“Into the ‘Merzbau:’ A Melodrama”

Wie sieht der New Yorker Kunstkritiker John Beeson den Merzbau von Kurt Schwitters?
Obwohl Schwitters gerade im Princeton University Art Museum New Jersey mit einer Reise-Version des Merz-Baus zu sehen ist (bis 26. Juni,), also quasi "um die Ecke" für John, hatte sich Beeson vor einiger Zeit ein Original-Bild machen wollen und reiste dazu nach Hannover. Gleichzeitig als mein Oster-Tipp zu verstehen, mal wieder das Sprengel-Museum zu besuchen. ip

"Here you are" mit seinen Impressionen:

"It took me a long while to come to it; I simply didn’t know what to think at first. Of course, I’d never seen anything like it before, and it didn’t make any sense. The project of the “Merzbau” was, more or less, without sense. I began to think of it as one of his “Merzbilder” (or “Materialbilder”), which Schwitters had simply expanded into space. That was easy enough to accept because a single, still vantage into the room could be embraced in much the same way as a picture. Viewing the room from one point of perspective bounded the actual variance in depth into the limits of my field of vision, into the limits of two dimensions. However, simply to move, as one is naturally want to do within a space, especially one so peculiar and with so much to see, was to take the fragile sense of normalcy in the space as well as any impression of having restrained the spatial chaos and to then throw it off its axis. Besides the construction causing intense spatial confusion -- not even to specify the architectural confusion it caused, which was complete -- when I lowered the purely formal lens with which I was viewing the structure and realized (or rather, remembered) that it existed in combination with what could be called living -- that people lived in and around it -- it was as if my own conception of normalcy and possibility were a thin sheet of glass smashed by a sharpened metal hammer and the alarm lying behind had been violently pulled. With the lights coming on and off to imitate the lighting of the construction in day and night, and staring either into reflections of the construction or my own face in clandestinely placed mirrors, I felt as if in a haunted house as had never before existed. Truly, rather than being another feeble grasp at the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, this construction changed the laws of nature, confined a space that ultimately retained less of a relation to life than to art, generated a “Merz-Gesamtweltbild.”

In Kooperation mit dem Sprengel Museum Hannover und der Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Hannover, organisiert die Menil Collection die erste Museumsausstellung des Hannoverschen Merz-Künstlers Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) in den USA seit 25 Jahren, – seit der Retrospektive 1985 im Museum of Modern Art, New York, die 1986 auch im Sprengel Museum Hannover stattfand. Kuratorin der Ausstellung Kurt Schwitters. Color and Collage ist Dr. Isabel Schulz, Leiterin des Kurt Schwitters Archivs im Sprengel Museum Hannover und Geschäftsführerin der Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung.