The empty face and the gadgets stuck to it

The first surprise is the scale. This is a small object, a little over a foot tall (about 1 ft 0 3/4 in, roughly 32.5 cm), the height of a large bottle. It is not a life-size head. The photographs that make it famous tend to fill the frame and lend it a monumental air it does not have in the room; in person it is a modest, almost pocketable thing, which only sharpens the joke. A portrait of modern man, the size of an ornament.

The face is a smooth, expressionless wooden dummy head, the features carved shut, the surface plainly that of a manufactured shop-fitting rather than a sculpted likeness. The grain, the seam, the fact that it is a found object are all visible. This is deliberate, and it is the heart of the thing. The title promises “the spirit of our time,” and the face where a spirit ought to be is empty: closed, vacant, blank. Whatever defines this man, it is not coming from inside the skull.

It comes, instead, from the outside, from the ring of objects fixed to the head. Following the museum’s caption, here is what is attached. A collapsible telescopic cup and a small leather case and a pipe stemare bolted on, the everyday apparatus of drinking, money and habit, stuck to the skull as if they were the man’s faculties. (Many descriptions also identify a camera segment and a typewriter part here; the museum’s own caption lists neither, so treat those as the popular telling, not the catalogue.)

Then the instruments. A double-decimetre wooden ruler and a piece of a dressmaker’s tape measure: the rationalized modern man literally wearing the tools that measure him. A white card with the bare number “22” on it, identity reduced to a figure, a filing label, the man as a statistic. And a watch gear and a roller of printer’s type: the clock that times him and the print that processes him, time and text, the machinery of modern life, attached exactly where thought should be.

What the piece is actually mocking is a real post-war ideal: the dream of a man optimized like a machine, timed, measured and standardized. This was the age of Taylorism(the “scientific management” of the American engineer Frederick Taylor, which broke a worker’s every motion into timed, measurable units), and the efficiency cult was crossing from American industry into Weimar Germany. Hausmann answers it with a hollow wooden head wearing exactly those instruments. The object-list cuts two ways at once: it is a verdict on the wartime machine that timed men into the trenches, and on the peacetime one that files a man as a wallet, a clocked workday and a number.

Take in the whole of it at once and the argument arrives without a caption. Here is a hollow wooden head, its face shut and vacant, with the instruments of measurement, money, time and standardization fixed to the outside of the skull. The man is not the head. The man is the gadgets bolted to it.