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KURT SCHWITTERS
Conceptual Framework: Artwork
Merzbau (Cathedral of Erotic Misery), begun 1923, never completed,
destroyed 1943 by Allied bombing
site-specific sculptural assemblage in the artist’s house, Hanover,
Germany
wood, plaster, metal, wire, found objects, paint
dimensions variable
The centre of Schwitters universe was his house in Hanover, and as of 1923,
possibly influenced by the architectural concerns of the Russian constructivists,
such as Tatlin, he began to construct his ultimate work of art. This began
as
disparate pieces of collage and assemblages around the studio walls, which
over time were connected by string, then wire, then wood, and finally plastered
wood so that these individual constituent parts began to coalesce into a
unique form of artwork, which at this time remained nameless, but which
we would now term a site-specific installation. He called this his Merzbau
which gradually took over the downstairs. When the work required more space
for expansion Schwitters cut a hole in the ceiling and gave notice to his
upstairs lodgers.
Conceptual Framework: World
The world of the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters was that of Europe circa WWI
and after. He was part of an international movement which originated in
Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 during the war called Dada. Its founders were
mostly young German artists and philosophers. Dada was born out of the frustration
and pain felt by these young artists and thinkers engendered by a revulsion
against the horrors of war and this was combined with a passionate desire
to smash the society that had made it possible. Young artists and thinkers
had a sense of total disillusionment with society and the agencies of the
art world; the art audience, the art gallery and marketing systems, art
itself. There was a belief that if the world which produced art could also
produce the atrocities of war then it was a world in which optimism and
the utopian programs of other modernist artists and avant-garde movements
were inappropriate. Consequently Dadaists questioned the role of artists
and the role of art in society in both their writings (the Dada Manifestos)
and artmaking.
Dada has often been called Nihilistic, and its declared purpose was, indeed,
to make clear to the public at large, that all established values, moral
or aesthetic, had been rendered meaningless by the catastrophe of the Great
War (WW I). Dada preached against the reason and logic which had produced
the war and instead advocated anarchy and the irrational: non-sense and
anti-art. The Dadaists wanted to sweep away all the West’s political,
social, cultural and artistic traditions which were held responsible for
the carnage of WWI.
Conceptual Framework: Artist
Rejected by the berlin dada groups for allegedly being too un political
or too bourgeois, Schwitters invented his own brand of Dada which he called
Merz, taken from the middle of the word “Kommerzbank”, from
a letterhead which he used in a collage in 1920. Schwitters Dadaism was
thoroughly nihilistic: He once said that Everything the artist spits is
art. As well as sculptural assemblage Schwitters produced montages and collages
assembled and constructed from the gathered refuse to be found in the streets
of his German city of Hanover. These works have an integrity of vision but
are not in any way political. Schwitters isolated himself in Hanover from
the rest of the Dada world. Instead he created a self enclosed world in
his own house and seemed to thrive on this relative isolation.
Artmaking Practice: Actions
New forms and the exploration of new techniques and use of new materials
were developed by Dada artists in their material artmaking practices. Collage
was a form of artmaking most favoured by the Dadaists and this can be seen
in the paper collages of Schwitters and also in the collage like merzbau
sculptures of Schwitters. Collage was a form based on the use of fragments
collected from different sources and this method of working seemed symbolically
appropriate in an age of fragmentation. It also down-played the use of the
traditional skills of image-making and gave artists a tool which was more
immediate in its impact. • the use of text, many different types of
typography, by itself or in combination with images and this can be seen
in Schwitters works on paper.
T he development of the site-specific installation sculptures of Schwitters
in his Merzbau.
Into the individual grottoes of the Merzbau a bizarre collection of objects
which Schwitters called ‘spoils and relics’ were lovingly placed.
These could be any thing from a broken pencil to a pair of socks souvenired
from one of his guests and elevated to the status of an icon, placed in
a shrine in the work. There were individual grottoes for artists Hans Arp,
Theo Van Doesburg, Hannah Hoch, Mies van der Rohe as well as grottoes dedicated
to abstract ideas e.g. a Murderers Cave, a Love Grotto
and a Philosophers’ Cave.
There was an intersection between the accretion of many different materials
with the endless flux of Schwitters material artmaking practice. Apart from
the ‘relics’ he stole from his friends, Schwitters also incorporated
relics of himself, his hair, nail parings and his own urine in small containers
into the work. He placed them in crevices, niches, tunnels in the architectural
shell which, because of the ceaseless construction, were often buried and
lost under conglomerations of other objects, wood and plaster. As Schwitters
spent years building, changing, rearranging and adding onto what was initially
a series of sculptures the Merzbau became an increasingly more architectural
construction, but a construction that had no architectural function, that
confused concepts such as interior and exterior and seemed to grow expressively
and irrationally. The internal space of the house was transformed by the
aggregation of found materials, objects and sculptural forms affixed to
and extending the architectural structures. The work was never completed
but in a constant state of growth and change. The only principle to which
the material artmaking practice of Schwitters adhered was that of continuous,
fluid production, a dynamic additive and subtractive process of connecting
and cutting. Schwitters insisted on the Merzbau’s sole structural
condition as one of flux: It is unfinished out of principle.
Artmaking Practice: Ideas
Dada artists conceptual artmaking practices were based on nihilistic feelings
of hopelessness, cultural fragmentation and alienation from their contemporary
world and especially its art and a need to critically re-examine the visual
conventions and codes of art: the traditions, premises, rules, logical bases,
the concepts of order, coherence and beauty that had traditionally guided
artmaking. Schwitters sought instead originality and a complete break with
the past. His ideas were based not on logic and reason, but on:
• randomness and chance,
• the instinctive rather than the conscious,
• the unexpected rather than the predictable,
• the imaginative rather than the real.
Schwitters ideas were not utopian instead they were opposed to science and
the idea of progress and exalted the absurd. He believed that the unexpected
was as much a part of life as the predictable and infinitely more stimulating
to creativity and audience response. “Merzbau” was therefore
characterised by free association, intuition, the logic of the illogical-
irreverence and irrationality- art that made no sense.
Conceptual Framework: Audience
Audiences for Dada exhibitions and performances were usually subjected to
a battery of the senses by the artists in an effort to have them respond
intuitively rather than through logic and reason to what was being presented.
Shock and unconventionality were two devices the Dada artists used to jolt
their audience out of a perceived complacency. Dada provoked the audience
into challenging their current notions of art and culture through attacking
the conventions of art and culture. The general audience could not function
as dispassionate spectators but was expected to be reactive rather than
passive and many of the audiences were loud in their condemnation of Dada
artmaking practices. However the arts literate cognoscenti was an audience
much influenced by not only the conceptual bases of Dada but by the innovative
use of techniques and materials and the development of new ways of making
art forms.
Because Schwitter’s artwork Merzbau was in the artist’s
house and was functioning as a refuge for his most subjective spiritual
and artistic needs it had, unlike most artworks, an audience comprising
only his fellow artists, friends and family. An art-informed audience could
see there were discernible influences from Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism
but the artmaking practices of Schwitters in Merzbau were characterised
more by a lively imagination and an originality of concept. The Dadaist
Hans Richter, when invited to see the work, characterised it as a living,
daily changing document on Schwitters and his friends. The installation
was an enchanted place that baffled some, and bewitched others. There was
extensive interest in it because of this and, although the original was
destroyed , it was documented photographically and later recreated by Schwitters
in England where he fled during WWII. It is often thought of as the forerunner
of the contemporary postmodern form, site-specific installation.
homepage.ntlworld.com
www.merzbau.org
www.stunned.org
www.stunned.org
en.wikipedia.org