The Chatter of the Visible

Patrizia McBride’s study, 'The Chatter of the Visible,' examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photo montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized re-appraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photo montage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it; a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres). According to McBride, “a close engagement with montage procedures going back to Cubism” reveals explicit inquiry into the status of objects as complex signifying entities whose “material qualities are inextricably bound up with linguistic dynamics.”