struggle against words

They are more like a Symbolist poem, composed of fugitive image clusters, exactly registered but separated by “blanks” – the time one takes to remove each phial from the case, inspect it, put it back, and extract another corresponds to the intervening silences and stretches of white paper that Stéphane Mallarmé valued as the background to words.

Their definition of culture was dominated by two large facts. First, cultural alternatives were now multiple, not vertically ranked; they spread across a field of choice generated by mass production and machine reproduction, and did not rise from the corner sweetshop to the Athenaeum Club. Second, books and painting were no longer socially dominant

In the Somme Valley the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

the central myth of the traditional avant-garde, that by changing the order of language, art could reform the order of experience and so alter the conditions of social life, had not yet collapsed

Grosz and Heartfield, as line soldiers during the war, would also send one another postcards on which they had made small, satirical montages whose point, not being verbal, was easily overlooked by the military censors.