirit of Our Time - Mechanical Head, Raoul Hausmann (1919)

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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. "The highest art," declared the First German Dada Manifesto in 1918, "will be the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect itself after yesterday's crash."

Hausmann said that the average German "has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued on the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty". Berlin at the end of the first world war was a city of maimed veterans and strife: in 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht organised the communist Spartacus rising, which was suppressed by far-right Freikorps units; the leaders were murdered. It was a city where Baudelaire's vision of the artist of modern life took on a new urgency.

Before the war, modernists had splintered perception, dismantled the Renaissance pictorial system and demolished naturalism - but all that became more literal, somehow, in Berlin. Perhaps German artists were too committed to beer-swilling reality to practise abstraction. For them, the fragmentation of art was a measure of the fragmentation of life, which the war had made grotesquely manifest.

Subject: Der Geist Unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf specifically evokes the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). For Hegel, whose books include Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), everything is mind. Among Hegel's disciples and critics was Karl Marx. Hausmann's sculpture might be seen as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose "thoughts" are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it.


Distinguishing features: Hausmann's crudely carved head, that of a tailor's dummy, has a fantastically stupid and gloomy look, an absence of life that travesties all the great expressive faces of sculpture, from Michelangelo's Moses to Rodin's Thinker.

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. If this is a "mechanical head", the prototype for humanity become robotic, it is a crude, Frankensteinian early experiment, in which the emotions and the soul survive only as a heart shape engraved on the empty tin cup.

Does Hausmann fear or welcome the disappearance of the Geist in a new mechanical age? The Berlin Dadaists, with their communist affiliations, were utopian as well as alienated. As George Grosz jokingly suggests in Daum Marries Her Pedantic Automaton George in May 1920: John Heartfield Is Glad of It, they thought of themselves as modern automata.

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.

Inspirations and influences: Hausmann's cyborg anticipates everything from the film Robocop to current techo-utopianism.

Where is it? Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.