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

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KURT SCHWITTERS: I URGENTLY RECOMMEND THAT EVERYBODY BUY THEIR CHRISTMAS PRESENTS NOW· by Norman Rosenthal from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, to Joseph Beuys or Dieter Roth, the worlds of Nouveau Realisme and Fluxus in Europe, English Pop Art as manifest by the work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, not to mention most of the greatest American Pop Art stars such as Claes Oldenburg, Ed Kienholz, John Chamberlain or, indeed, Andy Warhol himself, whose factory and the activities that took place within can be read as a kind of open plan Merzbau. An essentially throwaway society has become evermore an essential source for artists as they scour skips and convert the wastes of an accelerated obsolescence of nature and industrial life to create individual languages and new mnemonic poetics out of broken pots, dried sunflowers and ancient iron bedsteads that in another world, before Kurt Schwitters, had been the preserve of the rag and bone man. Schwitters, like Einstein or Freud, opened a book after which his subject of choice and the business of seeing would never be the same again. Certain artists have already been invoked and others among his immediate successors include Robert Motherwell with his collages that focus on grissini or Gauloises packets, or Louise Nevelson who, as far back as 1958, christened one of her most ambitious pieces Sky Cathedral, which consists of a black wall constructed of wooden boxes stacked upright and seemingly filled with a thousand and one fetishistic objects, mostly found, glued inside. Nevelson went on to make many more of these structures that Schwitters would surely have recognised as an homage to his own work. To fast-forward to the world of the present, the spirit of Schwitters, in all its multifarious aspects, can be found everywhere. We can feel him in those magnificent shimmering cloths made by El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana in 1944, made from thousands upon thousands of aluminium bottle tops sourced from recycling 146 stations and sewn together with copper wire, evoking for our time the great traditions of Ghanaian cloth making, but equally, in transformative environmental ways, all the spirits of erotic misery that characterises our own time. Another prominent artist one might mention here is Rikrit Tiravanija whose relational art sometimes involves audience participation along with plastic cups, picnics or even artefacts from his own apartment. His classic piece of 2005, The Air Between the Chain Link Piece and the Broken Bicycle, for all its obvious winking at Duchamp, constructs two environments, one made of wood, the other of glass, accompanied by poetic wall texts that when looked at could not be conceived of without reference to Merz and Merzbauten. The same can be said to be true of Thomas Hirschhorn, a declared admirer of Schwitters. It still remains unclear whether the first Merzbau in Hanover broke through the ceiling of his house. Hirschhorn, though, in a recent piece writes of a self-constructing kind of Merzbau he constructed in a private gallery in Naples in 2013. Titled Break Through, he allowed the ceiling of the gallery to fall in on itself. The gallery, in itself a functional space, became a subjective space in which, to quote the artist, ”I have to raise my head, I have to open my eyes wide and face what I do not want to see. This is the logic, the form and the mission of this sculpture.“ Another contemporary classic example of a cathedral of erotic misery is the Haus U R by Gregor Schneider that he exhibited to huge acclaim in 2001 at the Venice Biennale, where it was awarded the Golden Lion. Schneider declared that the title of the piece merely relates to where the house normally stood in his small hometown of Rheydt in the lower Rhineland, but U R invokes a whole German philosophical world of beginnings, in both time and place, and equally a primitive and primeval psychological site that anyone who has experienced his house will recognise as a Beuysian, if sinister, cathedral of true erotic misery.
147 It is perhaps pertinently strange that three more or less contemporary artists who happen to carry the name ‘Rhoades/Rhodes’, phonetically the same, are all Schwitterian, to coin a perhaps not entirely happy adjective. Jason Rhoades is remembered as an extraordinary creator of blindingly bright neon environments made of words. A friend of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, all were Los Angeles artists – unimaginable without the example of Schwitters. The same is true of two younger American artists. Stephen G. Rhodes, whose art installations construct labyrinthine spaces on a grand scale that evoke American and European philosophy and history. Davis Rhodes’ work, in contrast with Stephen G. Rhodes’, is almost minimalist. By cutting huge sheets of coloured paper, which find their own form, he makes in the process undeniably Merz-like spaces. Ultimately, such lists of artists today could go on indefinitely. Any browsing on the website of any self-respecting contemporary art gallery will reveal artists young and old, a majority, or at least a substantial number, of whom can be read as coming out of Schwitters. His momentary, sudden discovery of Merz opened a book that it seems will never be closed. As he declared in that article of 1940-46: One needs a medium. The best is, one is his own medium [sic]. But don’t be serious because seriousness belongs to a passed time. This medium, called you yourself will tell you to take absolutely the wrong material. That is very good, because only the wrong material used in the wrong way, will give you right picture, when you look at it from the right angle [...] That is my confession I have to make MERZ. 7 7 Kurt Schwitters, Eile ist des Witzes Weile: Eine Auswahl aus den Texten, Reclam, Stuttgart 2009, p.17. Stephen G. Rhodes, Receding Mind: Circle of Shit, 2010, Film installations. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. June 19-September 26, 2010. Davis Rhodes Untitled, 2009, Spray paint on vinyl, 243,8 x 121,9 cm
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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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t 57 t The beginning of Merz theory
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t The consequence of DADA: MERZ ·
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t 63 t A radical act, whose radical
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tt65 The consequence of DADA: MERZ
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t 69 t Modern Age), succeeding the
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t 71 t BATTLE CRY WITH VERVE Merz 7
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t 73 t develop. There is only art.
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t 75 t to inspire the Merzgesamtkun
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l In the political and social chaos
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l by the times themselves.” 31 Bu
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l Kurt Schwitters, Pollfoss, 1947 O
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Kurt Schwitters, who knew a lot of
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you liked my sonata. May I introduc
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93 Photograph of Helma Schwitters,
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Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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