When a head could be built from junk

For as long as there had been sculpture, a head meant a head carved or modelled by the artist’s hand from a noble material: marble, bronze, clay. The point of it was to portray a person or to idealize one, and the human head in particular was the seat of mind and soul, the most serious thing a sculptor could make. Even the boldest modern sculptors before this still shaped the head: Rodin pressed it out of clay, Brancusi polished it down to an egg of stone. The material was worked. The hand was the art.

Hausmann does none of that. He assembles the head out of found, ready-made junk, a barber’s wooden dummy plus office and household oddments, and he fixes them rather than fashioning them. This is assemblage, or found-object sculpture: the work is the selecting and the combining, not the carving. The method itself was not new. Picasso had been gluing scavenged materials into Cubist constructions since around 1912, and Duchamp had declared a bicycle wheel art in 1913 (the readymade, his notion that an artist could make art simply by choosing a manufactured object). What Hausmann does that is new is turn the method on the human head, the most traditionally hand-carved subject of all, and make it carry a portrait of the age. The old seat of mind and soul becomes a thing built from cast-offs.

And the meaning of that move is the mechanization of man. The brain is vacant; identity is bolted on from without. Hausmann said as much himself. In his own later writing on the work he described the everyday man, in a line that has come down to us in several English translations, this way:

“An average man has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued to the outside of his skull; his brain remains empty.”

That is genuinely Hausmann, from his retrospective account of the piece, though the exact English wording varies from source to source: some translations open it with “the everyday man,” others tighten it to “the average German,” and the skull clause appears both as “glued to the outside of his skull” and “glued to his skull, on the exterior,” so read it as one careful translation rather than a fixed original. It is also the work, restated. The face is the empty brain. The cup, the ruler, the tape, the watch gear, the number 22, the type-roller are the capabilities chance has glued to the outside. The piece reads, too, as a flat verdict on the war just ended, the industrial slaughter that had reduced men to machines and lives to statistics: man as apparatus, the spirit emptied out.

From here the line is direct. The found object glued to a base, made to stand for the modern condition, runs out of Dada into Surrealist object-sculpture and onward into Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” of the 1950s and the whole later tradition of assemblage. After the Mechanical Head, building a “portrait” of a person or an age out of cast-off manufactured things was a legitimate way to make a sculpture. The carving hand was no longer the only way to make a head.