Kurt Schwitters

     Schwitters has just finished his earthly voyage.  It was full of
countless buffooneries and pranks.  Yet his comical creations were far
removed from the monstrous creatures spawned by a machine.  He realized
how greatly materialist progress was denaturing man.  The hideousness
of this cancer provoked Schwitters' transmutation.  In that horrible
and macabre florescence, beauty congealed in its shapes and colors, 
and died.  Schwitters fervently implored a redemption of this dark
world, this corrupt nature.  And utter joy and gaiety permeated and
transmuted the refuse.
     He joined the dada campaign against the armies of the "golden
means" and challenged all teachers of art history to duels.  He gently
furrowed their heads with his rusty metallic Merz wires, his broken
wheels, and other battle engines of Franz Müller's Wire Springtime*
until they sought their salvation in flight.  He also invented the Merz
tongs to hold up close the frothing and aesthetic soliloquy.  The shoe-
makers of poetry, working their leather with useless diligence, were as
different from him as a songbird from a pachyderm.  He sang, trilled,
murmured, rolled his r's, exulted in his "Urlaut Sonata" with irresistible
élan, till his listeners jumped out of their gray skins.  His Merz Pictures
are full of secrets and wisdom.  They teach us to see life and beauty in
the most trivial objects, in a discarded trolley ticket, in a scrap of
paper.  He shared Heraclitus's opinion that the sun is no larger in
reality than it seems to us.
     When he set about working, Schwitters first changed into a long night-
gown, took out his dentures, and left them in a glass of warm water; next,
he covered his head with a large highwayman's hat.  Then he merzed with a
vengeance.  After working, he liked to relax in his elegant Merz parlor.
He used a grand piano to store his pots of paste.  Paste was an important
element in his Merz art just as the egg was for Columbus's discovery
of America.  In a corner of his elegant Merz parlor, Schwitters had built
a white cottage with his own hands, in Le Corbusier's style.  It was
here that he kept his guinea pigs.  From time to time he would take a foot
bath in his elegant Merz parlor.  Then, with a wry smile, he would show
his visitors his big feet, which were the color of smoky topaz.
     His house in Hanover was a maze of mining shafts from top to bottom,
artificial fissures through the storeys, tunnels spiraling from the cellar
to the roof.  The influence of the Sun King's style was obviously not
preponderant in Schwitters' house.  After years of intense and sustained
effort, he succeeded in totally merzing his house.  Through those
hollows, gulfs, abysses, cracks, grew the monumental Merz columns
artistically erected with the help of planks, rusty scrap iron, mirrors,
wheels, family portraits, springs, newspapers, bricks, cement, color
prints, plaster, paste, lots of paste, lots and lots of paste.  Yet this
monument, unmatched in the Old World or the New, never seemed like a
pastime of a naïve eccentric.  On the contrary, the rhythmic beauty
of that work linked it to the masterpieces in the Louvre.
     Behind all masks and programs Schwitters discovered the meaning of
life: the metamorphosis of the visible, palpable world toward the formless
absolute.  His playful wit has now joined the measure of all things.  It
is up to us to entwine his memory with ethereal praises.

*     Whatever became of Kurt Schwitters' novel "Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling" 
[Franz Müller's Wire Spring] several chapters of which we composed together?
Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover?
For hours, Schwitters and I sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took
these writings and channelled them into his novel...  We sat together again, writing
"Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling":
H. A.: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on
parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow.
K. Schw.: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together?
H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them?
K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark?
H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish.
K. Schw.: I'll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you wth it?
source of Arp's / Schwitters dialogue: "Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling-- Memories of Kurt Schwitters",
Hans Arp 1956; as quoted in "I is Style", ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned
by Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, pp. 139-140

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