Mass Psychosis

George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Photo-montage.

This collage in the spirit of Dadaism consists of figures cut from magazines. They are grouped in three tubular test tubes. Closer to the viewer, a group of African men form a ring – they crouched, their hands tied. The woman on top of this “test tube” is pointing a shotgun at the anatomical diagram of a man in a trilby hat placed absurdly on his head. Above him, in the same second flask, a man directs a billiard cue to a group of women in a nightgown. In the third upper fragment in the background is a German army officer standing in an empty circle. This series of absurd, potentially violent and arbitrary interactions between diverse groups of people produces an effect of confusion. The meaning becomes clearer if you know about a specific political event – the death of 89 demonstrators during the mass protests in Vienna. The artist offered a harsh expression of the variability of group psychology, referring to Freud’s book “Group psychology and analysis of the ego”.