CHAPTER ÄSS
Schwitters’ work, and the magical exaltation of the object, give the first hint of the place of modern art in the history of the human mind, and of its symbolic significance. They reveal the tradition that was being unconsciously perpetuated. It is the tradition of the hermetic Christian brotherhoods of the Middle Ages, and of the alchemists, who conferred even on matter, the stuff of the earth, the dignity of their religious contemplation.
—Marie-Louise von Franz and Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
Nonsense, abstract, nonrepresentational: these labels define by negation. Why be negative? To protect the status of sense, rationality, and representation.
Alternate labels like transcendental and visionary better highlight modern-art practices’ mystical, hermetic essence. Hermes, Mercury, Merz.
As nonsense performance-poets and abstract artists, we seek—and strive to provide access to—higher dimensions of experience. So, best to call Ur Sonata not nonsensical, but transcendent. Best to call Kurt Schwitters’ and Valerie Caris Blitz’s collage and painting not abstract, but visionary.
Kurt Schwitters had a one-man show in 1944 London, at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery. Art historian Herbert Read—theorist of anarchism and, later, editor-in-chief of the English translation of Collected Works of C.G. Jung—wrote in his introduction to the Schwitters exhibition catalog,
An art of abstract incantation…to hear Schwitters recite his poems is to be convinced that he has invented still another art form….
I doubt if Schwitters would like to be called a mystic, but there is nevertheless in his whole attitude to art a deep protest against the chromium-plated conception of modernism. The bourgeois loves slickness and polish: Schwitters hates them. He leaves his edges rough, his surfaces uneven. He realizes that the created object is always an approximation to the imaginative conception, and that it is only the fussy and irrelevant intellect that would like to give precision to the organic reality of art.
Schwitters was so pleased with Read’s essay that he included copies in correspondence with galleries and patrons in America.
Kurt Schwitters collage: “ohne titel — fur Herbert Read”. (Yes, that’s Herbert Read, in the center of the collage.)
El Lissitzky, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, Nelly van Doesburg, Ernst Schwitters, Helma Schwitters, and Kurt Schwitters (the tall one), 1922.
