I am thinking of an avant-garde practice during the constructivist period.

Interviewee: Grant Kester

That’s a very good question. I can recall the first time I read that Benjamin essay, many years ago. What I took from it was this idea that it is not enough to simply produce art that challenges the regime in some way symbolically, you have to rethink the way that art functions as an institution within a given society and a given mode of production, and it’s operation within concrete forms of political resistance. Heartfield is a good example of that. He is known as a formal innovator of the photomontage but at the same time his images were being distributed at a mass level by AIZ (Workers Illustrated Magazine), the largest working-class picture magazine in Germany at the time. They were not just on the walls and in galleries. For me, and I imagine Heartfield would have felt the same way, that integration with a broader social movement and context was key to what he was doing. The Dadaists used to walk through Berlin’s working class neighborhoods in a mock funeral procession carrying a plinth with copies of their journal to distribute. There is a performative dimension to their work, an integration with working-class politics, that’s central. But to abstract from this context, and to say Heartfield was a great artist simply because he made montages that can be linked with broader formal trends in avant-garde art at the time, to me that’s not the what Benjamin had in mind.