While researching collages, montages and assemblages, I became distracted by Kurt Schwitters’ Hanover Merzbau.
Schwitter described his Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (Cathedral of Erotic Misery) as:
…unfinished, and on principle. It grows about the way a big city does when a new building goes up, the Housing Bureau checks to see that the whole appearance of the city is not going to be ruined. In my case, I run across something or other that looks to me as though it would be right for the KdeE, so I pick it up, take it home, and attach it and paint it, always keeping in mind the rhythm of the whole. Then a day comes when I realize I have a corpse on my hands-relics of a movement in art that is now passe. So what happens is that I leave them alone, only I cover them up either wholly or partly with other things, making clear that they are being downgraded. As the structure grows bigger and bigger, valleys, hollows, caves appear, and these lead a life of their own within the over-all structure.
– from Kurt Schwitters’ Hanover Merzbau (pdf) by Werner Schmalenbach
And Jaleh Mansoor writes, in Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Desiring House:
The assemblage-work, perpetually unfinished, paradoxically figures forth the production of the process of production, which ceaselessly changes its own rules as it develops in practice. As such, a single interpretive key is rendered obsolete the moment it seems viable; it is exceeded the very moment it emerges because its object transforms, raising new questions opening onto new interpretations.
See also:
Book excerpt and review — Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: Cathedral of Erotic Misery by Elizabeth Burns Gamard
Merz as Metaphor by Michael Century
Merz_city by Christina McPhee — a digital photographic print, sound and video project that integrates into a multimedia installation – a meditation on ruin, aftershock, earthquake, and remix as architectural performance.
One Comment
thanks so much for the posting. hope to update my
merz_city work soon.. please check back.
http://christinamcphee.net
meanwhile, here’s a pr update on some new work inspired by
the merzian example…. from 2005 and the Parkfield earthquake of September 24, 2004 in California.
http://www.saratecchia.com
Sara Tecchia Roma New York, 529 West 20th Street, 2nd floor, NYC
through February 24, 2006
in the group show Persona-Personae….
Media artist CHRISTINA MCPHEE presents large-scale images from her Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, a meditation on seismic memory and identify along the San Andreas Fault in California. The landscape is a riddle of identity: who is in place, is place persona(e)? Seismic data, together with layers of documentary video stills, film and digital photography imply both a landscape of information and a physical presence. The persona of the artist disappears within the digital trace. Black depths of field absorb and project fragments of traumatic memory. The architectural scale of the prints evokes the ‘big data’ of current natural disasters–the tsunami, Katrina–and the amnesia that follows. She recalls Persephone–the goddess who disappears into the ground, and is reborn in spring–as if to suggest a cybernetic link between site, identity, and memory.
This is the first time that a group of digital chromogenic prints from the Diaries will be seen in New York City. Videos from the related Carrizo Quartet series, incorporating Diaries content, were presented in a solo exhibition in Sweden at Bildmuseet, December 2005 – January 2006, (http://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/exhibit05.html . The Diaries will travel to Cartes Center for Art and Technology, Espoo, Finland (Helsinki) May to September 2006 http://www.cartes-art.fi/flux/cartes.html — as part of a 5 year retrospective curated by Maria Tjader-Knight.