Kurt Schwitterss Merzbau, a sculpture that took over the artists home and studio,

would ultimately gain iconic status in the eyes of later generations, even though
little evidence of its existence survived; even Schwitters saw his own work for the
last time many years prior to its destruction. The few photographs that were taken
described it to be an extraordinary gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.
Schwitters relative secrecy surrounding the Merzbaus construction, however, has
led to difficulties in interpreting it. Photographs and descriptions reveal elements
of Dadaism, De Stijl, Constructivism and
surrealism alike in the Merzbaus form, causing ambiguity in its stylistic
categorization. So unusual was this sculpture that it could only be contained
within a category invented by its creator.
Because of an affinity he felt for the techniques of collages, Schwitters had
reached out to Hausmann hoping to gain acceptance into Club Dada. However, he
identified more with Dadas methods than with its philosophies or message, and
he was ultimately denied membership in the group. His good friend Hans Richter,
later recalled that: "Schwitters was absolutely, unreservedly, 24-hours-a-day PROart". He produced and performed nonsense poetry and songs, and created images
and collages that fit with Dada style. Tristan Tzara, another Dada member and
close friend of Schwitters, wrote many years after the fact, the participation of
Schwitters in dada ... has a particular nuance".
Merz represented for Schwitters the material element. Though Schwitters was a
prolific and multifaceted artist in life, working in a variety of two- and threedimensional media and performative methods, posthumously he is most widely
recognized for his collages. The earliest of these works appeared in 1919 with
Schwitters Das Merzbild, a work that would ultimately be displayed by the Nazis
exhibition of the Entartete Kunst. The term "Merz" can be found for the first time
in print in the center of the work. In this and the hundreds of Merzbilder, or Merz
pictures, all material was of equivalent representational value, from bus tickets
and beermats to pram wheels and buttons, playing cards and wire... and all were
included in his collages. Schwitters wrote: The word Merz essentially means the
totality of all imaginable materials that can be used for artistic purposes and
technically the principle that all of these materials have equal value.
Schwitterss introduction of the term Merz in 1919 applies the term specifically to
his Merz paintings. By the time of his writings the following year, though, his
definition of Merz had expanded to encompass performative works, evidenced in
his concept and drawings for a Merz stage, designed for the purpose of
performing a Merz drama.
Schwitterss Merzbau, or Merz-construction, began as a columnar Dadaist
structure assembled from the objects rapidly overflowing his Hannover studio in
Waldhausenstrasse 5 at some point in 1919, the year of his first written musings
on the meaning of Merz. Author John Elderfield acknowledges that the scale and
character of the work were unlike any of the artists contemporaneous
experiments with three-dimensional collage. Elderfield describes this initial
incarnation of the Merzbau as an autobiographical depository for Schwitterss

associative fantasies, considerably more personal than similar Dadaist works.

The personal nature of the Merzbau was reflected in Schwitterss incorporation of
various themed grottoes into its construction. By the time Dadaist and
Schwitterss friend Hans Richter was first invited to view the work, in 1925, the
Merz column had outgrown his first studio at Waldhausenstrasse 5 and had been
moved (in 1923) to a back room of the house. Each of the hollowed areas, the
Merzbaus legendary grottoes, contained found or pilfered objects which
characterized the grottos occupant. Shoelaces, drafting pencils, cigarette ends,
dental bridges, and even a bottle of someones urine characterized for Schwitters
the likes of Hans Arp, El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, Schwitters wife and
son, and even Richter himself. ...This was more than a sculpture, Richter later
recalled; it was a living, daily-changing document on Schwitters and his friends."
The constant growth and evolving character of the Merzbau are key elements of
its construction and are the very reasons why its has become so difficult to
describe, even by those who witnessed the work firsthand. Gwendolen Webster
has traced the true beginning of the Merzbau proper to sometime in 1923-24.
Richter continues on his account of the work to write that three years after his
initial visit, this time in 1928, the Merzbau was completely different in nature. The
associative have been entombed inside of the growing structure. The structural
and aesthetic elements of the Merzbau were never destroyed or removed after
their incorporation, but encased within and built upon. Richter describes a column
that, at that point in time had, as it were, burst the room apart at the seams to
the point that the tenants upstairs at Waldhausenstrasse 5 had to be evicted in
order that Schwitters could expand the column
upward. Webster disputes this account, calling it out as part of the Merzbau
mythology. She acknowledges the spread of the Merzbau to other rooms over
time, but discounts stories of evictions and ceilings being torn out, finding no hard
evidence in her research in support of such claims.
The Merzbaus location in his home and studio made viewership entirely reliant on
one being given a guided tour by Schwitters himself, and as a result it is possible
that no one, with the exception of Helma, his wife, ever saw the work in its
entirety. Schwitters felt that very few people were capable of grasping the
meaning of the work, and as a result gave tours to only a select few from his inner
circle. In fact, Schwitters once wrote that only Hans Arp, Sigfried Giedion and
Herwarth Walden could truly comprehend the Merzbau.

Schwitterss increasing concern with form over content likely explains the
evolution of the Merzbau from Dadaist collage, to Constructivist / De Stijl
architecture and the total environment. Initially interested in the interrelatedness

of the separate Merz pictures and sculptural features in his studio, Schwitters
explored their relationships by physical means, first by tying strings between
works, then
replacing the strings with wood, and ultimately plastering over the wooden
structure. In this exercise much, but not by any means all, of the the Merzbaus
autobiographical cataloguing was encased inside a more stark and angular
interior.
Schwitters believed in both the gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, and in a
personalized art. As a result, he could not distance himself far enough from
content to achieve purity of form. Schwitters could not deny his earlier influences
in either the work or in his own artistic evolution. The work, therefore, mirroring
his life experiences, incorporated and built upon earlier forms. Where other artists
associated themselves with new styles by exploring new, separate works to
convey newly developed sets of artistic ideals, Schwitters never discarded or
destroyed earlier elements of the Merzbau, rather building upon earlier
experiences and influences by adding to its exterior.
Before leaving Hannover for Norway in 1937, fearing for his life at the hands of
the Nazi Party, he and Ernst photographed the Merzbau for the last time, as
Schwitters would never return to his home or see the work again. In Norway,
Schwitters began a second Merzbau, in an effort to continue developing his lifes
art work. In 1940 he was again forced to flee the Nazis advance, this time to
England. In 1946 Schwitters began yet a third architectural Merz environment, this
time a Merz Barn in Elterwater in the northern-English countryside, where he lived
out his remaining days, but only ever completed one interior wall of the Merz
Barn. The work differed in character from his earlier Cubist-Expressionist forms,
tending toward a more organic-Surrealist style, primarily sculpted in clay.
Schwitters passed away in 1948 in Ambleside, England, having never returned to
Hannover to the site of his masterpiece.
Now generally recognized as one of the preeminent environmental art works, the
Merzbau began to
achieve mythical status beginning largely in the late-1950s and into the 1960s.
Ironically, though
it had evolved far past the style of Dada trash by the time Schwitters was forced
to abandon it,
the very personal nature of the Merzbaus earliest incarnation most heavily
influenced the environments and Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine,
Claes Oldenburg and others in
New York.
Ulrich Krempel writes of the Merzbau as being in the spirit of 19th-century
bourgeois artists studios: public in a sense and as much for the purpose of work
as for the purpose of self-representation and self-promotion. However, he
acknowledges that this assessment is potentially complicated by the introspective
nature of the Merzbaus content, as well as by the limited audience with which
Schwitters shared it. Meyer-Bser is less concerned with the Merzbaus limited

audience, choosing instead to focus on the viewer as an activating factor in the

space. In essence, the audience may have been limited, but it was an audience
nonetheless, and one over which Schwitters had complete control to reveal or
conceal elements of the works as he wished.
Given the necessary interaction of the component factors in this particular work of
environmental art, it seems appropriate at this point to briefly address some of
the issues surrounding a modern-day, full-scale reconstruction of the Merzbau
housed in the Sprengel Museum in Schwitterss hometown of Hannover. In 1981,
Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger was commissioned by curator and art
historian Harald Szeemann to reconstruct the main room of the Merzbau for
inclusion in a traveling exhibition titled Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. The
work was eventually purchased by the
Sprengel Museum and remains there today for visitors to walk through and
experience. According to Karin Orchard, Bissegger worked from black and white
photographs and the few drawings and plans of the Merzbau that survived at the
time, consulting primarily with Schwitterss son Ernst, who had last seen the work
over forty years prior. Complex geometric calculations allowed Bissegger to piece
together dimensional information on the angular structure of much of the work,
while lighting and color was based on Ernsts memory, and the content of the
grottoes, unable to be reproduced, was replaced with enlargements of original
photographs.
Of first concern is the reproductions omission of the Merzbaus defining
characteristics
of constant change and evolution. The Merzbau was a work in process and, if
Schwitters had
had his way, would never have been finished, states Meyer-Bser. The perpetual
reorganization and realignment of the materials meant that there was no final,
fixed meaning. The Merzbau was not only the work-in-progress, but the studio
workspace of a habitual collector, and absent is any evidence of his craft. What
remains is the building shell of an artists studio, unusual for sure, but unoccupied
nonetheless.
The final concern surrounding the value of the Merzbau reconstruction is the
absence of Kurt Schwitters himself. Schwitters looked forward to the birth of the
Merz composite work of art, of which all elements would be simply materials. In
the Merzbau work, Schwitters had become material, as much docent as exhibit.
Therefore, while a scale model of the Merzbau may give viewers an indication of
the works scale and parameters, without grottoes full of cigarette ends, dentures
and locks of hair, without buttons, bus tickets and pram wheels littering the floor,
without Schwitters himself giving the guided tour, without, as Schwitters wrote,
the totality ofall imaginable materials, questions surface about the extent of its
reconstructive value.