CHAPTER FAU—THEME 18

November 10th, 1984

Chicago Filmmakers

“Zätt üpsiilon iks, Wee fau Uu, Tee äss ärr kuu,” moans performance-artist Lynn Book—Time Arts instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Percussionist Johnse Holt thumbs his mbira; trumpet-player Jeff Beer squeezes a muted sigh. “Pee Oo änn ämm, Ell kaa Ii haa,” Lynn urges. “Gee äff Ee dee zee beee?”

Cellist Philip Hart Helzer has been bowing a drone. Now he leans to his mic, wondering if, “Zätt üpsiilon iks, Wee fau Uu, Tee äss ärr kuu.” Johnse is shaking a rattle; Jeff’s trumpet punctuates the letters. Phil plucks a dramatic cello chord, operatically adding, “Pee Oo änn ämm, Ell kaa Ii haa.” Johnse strikes a conga, Jeff hums a buzz through his horn. Phil fears, “Gee äff Ee dee zee beee?”

Now it's my turn to sing the alphabet in reverse—and I end triumphantly on “Aaaaa.”

Finally, Lynn, Phil and I conclude Ur Sonata with a fourth, simultaneous alphabetic recitation. But we get—painfully—only as far as “beeee?”

A hundred-odd audience members applaud. A robust elderly gentleman bursts forward to shake our hands. “I am Doctor Hansjuergen Kienast. My friend in New York for many years was Richard Huelsenbeck.”

How amazing to meet a living connection to dada!

Doctor Kienast has much to say. He’d loved our show. Huelsenbeck would have been so pleased that dada has a home in Chicago. How had we come to perform a German poem?

I am thrilled to be talking to this delightful man. But—something nags me. I do not bring it up, never in my subsequent letters to Doctor Kienast. Still—is he unaware of Richard Huelsenbeck’s frequently critical attitude toward Kurt Schwitters?

Huelsenbeck was a communist participant in the 1918 German Revolution at the end of World War I, and he called Schwitters petty bourgeois. Schwitters responded in writing, positing two kinds of dada: “husk” and “core”. Political dadas were husk—huelse—but pure dadas like Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, and Tristan Tzara, were core.

Kurt Schwitters declared allegiance to neither husk nor core dada. Instead, he was Merz, a one-man apolitical art movement. But for Schwitters, art and politics simply occupied different dimensions, and in a decade when the right-wing nationalist “stab-in-the-back” theory blamed Germany’s World War I loss on Social Democrats and international Jewish conspiracy, Schwitters’ internationalist practice of border-transcending artistic collaboration showed clearly which side he was on.

Schwitters may not have set out, in the nineteen-twenties, to inject politics into art, but his art did have political impact. As Stefan Themerson explained to friends in the Gaberbocchus Common Room, in 1958,

To us, today, it may perhaps seem that the act of putting two innocent words together, the act of saying:

“Blue is the colour of thy yellow hair,” 

is an innocent aesthetic affair—that the act of putting together two or three innocent objects, such as a railway ticket, and a flower, and a bit of wood—is an innocent aesthetic affair. Well, it is not so at all. Tickets belong to railway companies; flowers to gardeners; bits of wood to timber merchants. If you mix these things together you are making havoc of the classification system on which the regime is established, you are carrying people’s minds away from the customary modes of thought, and people’s customary modes of thought are the very foundation of Order, whether it is the Old Order or the New Order, and, therefore, if you meddle with the customary modes of thought then, whether you are Galileo or Giordano Bruno with their funny ideas about motion, or Einstein with his funny ideas about space and time, or Russell with his funny ideas about syllogisms, or Schönberg with his funny ideas about the black and white keys of the keyboard, or the Cubists with their funny ideas about shapes, or Dadaists or Merzists with their funny ideas about introducing “symmetries and rhythms instead of principles”—you are, whether you want it or not, in the very bowels of political changes. Hitler knew it. And that is why Kurt Schwitters was kicked out of Germany. “Nothing is resisted with such savagery as a new form in art,” writes Kandinsky, quoting a historian of the Russian theatre, Nelidoff.

In the nineteen-thirties, Kurt’s teen son Ernst joined the Socialist Workers’ Youth, smuggling information about the Nazis for publication abroad. Shortly afterward, Kurt and Helma Schwitters formally took a stand, becoming supporters of the left-liberal Social Democratic Party.

CHAPTER WEE

I felt liberated and wanted to exclaim my joy to the world. I was thrifty and used whatever I could find. After all, we were an impoverished country. You can also shout using garbage, and that’s what I did, by gluing and nailing it together. I called this Merz. It was my prayer to celebrate the victorious end of the war; for once again peace had triumphed. Everything was broken anyway, so the task was to build something new from the shards. I painted, nailed, glued, wrote poems….

—Kurt Schwitters, “Facts from My Life.”     

Transformations.

In 1921, Kurt Schwitters was already famous for his elegant parody love poem, An Anna Blume (“Blue is the color of thy yellow hair….”). While rehearsing in Hannah Höch’s Berlin apartment with Höch and Raoul Hausmann, in preparation for a Prague performance, Schwitters showed his poem, Alphabet von Hinten (“Alphabet in Reverse”). Hausmann called it “the first step to a sound poem,” and pulled out a copy of one of his 1918 Plakatgedichte (poster-poems): a graphic found-art piece composed entirely of large-type letters, “fmsbwtözäu, pggiv-..? mü”—originally a print-shop type sample.

During the threesome’s Prague show, Anti-Dada, Hausmann performed the fmsbwtözäu letters. On the return trip to Germany Schwitters toyed with the sounds. Recalls Hausmann, “He did not stop all day…it became a bit much.” In its early versions, Schwitters titled Ur Sonata “Portrait of Raoul Hausmann.”

Decades later, in 1946, from exile in the English Lake District, Schwitters reached out to Hausmann by mail; the two collaborated on a poetry journal called PIN, for “Poetry Intervenes Now” and “Presence Is New.” The effort was cut short by Schwitters’ illness, but Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann and the Story of PIN was published in 1962 by two Polish émigrés Schwitters had met in London, filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, later the founders of Gaberbocchus Press. The PIN book’s promo copy read, “TWO FAMOUS DADAISTS OF THE ‘TWENTIES WROTE THIS BOOK IN THE ‘FORTIES gaberbocchus PUBLISHES IT IN THE ‘SIXTIES and hopes IT WILL BE READ IN THE ‘EIGHTIES.” The Gaberbocchus PIN was edited by the Themersons’ niece, Jasia Reichardt.

The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in 1967, featuring a collaged album-cover created by English pop artist Peter Blake, who had discovered collage fifteen years earlier, when he was in art school. Blake’s roommate Richard Smith had been dating Jasia Reichardt, a Kindertransport refugee taken in by relatives. Reichardt described collages created by her Uncle Stefan and Aunt Franciszka Themerson’s friend Kurt Schwitters. Smith told Blake; they began making collages.

Schwitters to Beatles.

The Beatles’ 1968 “White Album” cover was designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, who had already played a critical role in Schwitters’ history. Hamilton in 1965 had organized the partial salvage of Schwitters’ third Merzbau, an English Lake District sculptural installation known as the Elterwater Merz Barn.

While assistant professor of art at Newcastle University, Hamilton had recruited students to extract the wall-mounted portion of this deteriorating assemblage from inside its stonework barn. Hamilton’s team had packed the Merzbau wall onto a truck, transported it one-hundred-twenty miles from the village of Elterwater, and installed it into Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University.

Hamilton’s “White Album” design included, packed within its austere blank jacket, a Schwitters-like poster collaging Beatles photos and memorabilia.

Schwitters to Beatles, again.

Like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, many young artists of the fifties who were seeking an alternative to the dominant Abstract Expressionist style took inspiration from Kurt Schwitters’ abstract yet topical collages and absurdly humorous yet pointed poems and performances. Among Schwitters’ American proponents was Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins—whose innovative coinage “intermedia” well described Schwitters’ discipline-busting practice (Higgins was father-in-law to Urchestra’s DJ Glove, AKA Joshua Selman). In the newsletter of his Something Else Press, Higgins explained Schwitters’ appeal to the new generation:

Shoes serve and wear out. From the moment they are put on the feet, they are always changing, until the time when their change makes them less serviceable, irreversibly so, and they are discarded.

So many of the artists became unhappy about [the] eternal, unyielding quality in their art, and they began to wish their work were more like shoes, more temporary, more human, more able to admit of the possibility of change. The fixed-finished work began to be supplemented by the idea of a work as a process, constantly becoming something else, tentative, allowing more than one interpretation. We see it in literature in the controlled ambiguities of Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Kurt Schwitters.

Another American admirer was Monty Python’s Flying Circus collage-animator Terry Gilliam, and he wasn’t the only Schwitters-lover among the Pythons. In Monty Python’s very first episode, “Whither Canada”—broadcast October 5th, 1969—John Cleese plays a sports announcer breathlessly narrating a modern-artists’ bicycle race, colleague Michael Palin at his side.

Pepperpot (Michael Palin): That’s not Picasso—that’s Kandinsky.

Sam Trench (John Cleese): Good lord, you’re right. It’s Kandinsky. Wassily Kandinsky, and who’s this here with him? It’s Braque. Georges Braque, the cubist, painting a bird in flight over a cornfield and going very fast down the hill towards Kingston and—Piet Mondrian—just behind, Piet Mondrian the neoplasticist, and then a gap, then the main bunch, here they come, Chagall, Max Ernst, Miro, Dufy, Ben Nicholson, Jackson Pollock, and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside here, Brancusi’s going with him, so’s de Chirico, Fernand Leger, Delaunay, De Kooning, Kokoschka’s dropping back here by the look of it, and so’s Paul Klee dropping back a bit and, right at the back of this group, our very own Kurt Schwitters.

Pepperpot: He’s German!

But Cleese’s claim was understandable: Schwitters wasn’t just a proto-Python, his application for British citizenship had finally been approved days before his death. On January 8th, 1948—with his English companion Wantee (Edith Thomas) by his side—Schwitters would have died an Englishman, if only he had lived to sign the paperwork.

*** *** *** *** *** ***

(Below, fast forward to Minute 14, Second 22 to watch the Modern Artists Bicycle Race)

CHAPTER IKS—THEMES 1, 6

March 18th, 2010

MUCCC (Multi-Use Community Cultural Center)

Rochester, New York

“I must take responsibility for what you hear tonight,” my eighty-four-year-old father, behavioral toxicology professor Victor Laties, tells an audience composed mostly of my high-school musician friends, along with our seventy-five-year-old former jazz-band director, Ned Corman.

“In 1949,” Dad explains, “I was studying German in college, and I read a nonsense poem called Priimiittitti, in an anthology of writing from transition, the nineteen-twenties European literary journal. Years later, I used to recite Priimiittitti to my children: Nancy, Andy, and Claire. They grew up, and Andy learned there was more to Priimiittitti. He started performing the long version of Priimiittitti as a jazz piece. Tonight, his jazz-band friends Mitch, Don, Steve—happy fiftieth birthday, Steve—with new friends Rebecca, Eric, and James, will perform Priimiittitti for you. So, I hope you can forgive me.”

Broadway-musical preparator Don Rice’s three saxophones and twenty heirloom bells are arrayed next to songwriter/bandleader Steve Rice’s accordion and keyboard. Multi-Use Community Cultural Center is their brother Doug Rice’s place.

Eric Blitz’s percussion paraphernalia are deployed upstage, between Mitch Ahern’s and Pronoblem’s assortments of homemade instruments. Rebecca Migdal, a pirate queen in flowing headdress, and I, two saxes jostling my chest, take center stage.

Steve’s piano rumbles. Eric’s cymbals rustle. Don’s bells ping, his soprano sax burbles. Pronoblem’s PVC-bass murmurs. Rebecca and I announce, “Fümmmmmmmmmms!”—she ascending, me descending. Steve’s piano rises with us, until, together, Rebecca and I land on, “Bö wö tää zää Uuuuuuuu,” me gliding up this time, while she goes silent.

Eric’s cymbals are jangling. Turning to me, Rebecca squawks, “Pögiff!”

Rim-shot from Eric. Mitch’s crutch-synth squeals. I try calm Rebecca with, “Kwiee---eeeeeee.” Don’s tenor sax offers tuneful subtones.

We reconcile, with “Ooooooooooooooooooo.”

After the show, Ned Corman congratulates us: “You ripped it up.”

CHAPTER ÜPSIILON

Nazi SA raided the office of Paul Renner, director of Munich’s Master School for German Printers, on March 25th, 1933, seizing Renner’s copy of Kurt Schwitters’ literary journal, Merz 24—typeset and printed there the year before by typographer Jan Tschichold and his students. Under Hitler, only heavily-ligatured Germanic blackletter fonts like Fraktur were permitted. New typography, an internationalist, form-follows-function approach promoted by Jan Tschichold—author of Die Neue Typographie—Paul Renner, and Kurt Schwitters, was condemned by Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels as “Kulturbolschewismus”: communism’s advance-guard.

The SA was far too late to prevent distribution of Merz 24’s thousand copies. The issue’s content was Schwitters’ thirty-page Ur Sonata (Primeval Sonata). Schwitters had developed this sound-poem through iteration and reiteration, between 1921 and 1932, during dozens of controversial performances at avant-garde theater evenings, private parties and fancy salons throughout Europe. He’d published excerpts previously, for instance, in Eugene Jolas’ Paris quarterly transition, and Arthur Lehning’s Dutch i 10 arts review.

After the March 1933 raid, Paul Renner was fired from his college directorship, and the font he’d created, Futura (this font you’re now reading), was banned. Jan Tschichold was imprisoned for a month, then escaped to Switzerland and England, where he was hired by the founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, to design the standard Penguin paperback. Kurt Schwitters was dismissed from his bread-and-butter position as chief graphic designer to the city council of his hometown, Hannover, and the Nazis began to include his typographically adventurous publications in book-burnings. They’d already been exhibiting Schwitters’ collages in the “Complete Insanity” area of their touring “Degenerate Art” (Entartete Kunst) shows. Then, in 1935, Neues Volk magazine wrote of his art, “Simply indescribable trash… That the Merzbild could even be purchased from public city funds testifies more to the business sense than to the artistic talent of their creator.”

Schwitters did not stop touring. Harriet Janis, co-founder of the Sidney Janis Gallery in Manhattan, recounts Walter Spengemann’s tale that, “He began enlivening his poetry lectures with a most dangerous kind of audience participation. Opening that strange, omnipresent, cabalistic portmanteau of his, he would remove a photograph of Hitler and place it at the platform’s edge. Before launching into the long Ursonate…he would invite his audience to spit at Hitler’s likeness whenever they felt so inclined. This, he implied, would be an acceptable substitute for applause.”

Living Ur Sonata: ZÄTT—THEMES 6, 12, 13, 14, 17

Schwitters survives…as one of the most extraordinary performers of the century. When he [recited] his Primeval Sonata—a long poem made up entirely of wordless sounds—it was as if there had come into existence a completely new mode of human expression, by turns hilarious and terrifying, elemental and precisely engineered. Others dreamed of reconciling art and language, music and speech, the living room and the cathedral, the stage and the unspoiled forest. Schwitters had the sweep of mind not only to dream of these things, but to carry them out.

—John Russell, An Alternative Art, 1974

October 10th, 2009

Main Street Park Pavilion

Easthampton, Massachusetts

“Priimittii, Priimiititti, Priimiititti too, Priimiititti taa,” intones performance-poet and graphic journalist Rebecca Migdal, swinging her hair, swaying in her black-and-red Renaissance-fair gown.

Bailey, the toy poodle at our feet, growls.

Two cops who’ve pushed through the audience wave their arms.

“Priimiititti too, Priimiititti taa, Priimiititti tootaa, Priimiititti tootaa,” Rebecca insists. Eric Blitz’s ad-hoc punk percussion and DJ Glove’s guitar/tape-measure mash-up are demanding answers. Holyoke community organizer Pronoblem Baalberith’s PVC-pipe bass bubbles. Noise musician Bob Wilson’s toy-store keyboard jangles. Expressionist painter Denis Luzuriaga’s aloe-plant-operated synthesizers coo and belch. Hand-typeset printer Mitch Ahern’s homemade electroluxopipophone roars to life—then gives up its ghost.

Bailey is howling.

“Wrap it up,” one cop commands.

I lean my silver flute into the mic and expel a burst of free jazz. Priestess-of-Artemis Rebecca intensifies, “Priimiititti tuutaa, Priimiititti tuutaa, Priimiititti tootaatuu, Priimiititti tootaatuu.”

The second cop runs his hand across his throat. Rebecca responds, “Priimiititti tuutaatoo, Priimiititti tuutaatoo.”

Scrap-metal sculptor John Landino, who specializes in bolting books shut, abandons tuba, trumpet, and French horn, navigates our ten-member ensemble’s maze of amps, and crosses to greet the cops. “You officers comfortable? Something to drink?”

Rebecca declaims, “Tatta tatta tuutaa too, Tatta tatta tuutaa too.” Eric bangs his soup-pot. My flute punctuates the rising cacophony. Rebecca chants, “Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe, Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe. Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe, Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe.” Barking with vigor, Bailey strains his leash.

Landino catches my eye. “Andy, how much longer?”

Rebecca is ranting, “Tilla lalla tilla lalla, Tilla lalla tilla lalla.” Our troupe--Urchestra—is midway through the Cadenza, so, five minutes of this. The Finale will be three. I flash my fingers: we need five plus five minutes.

“Tilla lalla tilla lalla, Tilla lalla tilla lalla!”

“No,” shouts the first cop. “It’s after seven, you’re in violation. Stop!”

Pronoblem—a Yeti in green beast-helmet and brown-fur gown—crosses to join Landino’s negotiation. Temporary distraction.

Rebecca goes operatic, “Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tee tee tee tee, Tee tee tee tee.” I add my baritone; we duet, “Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tuii tuii tuii tuii.” I drop down as Rebecca glides up, “Tee tee tee tee, Tee tee tee tee. Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe, Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe.” Guitar, cymbals and electroluxopipophone amp discordantly. “Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe, Tatta tatta tuiiEe tuiiEe.”

Landino is winding his finger: pick it up. I gesture behind me, asking the group to cut volume. Into her mic, Rebecca whispers, “Tilla lalla tilla lalla, Tilla lalla tilla lalla, Tilla lalla tilla lalla, Tilla lalla tilla lalla.”

DJ Glove’s tape-measure screeches against his guitar.

I cough along, “Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tee tee tee tee, Tee tee tee tee, Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tuii tuii tuii tuii, Tee tee tee tee, Tee tee tee tee.”

The second cop yells, “Stop!”

Eric’s snare rolls.

I shout, “Ooo bee!”

DJ Glove’s tape measure snaps.

Rebecca echoes, “Ooo bee!”

Mitch’s electroluxopipophone roars.

I warn, “Ooo bee!”

Bailey howls. Eric bashes. Rebecca wonders, “Ooo bee?”

Bob flutters his keys. I double down, “Ooo bee!”

DJ Glove revs his electric sander. Rebecca moans, “Ooo bee.”

Bailey on hind legs, barks, barks, and barks.

I relent, “Ooo bee.”

Denis’s synth is rising. Rebecca cheers, “Ooo bee!”

We raise arms for silence, gesturing for the audience to join, altogether now, with, “Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.”

I call over to the cops, “Two minutes.”

They’ve calmed down. They’re not Nazis.