Kurt Schwitters

Das Undbild von Kurt Schwitters und die Philosophie des Und von Franz Rosenzweig stehen im Zentrum der hier vorgetragenen Überlegungen. Beide Arbeiten, die künstlerische wie die philosophische, entstanden unabhängig voneinander, jedoch im nämlichen Zeitraum (ca. 1920). Ohne voneinander zu wissen, haben Schwitters sowie Rosenzweig auf je verschiedene Weise die Konjunktion thematisiert. Diese eigenartige Koinzidenz markiert eine historische Situation, deren Charakteristika genauer zu betrachten sind. Künstlerisch betrachtet erweist sich das Und als epochales Grundwort für Collage und Montage. Philosophisch bedacht führt die Konjunktion auf eine sprachphilosophische Wende sowie auf eine radikale Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik (lange vor aller postmodernen "Logik des Und"). Ziel des Vortrags ist es, Bild und Buch in wechselseitiger Verschränkung zu befragen.

In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.

The essay uses Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "carnevalization" to reconstruct the poetics of Kurt Schwitters's Dadaist and Constructivist "Merzkunst". Works discussed include the poem "An Anna Blume" and the collage "Merzbild 25 A: Das Sternenbild".

Analizy otwartych dzieł sztuki zmierzały do wykrywania technik generujących wielość znaczeń. Otwartość w takim rozumieniu to przede wszystkim polisemiczność. Siłą rzeczy, w badaniach nad tak rozumianą otwartością centralnym zagadnieniem stawała się relacja między dziełem sztuk a odbiorcą, rugując postać twórcy na marginesy sytuacji estetycznej. Mimo że sztuka w procesie plasuje się w przestrzeni zarezerwowanej dla dzieł otwartych, to nie stanowi działania, którego podstawowym celem jest podatność na wielorakie interpretacje. W sztuce w procesie podstawową kwestią staje się stosunek twórcy do jego dzieła. Jej otwartość, w przeciwieństwie do tradycyjnie rozumianej otwartości, zasadza się na nieustannym, dynamicznym procesie wytwarzania. Stąd wydaje się bezcelowe analizować sztukę w procesie w perspektywie tradycyjnych kategorii, wypracowanych przez teoretyków otwartości. W poniższej wypowiedzi próbuję przekształcić pojęcie 'dzieło otwarte' w ten sposób, aby mogło stanowić narzędzie twórczej analizy dzieł, których otwartość nie opiera się na polisemicznym potencjale.

This is the catalogue for Jack Ox's exhibition of her 800 Square foot  visualization of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland.  The exhibition occurred in conjunction with the first large Schwitters exhibition in Poland, with graphically matching catalogues. It covers such topics as intermedia and includes phonetic analyses etc of the Schwittters's sound-poem. Authors include The exhibition was sponsored by the German government in 2004.

This essay is an expansion of my contribution to 'Kurt Schwitters and his Cultural Landscapes', a Public Lecture/Lecture Performance co-presented with Dr Martyn Hudson on Feb. 3, 2020, as 'Negotiating a Cultural Landscape: Writers and Artists in the Lakes', a series hosted at the Ambleside campus of University of Cumbria. The lecture featured selected aspects of Kurt Schwitters' Merz legacy: the short prose piece "It is dripping down…" (1945-47) (Fig. 1) and three poems: Frohe Tage/ London Symphony (1946), London Onion (1946) and PIN (1947). These were chosen from Schwitters' literary output during his time in Ambleside to explore how he maintained emotional and material connections with his former cultural landscapes.

Os ateliers, seminários e encontros realizados com Claude Ledoux se inscreveram no âmbito de atividades acadêmicas desenvolvidas na Unicamp e na Usp na área de Análise Musical e compreenderam: Reflexão sobre a Análise Musical relacionada a tradições populares; Impacto do conhecimento de tradições populares no ato da composição musical; Claude Debussy e as tradições do Sudeste Asiático; Ligeti e a influência de músicas subsaarianas; Feldmann, tradições do Oriente-Médio e filosofias orientais; Scelsi, Murail e Harvey: interesse mutuo em músicas tibetanas, mongólicas e outros rituais budistas; Eötvös e Kurtag em relação às tradições da Europa Central; Claude Ledoux: influência das músicas da Índia do Norte e Indonésia; Relações com etnomusicologia e improvisação musical em extensão às reflexões analíticas; Levy Strauss e a Sinfonia de Berio; Relação entre música e texto em Berio e Kurt Schwitters.

In 1946, after many years in exile, Kurt Schwitters (who had moved to Ambleside in 1945) and Raoul Hausmann (since 1944 based in Limoges) resumed contact. The pair had not corresponded in some time, and they decided to put together a small magazine; they eventually settled on the title PIN for the publication. PIN aimed to offer art and abstract poetry to a new generation. The project was initiated in the autumn of 1946, then found itself in trouble. Schwitters thought he knew just the person to publish their little magazine: E.L.T. Mesens, a Belgian-born Surrealist who had in 1938 settled in London, where he became director of the London Gallery. Mesens was not a major publisher, but he published the London Bulletin and organised exhibitions of Surrealists as well as an exhibition of Schwitters' own work. However, Mesens did not want to publish the work, and this led to its demise. The PIN magazine did not make it to publication, but in 1962 a heavily annotated edition was published by the Gaberbocchus Press, led by Stefan The-merson, and in 1986 a second, bilingual edition was released by Anabas-Verlag.

Ever since Marcel Duchamp devised his 'readymades' in the early twentieth century, the majority of the critical literature on artworks that comprise readymade and found objects focuses on the commodity status of these items and the critique of consumer culture. This session, instead, invites papers that explore the links between found object-based sculpture and its relationship to the economies and technologies of production in industrial and postindustrial metropolitan areas-as Anne Wagner has argued, the history of sculpture is in constant dialogue with the history of technologies of production. From the dominance of industrial zones in early twentieth-century modern cities around the world to the waning of industry, the emergence of service-based economies and the growth of the financial sectors in postindustrial, postmodern urban areas, this panel explores how artistic practices that incorporate found objects negotiate the shifting texture of cities on the level of the street, the neighborhood, the workplace, the local store, real estate and urban life. This panel encourages the participation of art historians, curators, museum professionals, artists and theorists whose work and scholarship encompass the study of readymades, found objects, and simulated everyday objects in modern and contemporary sculpture and explore its links to obsolete and emerging technologies and sites of production in the context of industrial and postindustrial cities worldwide.

* Please send proposals for a paper including title, abstract (250 words maximum) and a short bio to Dr Natasha Adamou at adamou.natasha@gmail.com

For more information concerning the conference, see: http://www.collegeart.org/programs/conference/

This short essay undertakes the view that Anna Blume, as it appeared in English (first in 1922 and later in 1927) might be considered within a feminist critical framework. It explores the notions of gender, equality, sexuality, femaleness, femininity, and translation.

Der Text  wendet sich einem ebenso beziehungsreichen wie bedeutungslosem Wort zu, dem Wort 'und'. Tatsächlich hat 'und' keinerlei Bedeutung, es bezeichnet nichts. Es eröffnet jedoch eine Relation zwischen zweierlei, dem einen und dem anderen. In dieser seiner Zwischenstellung besetzt es eine Position, die an eine Grundform des Medialen rührt: das Trennen und Verbinden. Selten ist die Kopula so bohrend befragt worden, wie nach dem Zusammenbruch des 1. Weltkriegs -- künstlerisch von Kurt Schwitters, philosophisch von Franz Rosenzweig.

An account of the largely forgotten episode of Kurt Schwiters' internment on the Lofoten Islands in mid-1940.
The complete article is available free to members of the Kurt Schwitters Society http://www.kurtschwitterstoday.org/join.html or can be requested at a price of 10 Euros (or equivalent) plus postage.

While most critics have focused on the semantic, aural and textual effects of Dada sound poetry  few have given more than cursory treatment to the fact that these works also exist as carefully-typeset texts and as highly-scripted performances. Far from employing mere creative chaos or nonsense, Dada sound poems are intricately structured and meticulously staged. A key question is why. if Dada sound poems aim simply at evoking strong emotion, why would these poets not simply trust their own ability to improvise? Why fix so securely the specific sounds and performative components of their works? In this essay, I attempt to answer these questions in regard to two seminal works of Dada sound poetry, Hugo Ball's "gadji beri bimba" sequence and Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate. I argue that these works, while aiming at the experience of primeval language, also make deliberate use of technology, or what Huyssen has termed the technological imagination.  Specifically, in their sound poetry, Ball and Schwitters seek precise control in their shared project of remaking the listeners' relationship to language and the moribund notions that accompany it. In doing so, they are informed by the trope of the automaton, a common figure in the works of Grosz and other Dada artists. Mindless, maimed, and deprived of independent agency, the automaton is a human whose individuality has been subsumed by the forces of mass production. In contrast to this eviscerated, half-mechanized figure, Ball and Schwitters offer an alternative model of the animal-human hybrid. This inverse automaton forcefully asserts meaningfulness of interior experience. However, Ball and Schwitters both also employ structures of mechanization in their works and offer the possibility of reproducibility as a form of protest against the pressures of modernity. The sound poetics of Ball and Schwitters are, in effect, plans for a machine that is meant to shred and reassemble meaning, to rend and tear the listener in order to reframe her relationship to language and to the modern world.

Modern art remains a mystery because most people – including art critics and even artists themselves – are unable to see beyond the imprisoning confines of classical fine art. Everything is judged in terms of beauty and technical skill, when it should be viewed from a quite different perspective, namely that of the imaginative world that the modern artwork is a part of. Successful and authentic modern art is about creating worlds of the imagination - like a film, or a novel - only this time using different media. Modern artworks are like lobby cards and film stills to imaginative worlds, and they should not be seen as aesthetic ends-in-themselves. And for an artwork to be authentically artistic, as opposed to merely crafted, it must invoke a ‘strange and disturbing’ imaginative world, not a variant of the world we currently inhabit, as that world is the world of crafted and aesthetic objects.

Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, which took shape in Hannover, Germany, between 1923 and 1936, is one of the most problematical artworks of the 20th century. The Hannover Merzbau and its two lesser-known successors, constructed by Schwitters in exile, present an unusual challenge to art historians because so little remains of them: the first was destroyed in 1943, nothing survives of the second, constructed in Oslo, and the last, in Elterwater, England, was never completed. Despite the painstaking investigations of Werner Schmalenbach, Dietmar Elger and John Elderfield between the 1960s and 1980s, the Hannover Merzbau in particular has amassed so many myths and legends since Schwitters’ death in 1948 that the reception of the work may be said to have established a dynamic of its own. The combination of the lack of originals and a plethora of misunderstandings about the evolution of the Merzbauten has meant that these sculptural interiors are frequently misconstrued as essentially ludicrous, macabre or regressive works that are hardly to be taken seriously within the framework of the 20th century avant-garde.
  The main aim of this dissertation is to relocate the Merzbauten in their historical context by building on the often forgotten work of early researchers. It includes an examination and assessment of a selection of scholarly studies, a review of the evidence that draws on new archival discoveries, critical analyses of key sources such as Schwitters’ few published statements on his constructions, his personal correspondence and the visual material, and a revised chronology that not only calls into question many of the numerous anecdotes, legends surrounding the Merzbauten, but also most of the accepted art-historical theories. The concluding chapter examines various aspects of the complex interweaving of the public and private facets of the Merzbauten and suggests ways in which the revised chronology can alter our understanding of these works and in addition, redefine them as works of exile.

"Handy Art from Wroclaw. From a Thing to an Event" is an alternative art history of a city that used to be German Breslau and has become Polish Wrocław; the publication was trying to describe the constant flow between art and non-art, daily cohabiting and dialoguing with things, combined through inventive bricolage

Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and several other modernist typographers demanded that the alphabet be redesigned in order to represent speech more faithfully, yet Kurt Schwitters’s Systemschrift was the only such experiment that pursued to the end the modernist typographers’ rally cry of ‘one sound, one sign’. To achieve this, Schwitters rejected the standard characters of the Latin alphabet and designed entirely new symbols informed by phonetic analysis of speech sounds. Further, Systemschrift included aspects of non-arbitrary signification through imagery; the characters can be interpreted as depictions of the articulatory positions of the vocal organ. In so doing, Schwitters emulated experiments conducted by nineteenth-century English phoneticians.

Du théâtre, et de l'abstraction (Texte publié in : Théâtre et art plastiques, entre chiasmes et confluences, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2002.) La question, qu'il faudrait dire cruciale pour notre temps, parce qu'elle est celle de la mise en scène et donc de la mise en société (hors-scène), est la suivante : est-il nécessaire que la victime soit en scène pour que la jouissance soit intense? Jean-François LYOTARD 1 La question de l'abstraction, qui surgit dès qu'on interroge les relations du théâtre et des arts plastiques au 20 e siècle, est l'une des plus piégées qui soient. Parce qu'elle prend appui sur des modèles contradictoires, insuffisamment analysés sans doute, et qui mettent en jeu la définition même qu'on assigne à l'art du théâtre, en même temps que l'horizon qu'on découvre pour ses utopies. Se souvient-on par exemple de ce qu'Eugène Ionesco, dans un article de 1958 2 , comparait les toiles de Paul Klee, de Vassily Kandinsky, de Piet Mondrian, à la recherche d'un langage théâtral purifié, réduit à l'ossature du geste et de la parole, tel qu'il l'explorait dans sa propre écriture dramatique ? Qu'Alfred Jarry, dès 1896, évoquait la possibilité d'un « décor abstrait » et, à défaut de pouvoir réaliser celui-ci, considérait comme ses substituts les plus approchants soit « le décor par celui qui ne sait pas peindre 3 », soit n'importe quel châssis retourné ? Ces deux exemples suffisent à montrer combien les définitions que l'on donne de l'abstraction au théâtre peuvent être éloignées, voire difficilement compatibles. J'ajouterai, pour ma part, que le travail de la déliaison narrative dans l'écriture théâtrale contemporaine, comme celui de la dissociation du couple acteur / personnage dans la mise en scène, pourraient aussi, et à bon droit, être décrits comme autant de processus d'abstraction : à travers eux, en effet, s'opère un retrait de la mimésis, un renoncement à l'iconicité de l'image scénique, qui ouvre la même béance entre la scène et le monde que celle creusée par l'abandon de la figuration dans la peinture des années 1910. Ce n'est donc pas l'ensemble des questionnements soulevés par l'application dans le champ théâtral du mot (par ailleurs fragile, et controversé) d'« abstraction » que je me propose d'examiner ici, mais seulement les modèles mis en oeuvre par les peintres eux-mêmes pour imaginer l'application sur la scène de leur recherche d'une création plastique non figurative. A travers ces modèles, en effet, c'est une pensée du corps et de l'espace qui se trouve mise en jeu, et je poserai comme hypothèse que cette pensée, loin de constituer un phénomène marginal, trouve ses prolongements dans l'histoire des poétiques scéniques du 20 e siècle. Avant de commencer, j'évoquerai une dernière difficulté, qui naît d'un paradoxe. Il n'est pas indifférent que le développement de pratiques plastiques dites « abstraites », au long de ce siècle, s'accompagne justement du refus de tout ce qui, de près ou de loin, pourrait être assimilé à une forme de « théâtralité ». Ainsi Clement Greenberg, dans une conférence prononcée en 1954, at -il recours à la métaphore d'une scène qui se refermerait pour décrire le mouvement qui conduit de l'art figuratif à l'art abstrait : De Giotto à Courbet, la principale tâche du peintre a consisté à creuser sur une surface plane l'illusion d'un espace tridimensionnel. On regardait à travers cette surface comme on regarde la scène par-delà le proscenium. Le modernisme a progressivement rétréci cette scène jusqu'à ce que l'arrière-plan se confonde maintenant avec le rideau-rideau qui est tout ce qu'il reste au peintre pour travailler. 4 De même Michael Fried, critiquant en 1967 ce qu'il considère être les contradictions du mouvement minimaliste américain (en particulier les quelques traces d'anthropomorphisme qui subsistent dans les volumes géométriques de Robert Morris et Tony Smith), construit-il son argumentation sur le fait que « le théâtre est maintenant la négation de l'art », de sorte que « le succès, voire la survie des arts dépend de plus en plus de leur capacité à mettre en échec le théâtre 5 ». L'émergence et la radicalisation d'un art abstrait au 20 e siècle peuvent donc être décrites, sinon comme une guerre entre le théâtre et la peinture moderniste ainsi que l'affirme Fried, du moins comme autant d'étapes dans un processus de déthéâtralisation des pratiques plastiques. Le paradoxe que j'évoquais à l'instant serait alors celui-ci :

Love poetry between Realism and Dadaism in three examples: Theodor Fontane's "Winterabend" (1849), Gottfried Benn's "D-Zug" (1912), and Kurt Schwitter's "An Anna Blume" (1919).

Die drei Beispieltexte des Beitrags – Fontanes „Winterabend“ (1849), Benns „D-Zug“ (1912) und Schwitters „An Anna Blume“ (1919) – illustrieren nicht nur den Übergang von einer konventionsorientierten zu einer freieren Liebesauffassung, sondern auch den Stilwandel zwischen Realismus, Expressionismus und Dadaismus. Während im Realismus Wirklichkeitsbezug und Symbolik noch aufs Engste miteinander vermittelt sind, tritt im Expressionismus die äußere Realität hinter der Evokation von Bewusstseinszuständen zurück. Im ,linguistic turn' des Dadaismus geht es nur noch um das Zerspielen und Neukombinieren von Versprachlichungsformen des Welterlebens.

Die Arbeit beruht auf dem von der GZM im Oktober 2016 veranstalteten In Front Festival, das anlässlich der 100 Jahre DADA Feiern im Ludwig Forum Aachen stattfand. Es sollte in einer 3-tägigen Performance und einer Ausstellung ganz besonders an das vergessene Ereignis des Aachener Dada-Abends 1920 erinnern. Dabei war von Anfang an keine eins-zu-eins Rekonstruktion dieses Dada-Abends geplant, sondern eine Art Assemblage und Zeitreise im Sinne eines Gesamtkunstwerkes, zusammen-gestellt aus ausgesuchten Elementen der Geschichte Aachens, sei es historischen, politischen, sozialen, künstlerischen, musischen, literarischen, theatralischen oder architektonischen. Bausteine waren u. a. unsere Recherchen zu den (weitgehend vergessenen) Umständen des von Künstlern und politischen Gruppierungen gestalteten und aufgeführten Aachener Dada-Abends 1920. Dabei geriet u. a. auch das Hotel Grosser Monarch mit der zugehörigen Quelle, das Reiff-Museum und sein damaliger Direktor, die regionale Anarchisten-Bewegung und die Belgische Besatzung Aachens in unseren Fokus. In anderen Teilen des Festivals nahm unsere Thematik weiter Bezug auf Aachen, z.B. mit Werken des großen expressionistischen Dichters August Stramm (der am Einhard Gymnasium Abitur machte), oder mit der Uraufführung einer Gemeinschaftskomposition von sieben Aachener Komponisten/Komponistinnen. Die hier präsentierte Arbeit, Dada Aachen gewidmet, stellt unsere Recherchen zu eher ungewöhnlichen Aspekten der Aachener Geschichte und deren Bewertungen dar und schildert, wie wir diese unserem Publikum vermittelten. N.B. Wir bitten unsere Leser zu beachten, dass die GZM nicht als Geschichtsverein agiert. Es ist uns deshalb äußerst wichtig, dass diese Mappe nicht als akademische oder wissenschafltliche Arbeit verstanden werden soll, sondern eher als informeller Exkurs in die Geschichte Aachens, den wir mit viel Neugier und großer Freude, wenn auch mit Ernsthaftigkeit, betrieben haben. Aus Gründen der Übersichtlichkeit haben wir deshalb nicht alle Quellenangaben zu den Abbildungen und Texten genannt; auf Befragung stehen diese selbstverständlich zur Verfügung.

"A Secret Service: Art, Compulsion, Concealment" examines the work of 16 international modern and contemporary artists whose practices centre on the construction of private worlds or focus on the exposure of hidden facts. The book makes specific reference to Kurt Schwitters, whose seminal work, the "Merzbau", remains one of the confounding riddles of contemporary art. Including essays by artist and curator, Richard Grayson, specialist in outsider art Roger Cardinal, and Hayward Exhibitions Curator Clare Carolin, "A Secret Service" explores the spaces between psychological compulsion and philosophical expression, and maps the strange and awesome possibilities of the human imagination. Artists featured include: Sophie Calle, Roberto Cuoghi, Henry Darger, Gedewon, Susan Hiller, Tehching Hsieh, Joachim Koester, Kataryzna Josefowicz, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Lombardi, Mike Nelson, Kurt Schwitters, Speculative Archive, Jeffery Vallance and Oskar Voll.

This article explores an under-examined performance poem by the artist Kurt Schwitters referred to as 'The Silence Poem'. This work is explored through arts practice based research within the context of Heather Ross's moving image based installation 'The Loud and the Soft Speakers'. In this work Ross presents a contemporary iteration of Schwitters' poem to investigate the performance within the context of Schwitters' internment on the Isle of Man. Further, she examines the valuable role that re-enactment can play in researching the work of Kurt Schwitters; in accessing and synthesising archival materials, providing a more sensorial engagement with Schwitters' ideas and how making this performance visible can impact the reception of his other artworks.

L’œuvre tardive de Kurt Schwitters (celle des huit dernières années), est ici examinée en deux temps, un premier portant sur le conte et la poésie concrète sous le signe des « contradiction irrésolues » (Edward Said), un second dédié aux enjeux de Merz historiographe, entre création et récapitulation.