1,135 research outputs found
Splitting and Doubling: Spaces for Contemporary Living in Works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Kurt Schwitters and Gregor Schneider
No full textThe thesis addresses the question of dwelling as a challenge and concern in the twenty-first century. It does so on the basis of three works of art, all exercising radical spatial reconfigurations of existing residential buildings. The thesis argues that these works created in the twentieth century bring strategies forward for a contemporary living space of interest today. Furthermore, that the agency of the artistic gesture exceeds the scope of the architectural work when addressing the subject of home and house in critical ways. The importance of this engagement lies in an incompatibility observed between ideas about dwelling and the experience of the contemporary age. A prevalent desire for a permanently settled and stable living space is at odds with increasingly transient and nomadic present-day lifestyles – the thesis asks how come such concepts without application endure.
Literary works, concerned with the process of modernisation in the twentieth century, are called upon to qualify this problem of dwelling in our time. While the texts provide insight into the dialectics of the modern, the chosen works of art unfold three living spaces settled in the moment of their making. When answering the immediate contextual setting with an environment for living beyond conventional building practices, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (1927-37) and Gregor Schneider’s HAUS u r (1985-today) give clues to the nature of the contemporary dwelling. As a living space beyond conceptualisation, this dwelling does not require a whole house to be held in place nor does it rely on walls for spatial differentiation. Instead, a framework for coexistence is articulated as a space of resistance to the forces of the modern, threatening to render all dwellers homeless. The thesis challenges the contemporary architect with the task of participating in the creation of this space
Inventory for a Reverse Journey. Photographic Image and Found Object - An investigation of travel and material transformation as a paradigm of artist's practice: Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler, Bas jan Ader, Jimmie Durham, Gustav Metzger, Kurt Schwitters & Cian Quayle.
No full textInventory for Reverse Journey is the title of a collection of photographic artefacts and found objects, which I have collected over the last twenty years. The title refers to one specific type of artist's journey, which is applicable to the `chronotope' of my archive, as a `metaphorical journey in space and time' (Bakhtin 1981, p. 81). The `city',`provincial town', `road', `threshold' and `interior' are recurrent motifs, which Bakhtin fused together to describe the historical evolution of the novel in relation to its different genres. Bakhtin's motifs are expanded as the basis of an evolutionary nomenclature of the artist's-journey, as a form of spatial mapping and identity formation. Alongside other sources from literature (Alain Robbe-Grillet), cinema (Michelangelo Antonioni), psychoanalysis (Kierkegaard) and critical theory (Walter Benjamin) I have developed a theoretical framework, which initially originated in an empirical process, that is reflected in the antecedents of this project. The research process, as a journey itself, has concretised this approach within a systems-based practice. This is mirrored in the work of the artists under investigation, as their differences and similarities are highlighted within a broad contextual analysis. Accordingly the tone of the writing shifts its register at different points in the thesis.
My journey is just one example of several paradigmatic formations of `travel' as a strategy, which investigates the work of six different artists, as a voluntary or involuntary form of exile. A deskilled use of the photographic image is examined in the work of Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler and Bas jan Ader in the spatial mapping of their chosen locations. The work of these artists manifests travel, as a strategy, in a benign form of regional and expatriate exile. The investigation shifts its focus from the New World to Europe, where the work of Jimmie Durham, Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters is analysed in relation to their transformation of found objects and materials, and their relationship with a former 'home'. Their position registers different degrees of the `impossibility of return' to a point of origin, which exists in the mind rather than as a physical location. The transience of their work, and use of disparate materials, is counterbalanced by their physical presence in the work. Conversely Ader, Huebler and Ruscha are linked by a scale of decreasing visibility, as they are sublimated within their work in the formation of, what is now construed as, a unique photographic presence. The starting point for which is a return to the formative years of conceptualism in the 1960's, which set the scene for Durham and Metzger from the 1970's onwards. The spectre of Schwitters practice of forming (Formung) and unforming (Entformung) is significant for my analysis of the dematerialisation of the art-work and artist, by processes of series and repetition, distance and proximity, movement and stasis. Although `travel' is a ubiquitous term, I continue to use it as a portmanteau, which carries with it the themes and `salient' features of a typology of artist's journeys. In a moment of perceived obsolescence as digital information systems engender a culture of `selective-amnesia', these thoughts have informed my work, which runs parallel to the artist case-studies, and the material transformation of the photographic image and found object
Kurt Schwitters : space, image, exile /
No full textGerman artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile. Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters's experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters's aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today. -- Publisher's website.Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-289) and index.Radiating space -- The wandering Merzbau -- For the hand -- The image in exile.German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile. Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters's experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters's aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today. -- Publisher's website
Assembling the Ineffable in Kurt Schwitters’ Architectural Models
No full textDuring the early 1920s, the German artist and poet, Kurt Schwitters, developed a method of creating models of architecture using found objects based upon his Merz approach to art. While many leading architects joined the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and Bruno Taut's Gläserne Kette at the end of World War I to speculate upon what to build for the new post-war German architecture, Schwitters challenged the predominant views by probing how it could be designed through models. Compared to the normative practice of molding clay and casting plaster into scale models after completed designs, Schwitters assembled found objects into two models, Haus Merz during 1920 and Schloss und Kathedrale mit Hoffbrunnen in 1922, to imagine new combinations and transformations of material, form and space in building designs. Schwitters' Merz interpretation of found objects as models of architecture held that all materials have an ineffable transitory content that contributes to their identities as natural or man-made utilitarian things. In the Christian medieval exegesis of religious objects, the interpretation of materials as a dichotomy of visible form and invisible content was described as "anagogy." However, unlike this Christian conception of the invisible that was transcendental and a priori, the anagogical Merz interpretation seeks to find the invisible within the visible through the active imagination of found materials assembled as a model of architecture. This dissertation examines Schwitters' proposed use of found objects to construct architectural models as an anagogical approach to the material imagination of architecture.Ph. D
Schwitters\u27s <em>Ursonate</em> and the <em>Merz</em> Barn Wall
No full textThis paper notes the importance of Kurt Schwitters\u27s Merz project to the modernist politics and poetics of exile of the 20th century. Placing the sound work of Schwitters within his full Merz project, the author assesses the relations between the Ursonate and the final Merzbau. He discusses three of these relationscollage, found objects and the structures of building materiality in language and sculptureand presents Schwitters\u27s work as culminating in a vision of sound and building structures in what Brandon Taylor has called intrusive new entities of collage and assemblage that are themselves analogous to the intrusive new entities of human material itself
Kurtz Schwitters em seu Labirinto
No full textThe aim of this text is to analyze Kurt Schwitters' URSONATE, within the MERZ project, which was the framework that contained the artistic work and the life-long project of its author. This project arises from crossed influences: from music, from the forms of production of the avant-garde, from the predominant aesthetics, from his creative environment, building a frame that will be developed to think the sound poem as a scenic form, in the hypothetical MERZ scenario. For this purpose, we will propose to think the work within the canon of scenic production in the period of the so-called historical avant-garde. In this work we will dwell on the Merz devices, on the collage - as a procedure - that determined Schwritter's artistic invoice and, of course, the URSONATE, his textual and poetic project, which ranges from the poetry of Ana Blume to avant-garde poetry.El objetivo de este texto es analizar la URSONATE, de Kurt Schwitters, dentro del proyecto MERZ, que fue el marco que contuvo el trabajo artístico y el proyecto de toda la vida de su autor. Este proyecto surge de influencias cruzadas: de la música, de las formas de producción de las vanguardias, de las estéticas predominantes, de su entorno creativo, construyendo una trama que será desarrollada para pensar al poema sonoro como una forma escénica, en el hipotético escenario MERZ. Para eso propondremos pensar la obra dentro del canon de producción escénica en el período de las llamadas vanguardias históricas. En este trabajo nos detendremos en los dispositivos Merz, en el collage - como procedimiento - que determinó la factura artística de Schwritter y, por supuesto, la URSONATE, su proyecto textual y poético, que abarca desde la poesía de Ana Blume hasta la poesía de vanguardia.O objetivo deste texto é analisar o URSONATE, de Kurt Schwitters, dentro do projeto MERZ, arcabouço que continha a obra artística e o projeto de vida de seu autor. Este projeto surge de influências cruzadas: da música, das formas de produção da vanguarda, da estética predominante, de seu ambiente criativo, construindo um enredo que será desenvolvido para pensar o poema sonoro como forma cênica, no hipotético cenário MERZ. Para isso nos propomos a pensar o trabalho dentro do cânone da produção cênica no período das chamadas vanguardas históricas. Neste trabalho nos deteremos nos dispositivos de Merz, na colagem - como procedimento - que determinou a feitura artística de Schwritter e, claro, o URSONATE, seu projeto textual e poético, que vai da poesia de Ana Blume à poesia de vanguarda
Non-pecuniary damages, financial incentive or symbol? Comparing an economic and a sociological account of tort law
No full textSchwitters focuses on the differences between economic and a sociological perspectives on non-pecuniary damages. By exposing the alternative perspectives on this issue, he illuminates some methodological differences between both disciplines. Although law and economics has had a positive influence on empirical research, he questions the merits of this perspective when analysing non-pecuniary damages. Law and economics regards non-pecuniary damages exclusively as a financial incentive to realise optimal deterrence and maximisation of welfare. Alternatively, in sociology of law there is also attention for the symbolic dimension of law in which rules are seen as normative standards of behaviour. Compensation is a way to bring the wrongdoer to recognise that he has done wrong and has to compensate the victim, and to show the victim that his rights are taken seriously. Through a sociological lens, the adoption of an exclusively economic model of human behaviour has to be questioned. To what extent human behaviour is really influenced by either financial incentives or by normative standards of behaviour is an open empirical question. Finally, he argues that the decision to base our institutions (such as law) on economic underpinnings is a decision which itself cannot be based on an economic procedure of aggregating individual preferences and maximising welfare
Lucky Hans and other Merz fairy tales
No full textKurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his Dadaist Merz collages, theater performances, and poetry. But at the same time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the genre upside down and inside out. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is the first collection of these subversive, little-known stories in any language and the first time all but a few of them have appeared in English. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's leading authorities on fairy tales, this book gathers thirty-two stories written between 1925 and Schwitters's death in 1948--including a complete English-language recreation of The Scarecrow, a children's book illustrated with avant-garde typography that Schwitters created with Kate Steinitz and De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales also includes brilliant new illustrations that evoke the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.Schwitters wrote these darkly humorous, satirical, and surreal tales at a time when traditional German fairy tales were being co-opted by the Nazis. Filled with sharp critiques of German life during the Weimar and early Nazi eras, Schwitters's tales are rich with absurdist events and insist that not everyone--and perhaps not anyone--lives happily ever after. In Lucky Hans, the starving protagonist tries to catch a rabbit only to have it shed its fur like a coat and run off naked into the forest. In other tales, a sarcastic gypsy stands in for a fairy godmother and an army recruit is arrested for growing to monstrous size.Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is a delightfully strange and surprising book.Jack Zipes is a leading authority on fairy tales. His translations include The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm and The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (both Bantam). He is the editor of The Great Fairy Tale Tradition (Norton), and the author of Why Fairy Tales Stick and Hans Christian Andersen, among many other books. He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota.Reviews:Mostly unpublished during Schwitters's lifetime, the tales have been rescued from oblivion by teams of eager Germanists, and selected, translated and introduced for this edition by eminent fairytale scholar Jack Zipes. The tales are accompanied by cutely sinister illustrations by Irvine Peacock.--Justin Clemens, The AustralianIncluding four pieces Schwitters wrote in English--he had abandoned German, as the Nazis' language--this volume stands as a substantial, chronologically representative, and delightful addition to the still small number of texts by Schwitters published in the U.S. Zipes supplies snappy translations and a thoughtful critical introduction.--Choice</p
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