Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2019)
Kurt Schwitters’ resonant objects: matter and politics in early Merz
Abstract
Examining a selection of 1919 works by the German artist Kurt Schwitters, this essay argues that the artist’s early forays into collage and assemblage (what he dubbed ‘Merz’) can be understood as material instantiations of essential political questions at the time of their making. Above all, Schwitters sought in his works to concretize, and thus open for creative questioning and play, the processes by which people and things are defined, given value, and merged into integrated wholes. To pursue this argument—which is positioned in relation to the structuring binary of Charles W. Haxthausen’s 1999 Clark Art Institute Conference ‘The Two Art Histories’—the essay looks closely at Schwitters’ material components and techniques, and considers his negotiation, in the immediate wake of World War I, of the competing aesthetic programs of Berlin Dada and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery.
