Word: merzbau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sloppy, three-dimensional roomful of random art, in the abstract expressionist mode of the 1950s, when the wall-filling action canvases of Jackson Pollock were already being referred to as "environmental painting." Kaprow was also reviving and extending the then quiescent Dadaist tradition. One of his inspirations: the wondrous Merzbau assembled by German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters between 1924 and 1933. It consisted of rooms full of wood and plaster along with oddments culled from junk heaps, including a Sex-Murder Cave, which housed a red-stained bro ken plaster cast of a female nude...
...meaningless word derived from Kommerz (commerce), but carrying with it connotations of both ausmerzen (to reject), Herz (heart), and Schmerz (pain). In the form of rubbish, Schwitters brought elements of reality physically into his art. In his studio in Germany, he also constructed a collage environment-his famed Merzbau. It was sort of a cubistic grotto, cluttered with such objects as the plaster-of-Paris-dipped socks of a fellow artist. The Merzbau was also the prototype of "environments," present-day art works that envelop viewers like architecture-fundamentally collage turned inside out. Schwitters had moved from Dada...
Between 1923 and 1932 Schwitters published Merz magazine, in which he printed his own poems, views on art and passionate vindications of his use of rubbish in collages. As his movement flourished, he built a Merzbau in Hannover, where disciples could touch a rag that Schwitters asserted was Goethe's stocking, and a bottle of yellow liquid that he called the "urine of the Master." When Adolf Hitler came along, Schwitters' day in Germany was over. The Führer did not approve. In 1935 Schwitters fled Germany-first to Norway, then to England, where he died...