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 reappraisal 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).
McBride's contribution to the conversation around Weimar-era
montage is in her situation of the form of the work as a discursive
practice in its own right, which affords humans a new way to
negotiate temporality; as a particular mode of thinking that
productively relates the particular to the universal; or as a
culturally specific form of cognition.