Word: merzbau
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Twentieth century art has been rich in didactic rooms, in which an artist set forth to construct an exemplary environment: Lissitzky's Proun Room, Van Doesburg's project for a university hall, Schwitters' Merzbau, Kandinsky's music room, and so on. Nevelson's palace is of their company. Yet its motives are not didactic; they are closer to folk art, to the "ideal palace" made from junk by the French postman Cheval from 1879 to 1912, or the Watts Towers built by Simon Rodia in Los Angeles. Collection, repetition, unification: these are the elements...
...Schwitters was also possessed by that Faustian drive that today can be seen in Claes Oldenburg: the ambition to turn the whole world, bit by bit, into an immense objet trouvé. Thus his radical invention of environmental art. Schwitters' Merzbau (or Merz-house) in Hannover was the first great work of its kind, integrating assemblage, painting and architecture. Its convolutions reached through two floors and four rooms of Schwitters' home, with a separate offshoot in the attic. It was as if he had deposited the cells and memories of his own brain, wrought out in a coral...
Schwitters worked on the Merzbau for 18 years, and it was still unfinished when he was forced into exile in 1937. It must have been the most fabulously complex plastic work of the 20th century, a sculptural Finnegans Wake; some intimation of its scope may be had from one detail that Schwitters called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. This was a column some twelve feet high and six feet wide, with compartments bearing such names as "The 10% War Invalid," "Ruhr District," "Goethe's Grotto" and "Sex-Murders Cavern." They enshrined, among other relics, a tattered stocking, which Schwitters...
Schwitters was making a microcosm of Germany from its own waste products, and there was a bleakly ironical fate in store for the Merzbau: in 1943, an Allied bomb blew it to dust. But its implications, like the legacy of the rest of his work, could not be destroyed. "I know," Schwitters wrote, "that I am an important factor in the development of art and shall forever remain...