By MATTHEW EVANS

When once asked how she got into music, Siouxsie Sioux responded, “It must have been because my dad was a snake doctor.” Although it confused the interviewer, who was probably looking for something more concrete, it’s an apt anecdote for the band’s way of deflecting the explicit into an inspirited obscurity, and a proper passage into September’s show this past winter, “Metal Postcard – Mittageisen,” which also seized upon unlikely combinations.

“Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)” is the title of a 1978 Siouxsie and the Banshees song dedicated to the anti-fascist photomontage artist – and Berlin Dada pioneer – John Heartfield, which was written following wrongful accusations that Sioux had a penchant for neo-Nazi politics. One of Heartfield’s most recognized works – and the one that inspired Sioux – is Hurrah, die Butter ist Alle (Hurray, the Butter is Gone), which parodies Hermann Goering’s infamous statement made during a 1935 food shortage: “Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat.” Hurrah depicts a family lunching on axes, bullets, and bicycles, with swastika wallpaper and a portrait of Hitler in the background. The Siouxsie song is simply an attack on the bourgeoisie, accented with insipid lines like: “It’s ruling our lives/There is no hope.” It took the distinctly political to the less predicated realm of entertainment.

Here, 30 years after post-punk, and over 70 after Heartfield’s most remembered period, September drew our attention to the medium of montage with a group exhibition of seventeen contemporary artists. And at risk of being too obsolete or easily nostalgic, “Metal Postcard” pulled off an unlikely occasion for renewing Heartfield and Siouxsie’s impact.

When I spoke with gallerist Frank Müller about the show’s aim, he noted its equivocal mood: “We wanted to do something that may be perceived as political, but may also be something different, simply decorative for example.” So, instead of illustrating the ghostly polemics of “us vs. them” – fascism vs. communism, or bourgeois vs. reactionary – the exhibition occupied a “space in between,” where the typically disconnected coalesced, and where meaning wasn’t concentrated on any single component but more on the viscosity that held it all together.

The most obvious passport into the work itself were the pieces that most resembled Hearfield’s. Pablo Zuleta Zahr’s “Untitled” series was the better of these examples, with offset prints of mesmerizing and abhorrent montage, mixing the detail of Bosch with the dystopian satire of Terry Gilliam. But moreover, these works affirmed that most illustrated catastrophes, no matter how sincere the content, cannot escape the slippery imagery of graphic novel and video game entertainment.

A dynamic, and far less didactic, boost for the exhibition was the alternative use of collage. Swedish artist Klara Liden presented boxbox, a cardboard sculpture with two hanging parts, affectionately rotating in opposite directions, one inside the other. Mixing DIY culture and anarchic urbanism with the winning charm of kids’ constructions, it passes from the political to the recreational with little effort – perhaps a playful mobile, nodding malignantly to the subprime crisis across the Atlantic.

The performative tones of the exhibition may have been remembering Heartfield’s involvement in postwar theater which included close ties with the likes of Bertolt Brecht and Benno Besson. One wall was covered in black foil to imitate the décor of most Siouxsie and the Banshees concerts. Artist Reinhard Wilhelmi, who changed his installation every day, was regularly busy setting up faux altars with, among other things, clay chickens, sleds, busied photographs of fl ea markets in Neukölln, and self-portraits either dressed as a woman or donning an exposed erection. Wilhelmi’s work typically deals with derangement or de mentia, and while its similarity to Siouxsie’s theatrics is obvious, one must not overlook Heartfi eld’s engagement with madness – he even feigned it to evade military service during WWI. Nonetheless, these ephemeral yet immersive and experiential conditions collided with the concrete and highly commodifiable graphic works, and again illustrated the show’s disposition for intentional seesawing.

It was no surprise, then, to see Tony Brook, from Spin Design, present his series of superimposed words such as “fuck” and “puke” printed over the stock charts from the Financial Times. After all, Spin’s clients include Deutsche Bank, Nike, and Sainsbury, among others.

“Metal Postcard” was so saturated with references and contrasting details that it was difficult to extract any coherent significance. But it’s evident that the exhibition’s principal concern was the transformation of genre and the evolution of artistic legacy. We’ve doubtlessly come a long way since butter and metal were on an equal exchange rate. And although we may be closer to the post-punk adage of updating protest with dance and histrionics, those criteria have changed as well. It’s the in between space that “Metal Postcard” engages, scrambling for directives while embracing the uncertainty. And what better way to deal with precarious times, while the hubris of value-driven art markets is disappearing, than with effective ambivalence?