Schwitters in Britain
Tate Britain, London, January 30th to May 12th
Things—a piece of string, corrugated card, a used envelope, nails, a grubby bus ticket, sackcloth, a yellow dot—have been attached to a wooden board. Fragmented words from bits of coffee-stained newsprint poke through the gaps, teasingly. Splurges of paint sweep across the pitted surface. The result is a carefully assembled composition made from a load of old tat.
In 1919 Kurt Schwitters invented the concept of Merz. The term, like much of Schwitters’ work, is dipped in irony (he saw an advert for Commerzbank and took a bite out of the middle). The process is a sort of anti-ideology, in which boring everyday materials become expressive components of equal weight. “Merz develops the studies for a communal creation of the world,” he declared. “Merz detoxifies. Merz is Kurt Schwitters.”
Picasso and Braque had been playing around with a similar technique a few years earlier, which they called papiers collés, but Schwitters, says Emma Chambers, curator of modern British art at Tate Britain, “takes collage to a different level” (above, “The Proposal”, 1942). He had a sharp imagination that enabled him to look at ordinary objects with fresh eyes, as if seeing them for the very first time.
He was forced to flee Germany when his work was condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazi government. He was one of many German exiles, including a number of artists, to be interned on the Isle of Man during the war. In the camp, he took part in concerts, poetry performances and group exhibitions. “It’s unfortunate”, Chambers says, “that the legendary porridge sculptures didn’t survive.”
Released in 1941, Schwitters spent more time in London, and it shows. A Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts wrapper appears in “Untitled (This is to Certify That)”, 1942 , as do familiar English phrases and this is the first major exhibition to focus on his extensive British output. The curators, keen to shake things up, have invited two artists, in collaboration with Grizedale Arts, to develop new work in response to Schwitters. The two have taken different approaches—Laure Prouvost has used anecdotal material in which she hops between fact and fiction, while Adam Chodzko pays homage to the “Merz Barn”, an architectural construction in Cumbria considered one of the key lost works of European modernism. “I’ve discovered”, Chodzko says, “that people make no sense.”
Comments are closed.