The Spirit Of Our Times, 1921

Raoul Hausmann

”The most memorable of all Dada sculptures…It illustrates Hausmann’s own remark that the ordinary German ‘has no more capabilities than those which chance has glued on the outside of his skull; his brains remain empty.’ And so this…simpering coiffeur’s dummy carries an array of knobs and numbers and even a tape-measure for making judgements. It is a vapid statistic, ‘an O without a figure,’ offering as mordant a commentary on bureaucracy as Charlie Chaplin’s sliding dance through the cogs of the Machine in Modern Times did on industrial capitalism.”

- from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

Via secretcinema1