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

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NORMAN ROSENTHAL IN CONVERSATION WITH DAMIEN HIRST were working on, which in a way is a very Schwitterian thing to do. I’ve got a big collection of Harry’s work now. I have thirty collages. NR: I assume you have Schwitters in your collection? DH: I’ve got a couple of works on paper, but not any constructions. I’d like to get more, but I think they’re– NR: –quite expensive. DH: And the good ones are hard to find. NR: I remember a place in West London, when I was a boy where you could buy them for £50 each – maybe less. Fifty pounds was a lot of money, certainly for me in those days. It was actually one of my first encounters with “real art”. DH: Elma Thubron told me that she was once in Ambleside and she was walking around and she saw the gate post ‘Cylinders‘, and she thought: ‘Oh my god, I remember this from the books.’ And she said she went in and looked around and met a kind of a farmer, and asked him whether he has a work by Kurt Schwitters. And he said, ‘Oh yeah, I know.’ And he took her to a barn filled with loads of equipment – farming stuff like hoes, forks, spades – and in the back of the barn, with things leaning against it, was this huge Schwitters piece. The way she describes it makes it sound amazing: there were low windows and there was shimmering green light because of the grass outside. She said it was the most amazing thing discovering it on your own wandering around in the Lake District. Richard Hamilton took it out shortly after that. It must have been in the late ‘50s. NR: So you only have two Schwitters pieces? DH: I’ve got one really good one. NR: Where did you find it? DH: I can’t remember now – it was a long time ago. I’ve been looking for a construction really. I know that Miuccia Prada has an amazing green one. I remember looking at Schwitters’ work and thinking that I couldn’t work whether they’d looked new at one point or if they’d aged, or if they had been created to look nostalgic. I’ve got some fake Schwitters as well. NR: Yes? Where did you get these? DH: On Ebay. I buy lots of fakes. I’ve also got lots of fake Damien Hirsts, which I sign. So is it a fake, then? NR: I’m sure there are lots of fake Schwitters. I’ve written an article now about Schwitters in which I claim that since Rauschenberg, right down to the present, Schwitters is at least 150
as important as Marcel Duchamp. DH: Duchamp is so important, but I think it’s a different thing. Maybe you can say that the Merzbau is as important as the urinal, but I don’t think you can disentangle it so easily. Schwitters never really left the picture plane and I always thought you needed to leave the picture plane. NR: But he does use the the detritus of society, which is a big thing for art. When you, Damien, use cigarette ash in a vitrine, for example, you’re working in a lineage with Schwitters. DH: When the sculpture starts crawling off the table and up the wall, all hell breaks loose. Schwitters was definitely that guy. Also maybe his poetry is what endures too. All these things he is bringing into play about language – this totally changes the world. I like the fact, too, that he didn’t get accepted by the Surrealists. NR: Aside from from Schwitters, Duchamp and Picasso, do you think that there is any other artist in the first half of the 20th century who changed art? Who made possible so much other art? DH: I think you can’t imagine Jasper Johns’ beer cans without Schwitters. I think Pop Art came out of Schwitters as well. NR: When you’re making art, do you think about older artists at all? DH: It’s impossible not to. I remember being at Goldsmiths and looking around at all the people and thinking: We’ve got nothing in common. And then you realize that the world is so multifacetted that every generation will have this feeling. When Ian Jeffrey wrote the essay for the Freeze catalogue he called it ‘Platonic Tropics’ and I thought that it was a really a good way of saying that you have all these people who think that they have things in common but actually they have nothing in common. Schwitters’ work is heterogenous in that way. Every painting is like a battle like between creation and destruction. NR: Have you ever done an environment yourself? DH: The fly piece, A Thousand Years (1990) is definitely Schwitters-inspired. When I moved to London I found this old guy’s house, Mr. Barnes, and I made col-lages from stuff of his like Schwitters’. Did you ever see these? NR: No. This is long before Freeze? DH: Before Goldmsiths. I got into Goldmsiths with one of the little collages – they were just on display in the Tate St. Ives. And I remember there Basil Beattie said to me: These are great. You really shouldn’t be in an art school, you should go get an exhibition. That really fucking threw me. And then I thought: What am I doing here? And then I thought to throw it all away and start again. And then Michael Craig-Martin came in during my first few months and said to me: 151
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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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t Page from Schwitters’ family al
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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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47 t
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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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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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67 tt (core Dada and Huelsendada).
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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 Like Kandinsky’s abstractions o
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l 81 SCHWITTERS: Tending the Enchan
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l 19 Kurt Schwitters, “Merzbühne
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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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Postcard Kurt and Helma Schwitters
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97 Kurt Schwitters: A genius in fri
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Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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