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

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NORMAN ROSENTHAL IN CONVERSATION WITH DAMIEN HIRST What are you doing? You’re arranging objects on these found backboards, why don’t you get rid of the them to arrange the objects on the wall? And then I did that and I thought it was an amazing breakthrough. And then I realized that, maybe ten years before, Johnny LeKray had been doing it. And I thought, fucking hell, I’m not advanced at all, someone did that major thing ten years ago. And that kind of led to the medicine cabinet. I was totally against conceptual art. I hated it. I liked Schwitters because he wasn’t this ‘50s abstraction, but this kind of image that was about how you feel. I wanted browns and purples if I’m feeling somber and reds and yellows when I’m happy. I wanted that emotional kind of art and then it didn’t work in the world of today. NR: Schwitters and your work share this erotic aspect. You know he called the Merzbau the Cathedral of Erotic Misery? DH: Oh yeah, yeah, brilliant. To come back to my collages, I found the guy living next door to me living in a squat. I could hear though the walls the guy next door to me and I then I looked out of the window and he was pushing a shopping trolley around and collecting stuff and bringing it back to the house, day in day out. One day I stopped hearing him so I went around and I broke in. I got in and found two locked doors on the top floor and the rest of the house was just ruined. About sixty years it had been in that state. Eventually we broke the doors down and went in and collected sixty years of stuff, then I started collecting tools and ham-mers and paint and string and started bringing it all back to my studio and that’s when I started making my collages. Up there I found stuff he had collected that I had thrown out as well, like I found a tin that had been run over by a car and- NR: Why did he like all that stuff? The fetishistic aspect of it? DH: I really got to know him – he was called Mr. Barnes. From the top of the room there were piles to the ceiling, maybe a foot from the ceiling, and there was a little corridor through it, and there was a bench near a foot pedal like a lay of turned wood and he had alarm clocks, a clock collection, he was fixing the clocks, and it was chaos at the top and I went through it, and when I got down to the table level, I found, like, a civilized man and I found, like, his letters and his handwriting. At the top was where I found porn magazines from the seventies and he had scribbled with red pen the vaginas and before that it was like Paris Match. Little pencil lines drawn around the women, some of them dressed and drawn around the clothes. It was just unbelievable. I got to know the guy and he was… I went through sixty years of his life and got to know him. NR: But he was still alive? DH: No, he was rehoused by the council and the landlord didn’t want to have anything to do with it. 152
NR: So what happened to the house? DH: A few weeks after I went around the council came around with two guys. They had big shovels and smashed the windows out and shoved it all out the window. I went mad. It was unbelievable, sixty years of existence and then gone in no time. It completely blew my mind. And then I found it really difficult at Goldsmiths, when I got there, to kind of create anything meaningful, because you just thought, that was it. That was the most meaningful thing. And then the only thing that got me out of it was minimalism, because it went the opposite of that. NR: So out of all this came your source to fill your collages? DH: Yes. Well, and then I carried on collecting myself. NR: Do you still collage? DH: Organizing Freeze was a collage. I got all these existing elements, people’s art, buildings, arrangeable on the walls. NR: I think every exhibition is a kind of collage. DH: Yes, it is. Meyer Vaisman once said to me, when I lived in New York for about eighteen months, that collage was the greatest idea of the 20th century. There is so much going on in the world – the collage lends itself to making a comment about the world. You know you take fragments of the world and then you reconstruct another world, which is a mirror of the world. It is the most direct and simplest way to do it. NR: Do you still have all of your constructions from Mr Barnes’ junk? DH: Yeah. I actually gave one to Rauschenberg. And then I bought it back of his estate after he died. Let’s do a Merzbau. NR: Let’s do one. Let’s do one here! DH: Let’s do one with spots. A Merzbau with spots. Interview conducted by Norman Rosenthal with the help of Jonathan White 153
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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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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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Postcard Kurt and Helma Schwitters
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the Merzbau in Waldhausenstraße 5
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Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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