Tate Modern: House of Disparities

Sophie Barr, 2002 Tate Modern: House of Disparities

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Tate Modern - House of Disparities: the Dead Work of Kurt

Schwitters

Preface

On a recent visit to Tate Modern I almost passed through the Kurt

Schwitters and Jean Arp room without noticing. I was surprised at this

considering my interest in Schwitters’ Merz collages and also his remarkable

architectural Merzbau projects. As I focused on the work there more

closely I felt that I had gained very little from the experience. Surely I was

there for the purposes of gain, to take something with me: an experience,

some information, some new knowledge even? It seemed that the works

could not speak for themselves, and the information provided was

uncommitted to certainty. The text was often formal (materials based) or

anecdotal rather than historical or interpretative. I felt tempted to test each

work against its information plaque and move on to a more exciting space,

perhaps to look out of the window of the restaurant at the spectacular

views over London, or to see an upside-down piano suspended from the

ceiling spew out its machinery with a crash. I began to think that perhaps

the work was not boring in itself, only that put next to these other

experiences available in the Tate Modern, Schwitters’ sometimes subtle and

complex work might fail to engage me and other viewers. Added to this,

there was the architecture of the museum itself, speaking in such confident

terms. Tate’s brand identity may have made it difficult to hear the whispers

of this work. Considering the complexity of our modern-day technological

viewing practices, and advertising savvy, the rebelliousness of collage in the

early twentieth century seemed not only tame, but old-fashioned, stuck in

the past like the tram tickets and newspaper clippings themselves.

Furthermore, the seemingly innovative curatorial policy employed by the


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Tate Modern might have had some effect on this art, forcing it into

equivalence with other very different works. Perhaps there was a deeper

problem too, to do with (re)constructing the work of the past, in particular

the work of the Avant Garde, through the devices of the museum. Adorno

writes, that “Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than

phonetic association”, maybe I was looking at historical documents or relics

of “art that was” rather than functioning works of art.1 Could Tate Modern

be the House of Disparities that is the museum according to Adorno, or a

cutting edge gallery of modern art?

Tate Modern’s Project

In their 1978 article MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53rd Street, Carol

Duncan and Alan Wallach examine the curatorial strategy employed in the

Museum of Modern Art, New York in the context of the architecture and

layout of the galleries. They liken the journey through the numbered

galleries of MOMA, to a journey through a labyrinth. There is one main

route through the labyrinth, and this route tells the story of modern art.

Arranged chronologically (and when it is not it traces seemingly

homogenous movements of the twentieth century such as Surrealism or

Cubism), the labyrinth route provides the viewer with “the key moments

and turning-points of this history”2. This is achieved by exhibiting the

assumed masterpieces of the twentieth century at strategic points along the

journey. The arrangement of the works along this route serves to prioritise

certain individual artists and works of art over others. Important works can

be seen from some distance, whereas less important work is hung in

corners, or circumvented by the main route.

1 Theodor Adorno, ‘Valéry , Proust Museum’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, (Neville Spearman, London, 1967, p175-185) p175. 2 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53rd Street’, Studio International, 194.1 (1978) p53


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The story begins with Cézanne and ends with the art of the Abstract

Expressionists, with Picasso and Cubism regarded as the fulcrum of the

history of modern art. The story is familiar, it is a dogma which claims that

the art of the Avant Garde in the twentieth century was simply a sequence

of reactions, a logical cause and effect, to what had gone before. As the

story unfolds room by room, the audience can see that the artists of the

twentieth century became increasingly occupied with the elimination of

representational forms and the banishment of the painterly illusion of

depth. According to this story, surface and “truth to materials” were the

absolute goals of art. The art that stands outside this mainstream of art

history, that does not fit neatly into the story, is marginalised, literally, off

the main route. Other art simply does not appear at all.

Nicolas Serota, the Director of the Tate, recognises that chronological

display is too dictatorial, too rigid (of course the directors of MOMA have

not pursued this curatorial doctrine for some years either). In this system

the works of art cannot speak for themselves, they are too bogged down

with an unyielding history, only serving the canon. Serota’s aim for the Tate

Modern is to “generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense

of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in

a particular room at a particular moment, rather than find themselves

standing on the conveyor belt of history.”3 He also writes that “MOMA in

New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and

the new Tate Modern in London – are rethinking the ways in which they

tell the story of the twentieth century.”4 He writes, “In the new museum,

each of us, curators and visitors alike, will have to become more willing to

3 Nicolas Serota,, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art, (Thames and Hudson, London, 1996), p55 4 Ibid. p5


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chart our own path, redrawing the map of modern art, rather than

following a single path laid down by a curator.”5

Lars Nittive, the former Director of the Tate Modern wants visitors to,

“feel that what they are experiencing is part of their own time” He hopes

that, “visitors will perceive meaning in early twentieth century art as viewed

from today’s perspective, while at the same time according contemporary

art the same importance as established masterpieces.”6 So we can take from

these words that in Tate Modern we will no longer experience the labyrinth,

where the curators provide one digestible story of art, but the visitor will

choose their own route within the architecture, and can experience 100

years or so of modern art in their own way, outside the doctrines of

curators and directors. Not only can visitors make their own stories of art,

but they can experience art from the early twentieth century in the same way

that they can experience contemporary art, and the restrictive conveyor belt

of history will not mar this experience.

Unlike the hang at MOMA during the 1970s, the arrangement of the

works in Tate Modern is thematic. There are four main sections, which

loosely are, still life, history, the nude and landscape. Works from

throughout the modern period are put side by side with contemporary

work, based on the slippery boundaries of the four themes. This changes

the whole system of priorities present in chronological display, old over

new; painting over sculpture; masterpiece against lesser known work. All

the art objects have become part of a system of equivalence. Each should

be approached with the same openness, and should be viewed through the

framework of the “present” rather than seen as pieces of historic

information or evidence of events. The relation to other works within the

themes, that “cut right through history” should take priority over the

5 Ibid. p54 6 Lars Nittive, Tate Modern, The Handbook, Ed. Iwona Blazwick and Simon Wilson, (Tate Publishing, 2000) p10


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relationships with works similar either in form or history.7 An example of

this from the Tate Handbook is the pairing of Monet’s Water-Lilies next to a

Stone Circle by Richard Long. The benefits of this kind of juxtaposition are

described as “immediate, straightforward and wonderful”.8 The historic

movements of the twentieth century are played down, as contemporary

works by Jake and Dinos Chapman come to be seen in dialogue with

individual works by signed-up members of the Surrealist Group, such as

Dali and Buñuel’s film un Chien Andalou. Instead they are bracketed as

“subversive objects”, rather than seen in a temporal context, compared

with similar works from a similar era, as might be explored in a

chronological display.

In this system of equivalence, where the museum has not made obvious

didactic judgments of its collection, and seemingly asks few questions of it,

the meaning of the work then, is constructed by the viewer in that specific

place and time. If we the viewer are active in bringing meaning to the work,

unburdened by the weight of history then the implication is, that the work

functions as art no matter who you are or where you come from. This is not

skewed historical information, documents of the past or relics, but art that

speaks to us in the present about our lives now. However, we can only do

this inside the space provided for us. Nittive rightly acknowledges:

…nothing surrounding a work of art is neutral; that everything has an

impact on the way we interpret what we see – from the way a collection is

displayed, its narrative structure and physical rhythm, to the character and

even location of the building, the place where we, the visitors, find

ourselves.9

7 Ibid. p10 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.


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It remains then, that encoded into the very architecture of the Tate Modern

(or Tate Museum of Modern Art as it may be more appropriate to call it), is

an ideology, a story or stories of art. Perhaps this encoding is in order to

allow contemporary art practices to trickle into the canon, without

addressing the divide between modern and postmodern. Douglas Crimp

writes,

The term postmodernism described a situation in which both the present and

the past could be stripped of any and all historical determinations and

conflicts. Art institutions widely embraced this situation, using it to

reestablish art – even so-called postmodernist art – as autonomous,

universal, timeless.10

Perhaps this liberation of art from its past does make this museum more

popular, but this strategy may also constrain the viewer and force them into

making certain kinds of connections. Mignon Nixon has suggested that

perhaps in the Tate Modern, the artworks are “deployed” rather than

“displayed.” This will dramatise the role of the curator.11 Can the art of the

past, in particular the work of the Avant Garde function as “autonomous,

universal, timeless” in the Tate Modern? Can it be wrenched from its

historical context and still be meaningful to the viewer? Does the Tate

merely affirm that all works of art are good, without necessarily

problematising them? Can the work of Kurt Schwitters speak at all in this

postmodern museum?

10 Douglas Crimp, On The Museum’s Ruins, (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England, 1993) p18. 11 Mignon Nixon, “Round Table: Tate Modern” October (98 Fall 2001), p3


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The Building

Tate Modern is housed in the disused Bankside Power Station on the

South Bank in London. This colossal building once indicative of London’s

industrial past has become re-landmarked as a symbol of London’s culture

industry. It is spectacle from the outside but also from the inside. The

turbine hall is an enormous space that dwarves the visitor. It seems an

extension of the outside space by virtue of its sloping ramp. The building

also offers many views to the outside, towards the city, in particular one

view which takes in London’s iconic St Paul’s Cathedral. Herzog and De

Meuron, the architects of this transformation, have created a building

which carves out a powerful brand identity for this museum. Indeed the

brand precedes and pursues the museum and its collection. From the

quantity of publications, guides and souvenirs of the building, to the font

and colour systems throughout the galleries, (there is even guided tour of

the architecture of Tate Modern rather than the collection), the visitor is

continually made aware that they are experiencing one of the best museums

of modern art in the world. Stallabrass notes, “in the global competition of

cities, such visual branding is highly significant.”12

On my recent visit, the work on display in the turbine hall was Anish

Kapoor’s Marsyas. This is a work built on a scale as vast as the turbine hall

itself (fig.1 & 2). No visitor could ignore this work. It is impressive because

of its size, and also its use of space. Marsyas is a site-specific sculpture,

verging on architecture. It uses the architecture of Tate Modern to inform

it, to frame and contextualise it. It needs little interpretation, the impact of

this structure is obvious. The visitor can move freely (but not so freely as to

touch it) around this work, and confronted with it can be said to experience

the work rather than contemplate or observe it. The way to interpret

Marsyas is through its scale, colour, materials, use of space. It is easy to

12 Julian Stallabrass “Round Table: Tate Modern”, October (98 Fall 2001), p19


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respond to this piece of work. In his book about the British art scene of the

1990’s High art Lite, Julian Stallabrass writes that “much contemporary art

relies upon: ‘wow’”.13 This is certainly true of Marsyas and also of certain

other works in the permanent collection, such as the installation of Mark

Rothko’s brooding Seagram Murals, or Cornelia Parker’s exploded shed

(hung bit by bit to the ceiling of a gallery and lit with a single bulb). The

first experience of Tate Modern then, is a feeling of awe at the spectacle of

the building, and an amazement at the scale of the turbine hall, a space that

even without Kapoor’s immense sculpture, will amaze. In addition, a

number of works in the permanent collection have been installed in a way

that invokes their most spectacular nature.

Fig 1 &

13 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, (Verso, London, New York, 1999) p27


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The Schwitters Room

The first escalator leads directly to the “Still Life/Object/Real Life”

themed section of the gallery, one of the four sections that claim to “cut

right through history”. Before entering into the Schwitters and Arp room I

encounter many different artworks and experience the Tate’s curatorial

strategies first hand. The rooms are not arranged sequentially, the visitor

may navigate their own route. On my route I encounter a replica of

Duchamp’s infamous Fountain encased in a glass vitrine, a video animation

by Jan Svankmajer, spaces to recline and read while looking out over the

Thames and a room showcasing “Young British Artist” Sarah Lucas,

amongst other well known and lesser known art. The rooms vary in size, in

order to accommodate different scales of work. The “subversive objects”

space is painted dark pink, as if to suggest that subversive objects require a

subversion of the standard white wall, the language of the neutral gallery.

The Svankmajer, Lucas and “Art into Trash” spaces border the room

where I find the Schwitters work. I come in from the Lucas room, but I am

aware that I might have approached the room from three different

directions which in turn might have influenced my reading of the space.

There are several works by Schwitters and Arp which are displayed in a

variety of ways. There are a number of sculptures in vitrines, paper works

in plain modern frames, and a vitrine containing documentary information.

I explore one of the Schwitters’ images further (see fig. 3). The small white

information plaque tells me this image is called Koi, it was made in 1932, its

dimensions are 157 x 125 mm, and that it was lent by Philip Granville in

1999. It also it tells me that:


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Beyond the choice of the material, Schwitters may not have made any

alterations. The printed paper probably comes from the printing works that

Schwitters frequented in his capacity as a designer. The blocks of print are

arranged into a geometrical structure reminiscent of Constructivist

compositions. As all the lettering is reversed the paper must be an offprint

from printers’ proofs.14

fig. 3 Koi

It is not clear who has written this suggestive information, but the

language is authoritative and commensurate with the homogenous Tate

Modern style. It is tempting to try to validate the work against this

information, look for the trace of human hand, imagine how this may

compare to constructivist work and look for the reversed lettering. Once

this is done, I can perhaps move on, but without really taking anything in.

Michael Compton notes in Duncan and Wallach’s article that people “will

14 Tate Modern (circa.?)


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look at a painting for an average of 1.6 seconds”15. He suggests that viewers

do not confront the individual painting, but rather are ticking off what they

already know, an example of cubism, a “nice Mondrian”. This new

curatorial regime at Tate Modern does not challenge this problem.

This Schwitters work I am confronted with is not well known. I have

not seen it in reproduction or in a temporary exhibition before. It is a small

and subtle appropriated “drawing” and I do not know what it means. I do

not know what to bring to this work. The text that relates to the image has

dictated how I act in front of this work, how long I look at it, but also

insinuates that there is nothing else to know about it. The information does

not tell me who framed the work and when, how many people have owned

it, if any restoration work has been done to it, anything about the artist, the

time that it was made, how much it was bought for, how much it is worth

now. The implication is that I am regarding an authentic and unique art

object, that this is the artists’ vision, truthfully preserved for me to enjoy,

and to marvel at his genius. Charles Saumarez Smith regards this lack in the

museum as a “species of contemporary arrogance which regards it as

possible to reverse the process of history and return the artefact’s

appearance to exactly how it was when it popped out of its makers

hands.”16

The fetters of the gallery by no means allude to this anomaly. In fact the

framing, vitrines, white painted walls and subtle lighting reinforce the

language of neutrality. It seems that this rarefied art object stands outside

the system of exchange, and it can only be judged on the terms the museum

has set out for it; the system of equivalence. In this system I must judge the

work against my life and the city (society) outside the numerous windows.

But Schwitters work resists this kind of interpretation. It does not address

15 Duncan and Wallach, ‘MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph p53 16 Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, Artefacts and Meanings’, The New Museology, (Reaktion Books, ed. Peter Virgo, 1989), p20


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in a simple way, like the work of Sarah Lucas, which employs culturally

familiar signs such as phallic fruits, to invert preconceived ideas of sexual

roles. It does not entertain like the amusing and grotesque Svankmajer

animation, and neither does it “wow” like Marsyas, and the whole

experience of the Tate Modern.

Death of the Art Object

The German word, ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’], has unpleasant overtones. It

describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship

and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to

historical respect than to the needs of the present.17

Adorno, in his essay Valéry Proust Museum, recognises that art cannot be

reproduced in its original form in the traditional museum, that it will be

severed from any original meaning. “Modernizing the past does it [art]

much violence and little good.”18 This is the ultimate paradox of the

museum. In order to preserve art works like Schwitters’ collages in this

space, they are wrenched through time and space in order to be re-

presented, consequently stripping them of their vitality; their very

functionality; their art. For Valéry, “art is lost when it has relinquished its

place in the immediacy of life.”19 The museum turns art into

“commercialized decoration”, as relics of the past, not as art that has a

functioning reality in life. The most vital and exciting aspect of the museum

object is perhaps its time travel, its full life and its fight against decay. The

museum becomes the object’s final resting place, the mausoleum; stripped

of its art the dead object is merely a relic contained in a glass coffin.

17 Adorno, ‘Valéry , Proust Museum’, p176 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. p180


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Albeit a relic it is still a real object, something that belongs in the

material world. The object’s materiality gives the impression of a direct

physical connection to the past. Because it appears is a unique object it is

rendered more special in our world of mass production and proliferation of

images. Even the presentations of prints, photographs and films in the Tate

Modern, do nothing to diminish this impression of uniqueness. The

experience of uniqueness is intrinsically built into the experience of the

museum. In a world where we can access information at the touch of a

button, the notion of authenticity and uniqueness of the object has become

of paramount importance to the museum and its audience. This is shown to

be a sham when one approaches Duchamp’s encased Fountain, and finds it

is one of four or five reproductions. It is doubly a sham, should the visitor

realise that the art of this object lay in the gesture of 1917, placing the urinal

in the gallery. The gesture is hidden under many layers of gallery politics

and curatorial strategies. This object no longer gestures to us, nor can it

provide us with an authentic experience of the original object, all that we

see is a urinal in a gallery encased in glass; perhaps the joke still functions

on the gallery! What this object can do however, is act as a historical

document, as a testimony to the art of the past, but it simply cannot

function as art now.

What we see in the art of the past is its aura. This aura stands between

the object and me, resisting what Adorno refers to as, a “vital relationship”

that I might forge with the work. This distance is in part created through

the object’s singularity and the rarefied environment of the museum, but

also through the machinations of the art market. Stories of the high prices

of art, famously Carl Andre’s Equivalence an arrangement of fire bricks

displayed on the gallery floor (now roped off), help maintain this aura of

the importance of everyday objects.


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The aura and the actuality of Koi do not correspond for me. The aura

destroys the work by denying it a narrative. The object is presented as an

opportunity for me to reflect my own narrative. What I bring to this work

is the thought that “this was once a work of art”.

Trash

Schwitters’ collages and sculptures in the Tate Modern have an equally

difficult relationship to the viewer. The sculptures are made from painted

stones and driftwood. Some are wooden and plaster constructions,

haphazardly painted. These objects are made from found materials,

scavenged from everyday life; rubbish only

touched briefly by human hand. If I imagine for a

moment that they are not “modern art” they look

absurd on their white plinth with glass surround.

The information plaque pronounces that

Schwitters and Arp, like the Dadaists they had

sometime been involved with, flouted “accepted

standards of beauty” and that they “abandoned

traditional artistic techniques. Rather than relying

on fine art materials they made collages of

photographs, newspapers and found objects, and played on the effects of

chance.” The materials for these works are scavenged from the everyday,

detritus found in the street or wherever the artist happened to be. They

might be seen as indexes of the life of the artist as flâneur, as well as a

catalogue of the life of the objects. As Cardinal suggests, perhaps we might

see these collages and sculptures as “tiny showcases in a museum of inter-


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war history,” but these objects to not breathe on their own terms.20 Their

life is subject to the relativism of the museum.

Since Dada, artists have habitually experimented with non fine art

materials. Artworks made from many different media can be seen in the

Tate Modern. Some, like Schwitters’ work, are comprised of found and

transformed objects, detritus, and industrial material. But there are also

video and sound pieces, photographs, exploded sheds and basketballs

floating in a tank to cite just a few examples. Amongst this mêlée of objects

the significance and radical aspects of collage and the use of detritus as art

materials between the wars is lost. These painted stones, branches and bits

of metal have the look of things which have been wrenched from more

sympathetic surroundings and placed here, amongst the shiny, perfectly

executed, photographs, paintings and celebrated works of the twentieth

century. These objects have become equally rarefied, regardless of their

material.

The Dadaists railed against this

kind of presentation, and indeed

collage stood for the antipathy

towards more traditional forms,

the museum being a central

institution in its production.

Schwitters’ relationship with the

museum is certainly more ambivalent than that of other Dadaists,

nevertheless, his use of materials certainly allies him with them, and with a

more politicized take on art. The materials of collage are urban, they

displace “traditional creativity and artistic expression, which were thought

20 Roger Cardinal, ‘Collecting and Collage Making: The Case of Kurt Schwitters’ in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, (Reaktion Books Ltd. London, 1994, p68 to p96) p87


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to be located in the subject matter and individual artists’ marks”.21 The fact

that the materials are prefabricated, links “artistic production with modern

industrial production.”22. Schwitters did not only use the collage process for

making images, but extended it to other practices such as poetry,

performance, graphic design and musical composition. These practices are

acknowledged in a vitrine in this room where one can find a book of

poetry, an LP cover of his spoken word recordings from 1932, a

handwritten poetry manuscript and a copy of the magazine “Merz”.

Diverse time-based art works such as performance cannot be represented

in a museum except the resulting documentation. Perhaps then, like these

documents, the collages and sculptures are simply evidence of events that

Schwitters was a part of.

The fractured surface of collage and appropriation of ready made

material echo the perceived splintering of societal structures in the machine

age. The Merz pictures were certainly produced in volatile times. A number

of his works were considered “degenerate” by the Nazi regime under which

he lived and worked, and as a result were confiscated before he fled

Hannover in 1937. In the vein of the Dadaists, his work challenged the

conventions of taste and traditional aesthetic ideologies of art and art

making.23 Although not sympathetic to some of the revolutionary ideas of

others in the Dada movement (Merz was Schwitters personal movement

which allowed him distance from Dada), his art transcended the

conventional boundaries of painting and sculpture, with his assemblages

(Merzbild), and in particular his most ambitious Merzbau projects.

Although Schwitters main interest was in art, and not in social commentary

or revolutionary goals, his work was not made in a vacuum, and could not

21 Dorothea Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p3 22 Ibid. 23 Elderfield, John. Kurt Schwitters Thames and Hudson, London, 1985 p229


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have been made without the works and thoughts of his contemporaries.

The innovations and offences of collage cannot be understood in the

context of the Tate Modern. The system of equivalences, which urges the

viewer to understand the relative merits of work of the Twentieth Century

and beyond, struggles when coming across innovative yet subtle works. The

framing, vitrines and white walls make this work equivalent to all other

works within the same museological linguistic system. Other works in this

system will shout louder, will connect with a more contemporary sensibility,

one that has been born with and internalised the fractured nature of the

modern age. In this context the innovation of this work is redundant.

Site-Specificity – Total Work of Art

Around the time of Koi, Schwitters was building the first Merzbau in his

house in Hannover, perhaps his most important and complex work. The

large information plaque in the Tate Modern acknowledges this:

The major project of his life, however, was the Merzbau (1923–37), a vast

agglomeration of apparently random sculptural structures that filled his flat

in Hannover. Fleeing from the Nazis, he eventually settled in Britain where

he made small organic sculptures for a new Merzbau in the Lake District,

some of which are shown here. The project remained incomplete on his

death.24

It appears that some of these sculptures in Tate Modern, for example,

Chicken and Egg from around 1946, have come from the Merzbarn in the

Lake District. This Merzbarn was Schwitters third Merzbau, built after the

first and most prolonged in Hannover, and a second less worked in

24 Text by Tanya Barson and Matthew Gale.


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Norway, both of which were destroyed. The Merzbau in Hannover was

built over a number of years, starting properly 1923 and abandoned in

1936-7 when Schwitters fled Germany (it was later destroyed by bombing

in 1943). Schwitters’ son Ernst recalls the Merzbau in their family flat in

Hannover as a structure which continually grew to eventually fill several

rooms on various floors of their home, “resembling a huge, abstract

grotto.”25 Pictures and sculptures were incorporated into the architecture of

the building with wooden and plaster structures linking the individual

objects and the pivotal columns. Alongside these elements, inside the

“caves” were more personal objects, such as a bottle of the artists’ urine

containing “everlasting flowers”, objects belonging to his friends and

acquaintances such as a lock of hair, a bit of shoelace, a half-smoked

cigarette and even a dental bridge complete with teeth.26

Few elements of the Merzbau were permanent. Like the process of

collage or assemblage, Schwitters continually added to and covered over

parts of the Merzbau when he saw fit to do so, sometimes concealing the

contents of the caves deeper and deeper into the structure. Schwitters did

not ever consider the Merzbau to be “finished”, but very much a work

indefinitely in progress.27 Furthermore, the individual pieces of sculpture or

constructivist structures, pictures and columns were never meant to be seen

discretely, rather, part of the whole “four-dimensional matrix, an integrative

field that can be likened to a rhythmic, incantatory whole.” 28 The Merzbau

altered the normal relationship of the viewer to art. It was a total

environment that extended way beyond the picture frame and challenged

the normal visual field.

25 Elizabeth Burns, Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2000), p144. 26 Ibid. p102-103. 27 John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, (Thames and Hudson, London, 1985), p157. 28 Burns Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, p115.


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In 1946 Schwitters decided against restoring the original Merzbau in

Hannover, in favour of building a new Merzbarn in the Lake District.

Although this was to be more organic in form, Merzbarn was a total

environment or Gesamstkunstwerk (total work of art) that was not made

up of isolated elements. Some of the sculptures seen here in the Tate were

part of the Merzbarn, Schwitters’ final attempt at the Gesamtkunstwerk.

But these sculptures, once part of a dynamic site-specific arrangement, have

been separated from the system that framed them, that gave them their

meaning. Away from their barn, these objects have become stultified,

vestiges of a thing no longer in existence. I imagine collectors ransacking

the barn, desperate for a piece, that would somehow stand in for the

destroyed Hanover Merzbau as one the groundbreaking works of the

twentieth century. But sadly this array of objects does nothing in itself. In

terms of authenticity, this is as near as Tate Modern can get to the

Merzbau.

Perhaps the worst injustice to Schwitters’ work has been undertaken by

the University of Newcastle who removed the “Merzed” wall of the

Merzbarn piece by piece to the Hatton Gallery, as if it was a giant

sculpture.29 But the Merzbarn was unfinished, and perhaps, like the original

Merzbau, was to be a project in process, a total work of art. Although no

doubt the work will give scholars some idea as to how Schwitters may have

used his materials, the context of the art will be lost.

There has also been an effort to reconstruct from existing photographs

the original Merzbau by the Sprengle Museum in Hannover.30 Adorno

likens the reconstruction of artworks in their “original” surroundings to,

“efforts to retrieve music from the remoteness of performance and put into

the immediate context of life.” 31 The reconstruction of Schwitters most

29 http://www.ncl.ac.uk/hatton/collection/schwitters/index.html visited 28/04/03 30 Dietrich, The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, p167 31 Adorno, ‘Valéry , Proust Museum’, p175.


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ambitious piece of work can only result in a “costume piece”. Thirteen

Years of work simply cannot be resurrected for the museum, the space of

authentic art experience. In the case of the Merzbarn, a false authenticity,

the reconstructed Merzbau “wreaks even more havoc with art than does

the hodge-podge of collections.”32 I think he has a point.

Death of the Museum?

I do not propose that the museum is dead. The popularity of Tate

Modern is testimony to the museums continuing health. But in its new

curatorial strategy the Tate Modern is still faced with museological

problems. It is not enough to invite the viewer’s subjectivity to fill in for a

lack of historical context. As we have seen, some works in this non-

chronological display will inevitably fall by the wayside in the system of

equivalence. Andreas Huyssen asks whether the spectacle and mise-en-

scène of the postmodern museum has “deprived the museum of its specific

aura of temporality.”33 Maybe the Tate Modern ought to be a space in

which we can “negotiate and…articulate a relationship to the past that is

always also a relationship to the transitory and death.”34 Perhaps the Tate

might acknowledge that what we are seeing is not necessarily art, but

instead documents of the past, objects with extraordinary lives, made under

extraordinary circumstances, rather than forcing art into dialogue with the

spectacle. Tate understands that for art to function it must be connected to

the now, but it must also accept that it cannot breath life into everything. In

another hundred years perhaps we will build another Tate and close the

doors on this collection. Maybe with hindsight reconstructions will be made

32 Ibid. 33 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Escape from Amnesia’, in Twilight Memories, Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, (Routledge, New York and London, 1995), p16.. 34 Ibid.


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transparent, absurdities of display will be openly celebrated, and the

museum will embrace being a house of disparities.


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Tate Modern: House of Disparities - List of Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Neville Spearman, London 1967. Burns Gamard, Elizabeth. Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 2000. Cardinal, Roger. ‘Collecting and Collage Making: The Case of Kurt Schwitters’ in The Cultures of Collecting. Ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. Reaktion Books Ltd. London 1994. p68-96 Crimp, Douglas. On the Museum’s Ruins. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England. 1993. Dietrich, Dorothea. The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Tradition and Innovation. Cambridge University Press. 1993. Duncan, C. and Wallach, A. ‘MOMA: Ordeal and Triumph on 53rd Street’. Studio International, 194.1 (1978). p48-57 Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Escape from Amnesia’. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. Routledge. New York, London. 1995. p14-35. Elderfield, John. Kurt Schwitters. Thames and Hudson, London. 1985. Nittive, Lars. Tate Modern The Handbook. Ed. Iwona Blazwick and Simon Wilson. Tate Publishing 2000. Serota, Nicholas. Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art. Thames and Hudson, London 1996. Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s. Verso, London, New York. 1999. Various speakers. Round Table: Tate Modern. October 98. Fall 2001. Electronic Resources


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Tate Modern: House of Disparities

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