A head you assemble instead of carve

First, the date, which is genuinely uncertain and gets stated three different ways. The museum that owns the piece records it as 1919; recent scholarship leans toward 1920–21; popular accounts mostly just say 1920. The honest answer is c.1919–20, and nothing in the work depends on pinning it tighter than that.

Now the making, which is the whole point. Hausmann did not model this head in clay, did not carve it from wood or stone, did not cast it in bronze. He took a thing that already existed, a wooden wig-maker’s dummy head (the smooth, featureless shop-fitting a barber or hatter props a wig or a hat on), and he fixed manufactured oddments to it. This is assemblage: a sculpture built by selecting and combining ready-made things rather than fashioning a form by hand. The artist’s decision (this object, joined to that one), not the artist’s carving hand, is what makes it art.

Here is where care matters, because this is the single fact most often gotten wrong. There are two object lists in circulation. The one to trust is the Centre Pompidou’s own caption, written by the museum that owns the piece. By that list, fixed to the wooden head are: a collapsible telescopic cup; a leather case; a pipe stem; a white card bearing the number “22”; a piece of a dressmaker’s tape measure; a double-decimetre wooden ruler; a watch gear (a cog from a clock movement); and a roller of printer’s type. About nine elements in all, on one dummy head.

The other list, the one repeated across encyclopedias and tour blogs, adds a segment of an old camera and a typewriter part, and calls the wallet a “crocodile” or jewel wallet. The museum’s caption names neither a camera nor a typewriter. They may be in some descriptions; they are not in the catalogue of the people who hold the object, so we will keep them as “often described” and not assert them. What both lists agree on is the character of the haul: it is overwhelmingly the apparatus of measurement, money, time and standardization. A ruler. A tape. A watch. A number. A wallet. The tools that measure, time, price and process a person.

And there is a neat logic to who made this. The man who helped invent photomontage, who built faces out of cut-up photographs, has here done the same thing in three dimensions: instead of assembling a head from cut paper, he has assembled one from cut-loose manufactured objects. The Mechanical Head is photomontage stood up off the page.