KS - An Appreciation by Russell Mills
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| Schwitters and Ambleside - from an article by Russell Mills | |
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Certain places are imbued with particular resonance due to the occupancy at one time or another, of remarkable individuals, cultural shape-shifters whose life and work has inspired and informed subsequent generations. Barcelona is synonymous with the visionary mystic architect Gaudi and his Sagrada Familia Cathedral; Glasgow with Charles Rennie Mackintosh; Stratford-upon-Avon with Shakespeare; Liverpool with the Beatles; Dublin with James Joyce and more recently U2, to name but a few. Cumbria and in particular the Lake District is renowned as much for its abundance of literary and cultural associations as it is for its natural beauty. Grasmere has Wordsworth; Sawrey and Hawkshead, Beatrix Potter; Coniston and Brantwood, Campbell and Ruskin; Windermere, Arthur Ransome, Rydal, De Quincey, the Arnolds, Coleridge and a host of other Romantic poets; Ambleside has ..., Ambleside has ..., well, it has Harriet Martineau and, well, ... a plethora of shops selling anoraks and walking boots. Ambleside's most important resident was an exiled German artist and poet who died in obscurity and poverty in 1948. He is generally still unknown by local residents and ignored by those arbiters of taste employed in local government to promote the arts, culture and tourism in the region, however since his death in 1948, artists, art critics, historians and cultural theorists have slowly come to recognise him, alongside Picasso and Duchamp, as being one of the most influential and visionary pioneers of modern art in the 20th century. Whilst the whole of the South Lakes is peppered with tea shops named after rabbits, Wordsworth, Gingerbread, Daffodils and co., at the time of writing there is nothing in Ambleside which announces, informs, commemorates or celebrates the fact of the importance of Kurt Schwitters or of his habitation in the town. |
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| "...
the lonely man who was ahead of his time". Edward Mullins; The Sunday Telegraph; March 17th 1963. |
"One
of the most genuine artists of the modern movement". Herbert Read. |
| Kurt
Schwitters: In Brief |
|
| Escaping the Nazis who had dubbed him a "Degenerate Artist", Schwitters emigrated with his son Ernst to Norway in 1937, where he continued to work, undertaking his 2nd Merzbau sculpture at Lysaker until Germany invaded in 1940. Once again he was obliged to flee, only just securing passage for himself and Ernst on the last Allied ship to leave Norway to Scotland where he was immediately arrested as an "Enemy Alien" and interned in a series of detention camps in Midlothian, Yorkshire and finally in Douglas on the Isle of Man. On his release in 1941 he lived in London with Ernst and his newly acquainted companion Edith Thomas (Wantee) until 1945 when, suffering from ill health and the high cost of London life, he and Wantee moved to Ambleside. Despite his failing health and impoverishment, Schwitters worked ceaselessly in this period, painting portraits, landscapes and still life pictures in exchange for food and for the tourist trade, all the while continuing to make small abstract sculptures of natural forms and collages. At Elterwater he embarked on his final Merz sculpture, the Merzbarn (moved to the Hatton Gallery in the University of Newcastle in1965). He died in Kendal Green Hospital on January 8th 1948, leaving the Merzbarn unfinished. |  © DACS 2003 |
| His
life after all was mythic: it spanned the formative period of our world
and touched the savage heart of twentieth-century history, which is,
after all, the only myth everybody knows any more. Also, his life
reflected themes of exile and separation...with an absurdist humour and
optimism. From the start, he was tearing apart newspapers, machines,
language itself to make art. When history took up his life and
tore it apart, he made art with it. Right up till the end, he was
beginning again.
|
"But
instead of being grateful to this man for the happiness he gave to us
and to all his unregarded objects, for the inexhaustible wit he applied
to the juxtaposition of traffic-tickets, nail-files, cheese-paper and
girls' faces, for his many poems, apophthegms. stories, plays, in which
the loftiest sense went hand in hand with the profoundest nonsense - and
were united in deathless language as boy and girl are united in
springtime - instead of being grateful for all this, we allowed him, a
German painter and poet, to die unrecognised, in poverty and exile, and
protected only by an English girl, Edith Thomas, and an English farmer
by the name of Pierce."
Hans Richter |
|
Schwitters and the Collage Principle - by Russell Mills "...
there is no term capable of defining the conditions and potential of art
in our century more universally than that of collage." Collage in all its guises, as concept and as actual construct, is the most important cultural idea of the 20th and now the 21st century. Since Braque and Picasso's first moves off of the flat surface towards the 3-dimensional in 1911 - 12, a quiet but influential revolution has been spreading throughout all areas of creativity. Along with Marcel Duchamp and his "Readymades" and proto-conceptual objects, it is Kurt Schwitters with his startlingly poetic collages, phonetic poems and innovative Merzbau sculptures (pre-empting "installations" by 40 years), who has done most to ignite this cultural fuse. Through the process of collage, Schwitters, utilising society's discarded ephemera, bus tickets, newspaper scraps, wrappers, cloth, wood, etc., defined the creative process not as a separate sphere but as intimately linked with everyday life. as a process of organic transformation. |
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| Schwitters' diverse works were and are central in the history of Modernism in the 20th century. Through his radical imperatives such as the groundbreaking "Gesamtkunstwerk": the idea of the complete integration of different forms, he has been the benign midwife to all subsequent generations of the avant-garde for over 60 years. His enormous seminal influence can be seen in all genres of the arts and in the wider contemporary media landscape. Without Schwitters there would not have been Conceptual Art, Concrete Poetry, Punk graphics, Pop Art, Performance Art, Land Art, Nouveau Realism, the Fluxus movement, Arte Povera or Happenings. Without his phonetic poetry and his prose there would not have been the bewildering "stream of consciousness" literary experiments of James Joyce or the Beat writings of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Jack Kerouac or the fantastical writings of contemporary novelists such as Mark Danielewski and Ben Marcus or the "psychogeography" of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, nor the "cut up" lyrics of David Bowie. Pop Art's joyful appropriation of the banal, the kitsch and the contemporary everyday converted to iconic status, finds its origins in a picture that many eminent artists and art historians have defined as the first Pop Art picture, "For Kate" 1947, a tiny piece incorporating fragments of American comics made by Schwitters whilst he lived in Ambleside. (There are other earlier examples of figurative collage by Schwitters which might also be considered to be the rightful precursors of Pop Art). Design's continual Magpie plundering and re-cycling of stylistic shifts nod homage to Schwitters' typographic inventiveness of his Dadaist and Constructivist days. Similarly artists such as Klien, Manzoni, Christo, Beuys, Kieffer, Tapies, etc., through to our recent Turner Prize world of high-fliers - are all continually using forms of collage, materially, conceptually and contextually. | |
| Without his 3 ambitious walk-in sculptures, the Merzbau's (Hanover, begun 1920, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943; Lysaker, Norway, begun 1937, destroyed by fire in 1951; and Elterwater, Cumbria, begun 1947, unfinished), there would not be the multi-media installations that are the chosen mode of most contemporary artists including the "YBA's" (Young British Artists) such as Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Mark Wallinger, Martin Landy and Martin Creed, et al. Hirst has admitted that as a student at Goldsmith's College of Art in the early 1980's the discovery of Schwitters opened his eyes to the potential of collage and ultimately was the liberating force which enabled him to aspire to his ambitious and sometimes controversial works. (Hirst also spent 2 years making assemblages based on Schwitters' works, so influenced was he that these works bear a striking resemblance to the original Schwitters only differentiated by the inclusion of some contemporary materials such as coloured plastics). It can be claimed that Schwitters' works pre-empted all artistic movements since the Second World War and in his writings he anticipated much that is with us now in our daily lives as well as speculating on a visionary idea of “Total Art" that includes and can effect all the senses in real time; this aspirational manifesto of the hypothetical "Merz Stage" was proposed in a text written in1921 and still it cannot be realised. | |
| I know for sure that a great day will come for myself and for other important individuals of the abstract movement when we shall influence a whole generation, only I fear that I personally will not live to see the day. KS | Abstract art rates no more than a question mark here,” KS said. “In America it rates an exclamation mark” |
| His ideas have also informed the fast cuts and time shifts as used so effectively in film, television and video editing. In radio too his influence was first unconsciously echoed through the work of the innovative Radio DJ Jack Jackson, who physically cutup tapes from various comedy shows of the day and re-spliced them to produce deliberately anarchistic running gags. By extension and following these experiments, it could be argued that his legacy also suggested the absurdist juxtapositions which have been central to the peculiarly British comedy genre from the Goons via Monty Python's Flying Circus to the Fast Show. Advertising, animation, magazine design (and content) have all, consciously or unconsciously, embraced collage as a paradigm. Assisted by the rapid pace of technological change the collage principle as Schwitters imagined it, has also unwittingly produced the ideal visual collage tool, the computer, with its numerous effects programmes, filters and Photoshop facilities, enabling instant juxtapositions. In contemporary music, from the radical experiments at IRCAM in Paris in the1950's and continuing through the works and ideas of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others through to the likes of contemporary musicians such as Radiohead, Bjork, Brian Eno and Moby, the use of samplers, sequencers, multi-speed editing and time-stretching effects has allowed the collaging together of disparate sonic elements in single compositions and performances not possible in real time with traditional instruments. | |
| To his radical works and visionary ideas is owed much of the basic cultural assumption that art can exist for any duration, in any material, for any purpose and for any destination; through his influence we are now experiencing a culture in which collage pervades like perfume, seeping into and defining our daily lives, ignoring any traditional cultural barriers or categories. | |
| "My name is Kurt Schwitters...I am an artist and I nail my pictures together..." | |
|
"Mr.
Schwitters achieved world fame as the artist to take the first big step
into modern art after the introduction of Cubism by Picasso". |
"He
is revealed as a master of the 20th century". (Lady) Marina Vaizey; The Sunday Times; 10th November 1985. |
[ Alien at Ambleside ] [ Dr G A Johnston ] [ Merz Lives On ] [ Kurt Schwitters at the Armitt ] [ KS - An Appreciation by Russell Mills ] [ Newspaper Collages ] [ Wood on Wood ]