Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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Kurt Schwitters & Kazimir Malevich 114 To Kurt Schwitters From Kazimir Malewicz Having read your article in the journal Der Sturm of October 1926, I see that you are an advocate of Art, but you write in such a tone that it seems like a voice crying in the wilderness, as if the entire field were already overgrown with Constructivism, and neither Art nor artist were visible behind this overgrowth. But despite all this, you still make so bold as to call yourself an artist. At the very time when Constructivism (Constructure) is already becoming an unremarkable phenomenon, at the very time when the banner of Art is beginning to be raised and the artist is liberated from enslavement to ideas holding sway over his sensations and, strange as it might seem, given the fact that painters were the first to shrug off objectness from the shoulders of art, and were the first to start rocking, striking anew at representation, while the architects, who, it would seem, had gained a firm hold exclusively on expedient forms, who maintained and continue even now to maintain the reason for the manifestation of forms from the functional side, which in turn flows from the idea, turn up in the ranks of the front of art, as such. It must indeed be acknowledged: that Art is still in a period of crisis, Constructivism is not completely cured, Art in our day is suffering a severe case of it, but it is my diagnosis nonetheless that it will prevail, for man will still remain man and the machine will not possess him, and it will not turn him into a mechanical automaton, since he has made the machine to liberate his movements for more important matters. That is already enough for Constructivism not to become the apotheosis of life, but only Art. Man will never throw himself into the slot of an automated machine, like a coin, in order to receive in exchange a dead piece of cardboard for his fare, or a five-kopeck stamp. Because he has constructed it to carry out dead functions, for which mechanical movements exist. Man, by contrast, has reserved for himself live functions and live movements. Hence Constructivism can never kill Art, but the automaton has triumphed over the Constructivists. Contemporary artists who have transformed themselves into Constructivists under the influence of “expedient technology” have renounced Art, wishing to serve life and provide it in time with a perfected economic “kitchenbedroom” or “kitchen-automobile,” they are saw blades, that is, something even life is reluctant to accept. The Constructivists viewed contemporary man as a contemporary automaton, they adopted the automaton as the image of man. Thus, unwittingly they themselves became automatons, with a purpose and the image of a purpose—and it’s the purpose that was their automaton. Hence they suffer from visions of purpose-images and from a change in conceptions, therefore they suffer too from a mania for overcoming the economic purposes of squalid life. They themselves don’t know that the construction for them serves only as a method of crawling out of those nooks and crannies into which life has thrust them. But since this is their purpose and image, obviously they will never crawl out, for to crawl out from under purpose and image, that is, to triumph over its realization, means to enter objectlessness. The new artists, being revolutionaries in spirit, were carried away by contemporary changes in political and economic human relations, as a result they introduce new achievements in Art as a new technical means of expressing political and economic relations, instead of revealing Art as such, liberating it from this or that ideology, and creating an Art that is really new in form, they engaged in illustration, representation (at a time when it would have been more essential to go to the barricades not with canvases, but with a more expressive instrument). This is one instance, in another case part of the artists of the new Art went to work constructing various types of expedient objects, and in this instance, such artists rejected Art and ceased to be
115 artists. In the wake of this confusion of concepts the spirit, the strength were also directed, not to a new form of Art, but to the form that had been before, that is, illustrating and serving ideologies. Hence the new artists begin to overlook Art. The late 19th century and early 20th century were noted for a supreme event in Art. This event was noteworthy because it led to objectlessness, it freed itself from ideological tenants who are like hermit crabs, who crawl into beautiful shells and turn them into utilitarian, expedient living quarters. Moreover, they even propose that if the hermit crab didn’t exist, then the shell wouldn’t exist either, and with their ideology they prove that the shell was the result of its [the crab’s] functions, of its life. The shell itself also became convinced of this ideology and gave itself up to be eaten, from which the ideological crab only grew stronger in fat and body and made itself beautiful with [the shell’s] Art. Just so will the artists be eaten by the ideologues. Look at the hermit crab, sitting on the mother-of-pearl shell, and you will see that a harmonious connection between its image? [sic] and the image of the shell does not exist. So too in Art there is no harmony between the tavern of life and Art. Religion and the State are sometimes connected, sometimes they don’t understand each other and part ways, essentially this is one and the same thing, it is only a difference in methods of attaining a goodly kingdom in heaven or on earth. The same with Science-Technology, in developing means of communications, the train, the auto, the airplane, the radio, and so on, for the most rapid achievement of the goal and the image of the idea, in like manner it does not achieve it. This has already been proven by the historical movement of materialism and Religionism. We have only to mention the fact that thousands of engineers with millions of workers and peasants to this day have not been able to build anything permanent or unchanging, whereas the artist, with a simple bristle brush or chisel has made things that have worked permanently and in like manner throughout all ages. Artists long ago triumphed over space and time, and image and idea, without weapons, power, gases, and dynamite. Everything else is merely breaking down an open door. What’s more, artists long ago destroyed “thought,” something that has not been achieved despite all the efforts of high-minded people to create a particular form of life. After all, every State or religion system (so-called order) strives to establish a single, unchanging thinking, and how similar are the religious commandments: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. “Thou shalt have no other thinking but mine,” says the State idea. Anyone who thinks otherwise will be punished. Thus, Comrade Schwitters, artists have long ago come to the watch-tower of rest and objectlessness, and the hermit crab to this day has not found his abode, he has built nothing, nothing comfortable, nothing utilitarian, but in order not to fail completely, he passes himself off as a genius of the ideological future, since he can offer nothing in the present, and wishing to be conscientious, he says right off the bat, “I promise nothing in the present, only in the future,” but even so he ate up the shell today. Artists offer a thing of today, for it is in all things today, of today (Praezens [sic]). Kazimir Malevich Berlin 1o May 1917 This English translation is published in Kazimir Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism Volume 1 (Tate Publishing, 2015) and is reproduced by permission of the Tate Trustees.
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KURT SCHWIT TERS EXIBITION DESIGN B
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KURT SCHWIT TERS galerie gmurzynska
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“In part spurred by Rauschenberg
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SUMMARY 10 MERZ (Extract from “AR
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One could make up a catechism of me
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Merz House was my first piece of Me
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15 Kurt Schwitters (ed.), Merz 2. N
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17 Kurt Schwitters. Anna Blume. Dic
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Almost all the pioneers of modern a
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‘constructivist’ period, which,
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Sonata and after the Dadaists perio
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Ernst Schwitters, Photograph of Kur
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All this changed at a stroke with t
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As the world changed, as the way of
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45! was exactly what he had done, i
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49 t Kurt Schwitters, Hanover 1927
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53 look down upon the apparent nons
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55 t Ernst Schwitters, Kurt Schwitt
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t 57 t The beginning of Merz theory
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59 t t Blume and wants to love and
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t The consequence of DADA: MERZ ·
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Page 65 and 66: tt65 The consequence of DADA: MERZ
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Page 71 and 72: t 71 t BATTLE CRY WITH VERVE Merz 7
Page 73 and 74: t 73 t develop. There is only art.
Page 75 and 76: t 75 t to inspire the Merzgesamtkun
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Page 85 and 86: l by the times themselves.” 31 Bu
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Page 89 and 90: Kurt Schwitters, who knew a lot of
Page 91 and 92: you liked my sonata. May I introduc
Page 93 and 94: 93 Photograph of Helma Schwitters,
Page 95 and 96: Postcard Kurt and Helma Schwitters
Page 97 and 98: 97 Kurt Schwitters: A genius in fri
Page 99 and 100: the Merzbau in Waldhausenstraße 5
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Page 123 and 124: Letter from Kurt Schwitters to Kath
Page 125 and 126: together with Alfred Barr and the c
Page 127 and 128: exhibition in the Pinacotheca Galle
Page 129 and 130: and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim, who
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Page 133 and 134: he also designed the catalogue: a p
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Page 149 and 150: NR: Tell me, Damien, when did you f
Page 151 and 152: as important as Marcel Duchamp. DH:
Page 153 and 154: NR: So what happened to the house?
Page 155 and 156: “Imitation remains imitation. Imi
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Page 162 and 163: In November, Schwitters publishes M
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several weeks later becomes dictato
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exhibition catalogue. In November 1
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Original Recordings by Kurt Schwitt
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Collage/Collages from Cubism to New
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1, 3, and 4. Ed. Perdita Lottner. E
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The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Ka
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WWW.GMURZYNSKA.COM
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Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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