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 KURT
SCHWITTERS' MERZBAU: THE CATHEDRAL OF EROTIC MISERY
Elizabeth Burns Gamard
Princeton Architectural Press
2000
ISBN 1-56898-136-8
Billed as the first in-depth study in English of the work of the German
artist, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Elizabeth Burns Gamard's book
focuses on the Hanover Merzbau, a unique installation in the history of
modern art.
Schwitters was an associate of the Dadaists Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara,
but Merz was a one-man extension of Dada, not a group. Merz took
its name from "an arbitrary and effectively meaningless word
fragment culled from the German word Kommerzbank (Bank of Commerce)
which appeared by chance in an early collage…" (pg 26).
Schwitters' personal continuation of Dada, Merz embraced poetry
and architecture, as well as collages and sculpture, and was advanced
by Schwitters through his magazine, Merz.
Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (The Cathedral of Erotic Misery)
or KdeE - later called the Merzbau - was a combination of collage, sculpture,
and architecture. Begun in the corner of Schwitters' studio around 1923
(the date is problematical), it gradually expanded into the family living
area.
Under pressure from the Nazis, Schwitters fled to Norway in 1937* and
then to Britain where he was interned as any enemy alien. The Merzbau
was destroyed during an allied bombing raid in 1943, and Schwitters died
in poverty and obscurity in England in 1948.
Gamard argues that Schwitters has largely and unfairly been written out
of the modernist narrative because he was not a modernist purist. Schwitters
had progressed through Impressionism, Expressionism, and Abstraction before
discovering Dada and developing Merz, and he also continued to paint portraits,
still-lifes and landscapes.
His failure to give himself entirely to Modernism and his exposure of
Romantic and Expressionist leanings were not well received by some of
his Dadaist associates who regarded his work as sentimental and nostalgic.
Schwitters simply did not consider social and political critique worthy
of artistic deliberation, and he remained aloof from the use of art as
a political tool. Any notion of revolution was personalised, and all this
annoyed the more politicised Dadaists.
The photographic plates of the Merzbau with which the book opens immediately
suggest a Cubist painting sprung to life, a three dimensional form to
which two-dimensional Cubism so obviously aspired, despite the Escher-like
impossibility of its planes. But the Merzbau was developed over a number
of years and the flat architectural surfaces obscured an inner core of
cavities and sculptural excrescencies. Behind the Constructivist veneer
there were inner sanctums of 'refuse' and found objects ranging from tram
tickets to broken toys, which the museum director, Alexander Dorner regarded
as "a kind of fecal smearing - a sick and sickening relapse into
the social irresponsibility of the infant who plays with trash and filth."
(pg 101)
Stretching from a subterranean cistern out through an attic skylight
to a platform on the roof, the Merzbau formed a cathedral-like conduit
between earth and the heavens, reflecting alchemical enterprise and German
nature mysticism.
Schwitters filled his construction with grottoes and caves. Some were
dedicated to personal associates and housed reliquaries tending on fetishism
(the Mies Cave and the Mondrian Cave). Others were dedicated to artistic
movements (the de Stijl Room), and to other aspects of culture (the Goethe
Cave).
Some related to themes in the development of German cultural identity.
Why Schwitters - an avowed modernist and internationalist - should want
to accommodate the mythical wellsprings of the Volkische movement
and German nationalism remains unclear. Gamard suggests that Schwitters
was subverting this tradition through incorporation in his eclecticism,
but one wonders whether his attitude to the struggle between Enlightenment
Zivilisation and Spenglerian Kultur was rather more ambiguous.
Like Worringer and the Conservative Revolutionaries, Schwitters appears
to have shared an acute sense of ambivalence towards the socially disruptive
effects of modernism that wracked Germany in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Another controversial theme in Schwitters' work was the concern with
Lustmord, the explosion of brutal sex crimes in Weimar Germany
and its cultural treatments by artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz.
Like Dix, Schwitters traced a philosophical origin to Nietzsche. In the
first issue of his journal, Merz, Schwitters delivered a Nietzschean call
for the emergence of a 'will to style' (pg 33).
Following in the footsteps of Carl Jung, Gamard relates Schwitter's work
to the tradition of alchemical symbolism. She concedes, indeed stresses,
"that there is no explicit information regarding Schwitters' interest
in the riddles of the occult..." (pg 64), which presents her with
an obvious practical difficulty not so much in making her case as in presenting
it. She is forced, perhaps inevitably, to present an exposition about
the Alchemical tradition and then to point Schwitters to it rather than
study his work and draw such conclusions at the end. Causal connections
are not always clear, and Gamard's study is in itself a work of postmodernist
intertextuality.
She also places Schwitters in the tradition of German nature mysticism,
which she expounds with reference to Wilhelm Worringer. In Abstraktion
und Einfühling (1907) and Formproblem der Gothik (1912)
Worringer had "revalidated the spiritual foundations of Gothic art
and architecture, an analysis that suggested the pursuit of mystical,
organic unity and rhythm, or in Worringer's terms, the empathic was central
to German culture." (Pg 123).
Although Worringer is little known or studied today, he was of considerable
historical importance and a big influence on the German milieu of cultural
theory in Schwitters' time. The (Gothic) Cathedral was undoubtedly a significant
icon, but according to Worringer it represented a negation or transcendence
of nature rather than its affirmation. What Worringer argued was that
organic forms reflecting harmony with the world gave way to 'abstract'
(i.e. stylistic) ones when cultures were threatened and aspired to transcend
the chaos. The Gothic cathedral was not organic but inorganic, an attempt
to capture space from the chaos of nature and impose order. The Worringer
link is thus extremely apt for Schwitters' cathedral enterprise, but is
not examined quite as well as it might be.
And if in accord with occult belief systems, Schwitters' immediate drivers
were patently psychological. Fuelled particularly by grief over the death
of an infant son, his work paid homage to the interlinked themes of sex,
life and death.
Schwitters regarded form in art as a dynamic metamorphosis of becoming,
and his developmental and generative approach summed up in the concept
of Formung and Entformung places Schwitters in a philosophical tradition
which views life as a perpetual flux and is traceable backwards through
Nietzsche to Heraclitus and forwards to postmodernist theory, and Gamard
quotes from Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge to support this (pg 36).
Schwitters pursuit of eclecticism, incorporating other artists' styles,
is in the spirit of postmodern pastiche, while his use of found objects
and ready-mades (à la Duchamp) - which he regarded as artistic
shortcuts (pg 117) - further subvert artistic authority and originality.
The artist is shown to be no longer an individual genius, but a less-than-allpowerful
conduit (pg 185).
You will have gathered by now that Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau is
written in what is now required academic style in the field of culture
and media studies. Driven by an apparent desire for linguistic symmetry
- a hermetic aim in itself no doubt - Gamard is characteristically over-fond
of stating the converse, e.g. "…the building is a function of
its forming (being formed) as well as a forming of its function."
(pg 157) and "The erotic nature of human activity, a play of function
and, conversely, a function of play…" (pg 170).
Like many if not all works of academic analysis, it assumes intentions
that might be no more than the haphazard result of chance. The untrammeled
pursuit of Deconstruction - ever implicit in the thesis-writing process
- also overwhelms more economical or prosaic explanations. In discussing
the early sculpture, Haus Merz, the presence of church clocks is said
to be read traditionally as a signifier of the temporal nature of life,
although it might just as well be read as a means of telling the time
amongst people who didn't have watches.
I am also a little surprised that Gamard doesn't question more fundamentally
the "whitened and fluid spatial edifice" achieved in the concluding
'Constructivist phase' in thc late 20s and early 30s. If the Merzbau was
not only a work of art but "a stage for the artist's inner privations"
(pg 177), it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the change of
style represented not only the triumph of Schwitters' architectural enthusiasms,
but a change in psychological orientation. It seems to me that Schwitters
may have wished to obscure the personal and/or the origins of the Merzbau
in detritus, possibly in response to what he regarded an increasingly
threatening political environment.
Gamard argues here that the forms of the new style "actually maintain
and in some ways clarify the essential nature of the project," (143).
This argument is founded on an organic interpretation of geometry, but
I think she is rather overtaken here, as elsewhere, by her own love of
the hermetic.
Despite these reservations, Gamard's book is a detailed, thought-provoking
and valuable study of a proto-postmodernist. Reflecting on her theme,
I was immediately struck by the parallel that might be drawn between the
concept of the Merzbau and creating a website. The Merzbau began with
lengths of string strung between pictures emphasizing connections between
them, rather like hyperlinks. And this website is a sort of Merzbau, with
its labyrinthine passages, spaces and shrines, and the changing structures
and veneers that have been laid across a selection of cultural material
which - although streamlined and objectified - is ultimately a partial
if not entirely arbitrary personal selection.
Rik - 16 January 2001
* The book says 1938 but the author informs me that this
is a mistake missed by the copy editor. It will be corrected in the forthcoming
second edition.
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