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

l
19
Kurt Schwitters, “Merzbühne,” 1919, p.
3, in Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk,
ed. Friedhelm Lach, volume 5, DuMont,
Cologne 1981, p. 42; cited in John
Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, The Museum of
Modern Art & Thames and Hudson, New
York 1985, p. 107.
20
Kurt Schwitters, “Merz,” Der Ararat,
1920, pp. 6-7, in Kurt Schwitters, Das
literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach,
volume 5, DuMont, Cologne 1981, p.
79; cited in John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters,
The Museum of Modern Art & Thames
and Hudson, New York 1985, p. 44.
Schwitters’ idea of the Merzbühne is
indebted to Kandinsky’s stage composition
Gelbe Klang, published with his theories in
the Blaue Reiter Almanac 1912.
21
Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art,
McGraw Hill, London and New York
1965, p. 152.
22
See: John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters,
The Museum of Modern Art & Thames and
Hudson, New York 1985, p. 160.
23
Kurt Schwitters, “Ich und meine Ziele,”
1930, 116, in Kurt Schwitters, Das
literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach,
volume 5, DuMont, Cologne 1981,
p. 345; cited in John Elderfield, Kurt
Schwitters, The Museum of Modern Art &
Thames and Hudson, New York 1985,
p. 159.
Schwitters came closest to achieving this grand
synthesis in his Merzbau, a perpetually evolving
environment that began around 1923 with a pair of
columnar assemblages in his studio; he called them the
Cathedral of Erotic Misery and the Column of Life. These
grew to encompass the entire room, then several rooms,
with a proliferating warren of little shrines and space
defining architectural structures. As he finished each part,
new additions would swallow it up, in layer upon layer,
with new construction. Sliding doors opened to hidden
grottos, and passages to the interior offered glimpses of the
deeper strata of content, as though the viewer was peering
into a shop window. Caves and tableaux mushroomed in
the relatively formless core of collected debris, souvenirs,
postcards of places, photographs of people, emotionally
charged symbols of fantasies, all freely appropriated and
conglomerated. Gradually, an outer shell enveloped the
expressionist core; this he rigorously constructed in clear
architectural forms of plaster and wood and painted white
with just a few color accents. The core, in turn, receded
further and further into inaccessible private spaces like
Freud’s description of the unconscious. Sometimes
Schwitters even literally plastered over sections with the contents still intact.
“He cut off a lock of my hair and put it in my hole,” Hans Richter reported. “A thick pencil,
filched from Mies van der Rohe’s drawing-board, lay in his cavity. In others’ there were a piece
of a shoelace, a half-smoked cigarette, a nail paring, a piece of tie (Doesburg), a broken pen.” 21
Sophie Taeuber came to stay with Schwitters and awoke to find her bra had disappeared into a
cave dedicated to her; Moholy-Nagy lost his socks. 22 Schwitters himself described The Big Love
Grotto in the style of one of his poems, inserting “live” elements morphed in the retelling from
the inanimate dolls and objects in the construction:
A wide outside stair leads to it, underneath which stands the
female lavatory attendant of life in a long narrow corridor with
scattered camel dung. Two children greet us and step into life;
owing to damage only part of a mother and child remain. Shiny
and broken objects set the mood. In the middle a couple is
embracing: he has no head, she no arms; between his legs he is
holding a huge blank cartridge. The big twisted-around child’s
head with the syphilitic eyes is warning the embracing couple
to be careful. This is disturbing, but there is reassurance in the
little bottle of my own urine in which immortelles [long-lasting
flower arrangements placed on graves] are suspended. 23
83 SCHWITTERS: Tending the Enchanted Garden · by Jonathan Fineberg