How free is free love? How polyamory lost its allure

Why do we embrace monogamy over sexual experimentation? Artists and writers who tried more radical arrangements have a lot to teach us, writes Lara Feigel

In 1919 the German Dada artist Raoul Hausmann dismissed marriage as “the projection of rape into law”. It’s a statement that relishes its own violence: he is limbering up to fight marriage to the death. A strange mixture of dandy, wild man, provocateur and social engineer, Hausmann believed that the socialist revolution the Dadaists sought couldn’t be attained without a corresponding sexual revolution. And he lived as he preached. He was married, but was also in a four-year relationship with fellow artist Hannah Höch.

Hausmann and Höch form one of the couples in the Barbican’s Modern Couples exhibition, which shows the freewheeling experimentation of interwar art to be inseparable from even more extravagant experiments in sexuality and coupledom. The exhibition includes several of the partly whimsical, partly grim collages Höch made at this time. Bobbing her hair and smoking in public, Höch was a self-styled “new woman” who shared Hausmann’s carnivalesque contempt for bourgeois morality. Her Bourgeois Wedding Couple (Quarrel) photomontage from 1919 satirises the married pair as ungainly children. The bride teeters on the boots of a grown-up woman, but she has the body of a mannequin and the face of an overgrown baby whose tantrum is observed by her childlike spouse.

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from Books | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FPAZWA

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