Kurt
Schwitters
Discovery
of Art Series. Kultur, West Long Branch
NJ, 2000
VHS, 50 mins., color
Sales: $19.95 VHS
Distributor’s website: http://www.kulturvideo.com.
Reviewed by Artur Goczewski
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
artur.goczewski@uni.edu
This film about German-born Dada artist
Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) is a survey
of his wide-ranging and prolific artistic
achievements, a life-long output so diverse
that it included not just painting and
drawing, but also multi-media assemblages,
graphic design, literary, and even musical
works. Schwitters (who had an active sense
of humor) would sometimes introduce himself
as a painter who "nails" his
pictures together, in part because he
is famously known for having invented
Merz, an art form whose name is
meaningless, having been coined one day
as he made a collage in which he sliced
in half the word Commerz. Today
we would tend to classify such pieces
as assemblages or installations, but in
essence they consisted of two- and three-dimensional
collages made of found materials and other
cast-off rubbish from the street.
Made up of about 15 sub-sections, this
film considers Schwitters’ work in
a more or less chronological sequence,
supplemented by in-depth commentary, especially
in the second part. This is a useful way
to review his life and to follow the development
of his stylistic diversity. Further, it
is significant (and, I think, very welcome)
that the main focus of the film is on
Schwitters as a Dadaist, so that, far
from being simply a biography of one artist,
it is also a solid and serious look at
the Dadaist movement in general.
Those fortunate enough to witness this
film will end up with a knowledge of Schwitters’
range and depth of work, along with essential
ideas that may also help them understand
not only the original Dadaists (located
in Zurich, Berlin, and New York, primarily)
and the later proto-Pop Art style called
Neo-Dada, but also the multi-media experiments
of subsequent artists, including artists
working now. In examples as wide-ranging
as the "combines" of Robert
Rauschenberg to the assemblage-installations
of Hans Haacke (made of delineated cultural
spaces), the efforts of the Dadaists continue
today to have an effect on the art world
and on our culture as a whole.
Oddly, the potency of Dada is something
one might never guess from reading current
textbooks in the field of art history.
In most such books, accounts of the movement
(and especially of its Berlin branch)
are conflicted at best. Dada is typically
marginalized by texts that are quick to
discount it as either nihilistic trivia
or trivial nihilism. As deliberately repugnant
"anti-art," it is too easy to
dismiss as having merely had a shock effect–with
the result that some people would argue
that it barely deserves to be classed
as an art. Thanks to the persistent, pioneering
work of art historian Stephen C. Foster
(at the University of Iowa, where there
is a substantial archive of Dada-related
documents), this attitude may be gradually
changing, and, to its credit, this film,
for one, is a positive step, in the sense
that it provides us with the basis for
a (re)consideration of Dada. Indeed, to
my mind, this film is of sufficient worth
that it should be added to any art resource
library.
At the same time, I must confess I have
some lingering doubts about the formalistic
point of view that is emphasized to (I
think) an excessive degree in the film’s
commentary. Its primary critical attitude
comes from the age-old idea of artists
as utopian rebellious romantics, whose
vision is so inspired (some might even
say "divinely") that they are
courageously able to stand outside the
conventional limits of art and of society
and to reveal a new artistic view of reality.
In that context, Schwitters’ assemblages
are characterized as artful transformations
of normally prosaic things, which then
metamorphose from their degraded status
as commonplace objects (literally rubbish
or garbage at times) to a world of exalted
abstract beauty by virtue of his magic
means of "self-expression."
The purpose of extolling his work on this
basis appears to be to enshrine it (as
well as that of other Dadaists) as "Dada[ist]
Art Expression," which the film then
further simplifies as "a violent
reaction against conformism."
The notion of art as a means of combating
conformist ideas is not unreasonable,
but the romantic misconception of personal
expression as the source of that transformation
results (if inadvertently) in a kind of
disarmament or trivialization of Dada
art, by preventing that style from engaging
in a critique of our culture in a far
more powerful way–it is relegated
instead to mere estheticism. It is puzzling
that this belief should persist in spite
of the indebtedness of Schwitters (and
other Dadaists) to such movements as Cubism,
Futurism, and nearly all of Constructivism,
where the Romantic paradigm of art was
resoundingly opposed.
In conclusion, I want to look closely
but briefly at a specific Schwitters collages,
titled A Knave Child (1921), which
is pictured in the film and then mentioned
in its narrative. This piece is of particular
interest because it is a work of art that
is based on the esthetic re-design or
a playful re-structuring of the conceptual
frameworks or organizing principles of
various cultures. This collage by Schwitters
is derived from a drawn reproduction of
a famous painting by Raphael titled The
Sistine Madonna. In his collage, Schwitters
has modified this famous image by substituting
the head of the Virgin with the pretty
head of a modern fashion model. He then
covers the two angels at the bottom center
with a car, and adds an image.
These tactics by Schwitters are reasonably
transparent: I interpret this collage
to mean that the religious or idealistic
rationale of a culture, as well as the
art that it sanctions (as embodied by
the Virgin, a symbol of physical and spiritual
purity) is being replaced by a notion
of beauty that is, at least in conception,
far more Dionysian (as currently represented
by the fashion model). The automobile
(which is an updated embodiment for angels
and maybe an allusion to Futurism) suggests
that science (and technology, even more
so) may have become the basis for artistic
values.
The rules that Schwitters employs in his
art, in which formal and conceptual elements
are esthetically intermixed, have been
practiced in one form or another at least
since the era of Gustave Courbet. Considering
that the notion of art as a cultural critique
is at stake in Schwitters’ work,
I find it disturbing how easy it has been
(and apparently continues to be) to rationalize
that function out of existence by giving
priority to formal esthetics instead.
How is it possible that the category of
art–which has such power that it
can treat cultural spaces like a playground–can
be so easily trivialized in this and other
educational films and other productions?
Not only is it odd, but it is also terribly
sad that all this contrivance takes place
in the so-called sacred name of Art.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 20, Number
4, Summer 2005.)
