Kurt Schwitters.

Dadaism and ursonate

Teresa Daz de Cossio Snchez

Dada or Dadaism has roots on French, referring to dada as a child word for horse. This nihilistic
movement in the arts predominated in France, Switzerland, and Germany from 1916 to 1920.
Was movement based on the principles of deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism and
the rejection of laws of beauty and social organization.1

The movements name surges in a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Balls Cabaret in Zrich, a
paper knife was inserted into a French-German dictionary pointing to the word dada; this word
was appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were
engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. However, Dada
vanished during the later 1920s and many Dadaists had a growing interest in surrealism.

Following this trend was Kurt Schwitters a German artist born in Hannover, Germany in 1887
who ended his life Westmorland, England in 1948. When World War I concluded, Schwitters
became interested in the emerging Dada school. After being denied in the Berlin circle of
Dadaists, he created his own variant in Hannover; creating compositions with everyday objects
(train tickets, wooden spools, newspaper, string, cigarettes, and postage stamps). His poems,
were created using newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and other printed ephemera.

Schwitters called all this activities Merz, a word with nonsense meaning, created using the
syllable of the word Kommerz (german: commerce); subsequently his collages were called
Merzbilden. In 1920, Schwitters started working on the building of a cathedral made with
everyday objects; a three-dimensional building named Marzbau (Merz building), this was
destroyed during World War II.

The German government declared his art decadent in 1937, and Schwitters had to move to
Norway where he started a second Merzbau, which was destroyed in a fire during 1951.
Germans invaded Norway in 1940, making Schwitters escape to England. The Museum of
Modern Art in New York City, help the work of construction of a new Merzbau; unfortunately,
Schwitters passed away before finishing the project. This continues to be preserved at the
University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne.2 Merzbau works started on an object that
evolved by the addition of material of other artist, making art a piece that changes and evolve
over time, growing to great proportions that forced the viewer to actually experience, rather
than simply view, the art.3
Merz art was questioning the world of the 20th century, and endless compulsion to rebuild can
be interpreted as a need to reconstruct his past through art. The Ursonate (original sonata)
was conceived in 1922 as an amalgam of poetry, music and performance. The work was
premiered on 1925 in Potsdam. Merz and Ursonate are works of politics and exile, as Kurt said I

1 http://members.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/index.html
2 Britannic Encyclopedia https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kurt-Schwitters
3 http://www.theartstory.org/artist-schwitters-kurt.htm
am not constructing an interior for people to live in, for the new architects can do that far
better. I am building an abstract sculpture into which people can go.4

4 Hudson M. Schwitterss Ursonate and the Merz Barn Wall.