John Elderfield

Kurt Schwitters-Merzbau

Everything you ever wanted to know about the great German experimental artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), to be sure. John Elderfield provides 300 pages of cultural and historical context along with the artistic development of this most original of creators. At one point he writes, “Schwitters talked a great deal of wanting to combine all the arts in a synthesis . . . In practice, however, what he did mainly was “to efface the boundaries between the arts” not in show more fact by linking all of them together, but by applying the common principle of assemblage to each of the arts he worked in.” Included in this large art book are over 300 illustrations, not only of Schwitters’s art but also various artists of the era, such as Andre Breton and Raoul Hausmann. What a treasure.

This book can fire the imagination. After reading some years ago myself, I was inspired to create my own Kurt Schwitters-style construction. Here are the notes I found in the diary I was keeping back then:

Rather than running to a department store and buying my daughter the dollhouse she’s been asking for, I decide to build one myself, a dollhouse to end all dollhouses, a dollhouse not only granting her wish for having a place for her miniature people and miniature furniture, but a dollhouse enabling me to fulfill my lifelong dream, albeit on a small scale, of creating a space similar to that great German Dada/Merz artist Kurt Schwitters, who turned virtually every available square foot of his home in Hanover into a sprawling no-objects-bared work of art. As he stated at one point, "My 'ultimate aspiration’ being ‘the union of art and non-art in the Merz total world view.'"

So, after sweating through an entire week of measuring, sawing, nailing and painting, I finished constructing the dollhouse, which I thereafter gave to my daughter as a present. She was delighted to finally have a dollhouse of her very own. Almost her own, that is, for during those first nights, after I tucked her in bed, I proceeded to build a sculpture construction out of toothpicks and matchboxes in one of the little upstairs dollhouse bedrooms.

Initially, my daughter found it curious, her daddy making “little cuties” in her dollhouse, places where her little doll family could sit and play. But the more I worked on the dollhouse, the more infatuated I became. It was if the spirit of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists came to not only inhabit but also haunt the little rooms of the dollhouse.

I cracked the little kitchen window and used a felt-tip pen to mark the smashed glass. This became my doll-sized version of Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even.' I molded a tiny urinal out of clay, fastened it upside down to a dining room wall and wrote ‘Fountain’ underneath. Then, using glue and photographs reduced in size, I covered the little ceilings, walls and floors with collage and photomontage. I included every variety of discarded scrap I could put my hands on to fill every available space.

And, since I ran out of room in the dollhouse itself, I even took my daughter’s little dollhouse dolls and made random attachments of tacks, tape, springs and pins to their heads, thus creating multiple miniature versions of the Dadaist head of Raoul Hausmann.

Meanwhile, my daughter has been having mixed reactions. At times she enjoys all the new, unexpected tricks her made-over dolls can do in their full-to-the-brim dollhouse. But at other times, she is frustrated about the lack of empty space.

I can only hope she’ll eventually be happy, or at least tolerant. For, like Kurt Schwitters, who continued to build, combine and add until he constructed himself into a corner of his house and became a flesh-and-blood extension of his unending collage, my fingers have taken to dancing and building on their own.

And, after all, I will have to follow the lead of my fingers and work non-stop at night, starting in the corner of our downstairs family room where my daughter keeps her dollhouse next to a stack of teddy bears. Lucky for me and my family, I suppose, that it will take many more toothpicks, matchboxes, marbles, clay figures, wooden blocks, springs, tea sets, spools and string before my fingers take me to the stairway and the other rooms of our house. show less

Late last year I wrapped up writing a book devoted to landscape designs. One of the 100 projects included in the book is MoMA's famous garden, known officially as the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Although very well known and frequently visited, it seemed like most research yielded fairly superficial histories. So to get a better handle on the details behind its realization I discovered and bought this issue of MoMA's "Studies in Modern Art" series on Philip Johnson's show more relationship with the museum. It consists of four essays, one of them is devoted to the sculpture garden: Mirka Benes's "A Modern Classic." (The other three essays are about Johnson as a donor to the museum, as a curator, and as the museum's architect.) Benes's nearly 50-page essay is an excellent background on the space, from its days as an outdoor gallery designed by curators John McAndrew and Alfred Barr to Johnson's design and its changes up to the turn of the century. With Yoshio Taniguchi's renovation and expansion of the museum in 2004, the garden and its boundaries would change once again, but the basics of Johnson's design (pools, bridge, asymmetrical plan with plantings) have remained intact for all of its sixty-plus years. Johnson may be known to the wider public for buildings like the AT&T Building (now Sony Tower) not far from MoMA, but the small outdoor space he designed for the museum is one of his best and most lasting designs in any form. show less

Kurt Schwitters-Merzbau

Everything you ever wanted to know about the great German experimental artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), to be sure. John Elderfield provides 300 pages of cultural and historical context along with the artistic development of this most original of creators. At one point he writes, “Schwitters talked a great deal of wanting to combine all the arts in a synthesis . . . In practice, however, what he did mainly was “to efface the boundaries between the arts” not in show more fact by linking all of them together, but by applying the common principle of assemblage to each of the arts he worked in.” Included in this large art book are over 300 illustrations, not only of Schwitters’s art but also various artists of the era, such as Andre Breton and Raoul Hausmann. What a treasure.

This book can fire the imagination. After reading some years ago myself, I was inspired to create my own Kurt Schwitters-style construction. Here are the notes I found in the diary I was keeping back then:

Rather than running to a department store and buying my daughter the dollhouse she’s been asking for, I decide to build one myself, a dollhouse to end all dollhouses, a dollhouse not only granting her wish for having a place for her miniature people and miniature furniture, but a dollhouse enabling me to fulfill my lifelong dream, albeit on a small scale, of creating a space similar to that great German Dada/Merz artist Kurt Schwitters, who turned virtually every available square foot of his home in Hanover into a sprawling no-objects-bared work of art. As he stated at one point, "My 'ultimate aspiration’ being ‘the union of art and non-art in the Merz total world view.'"

So, after sweating through an entire week of measuring, sawing, nailing and painting, I finished constructing the dollhouse, which I thereafter gave to my daughter as a present. She was delighted to finally have a dollhouse of her very own. Almost her own, that is, for during those first nights, after I tucked her in bed, I proceeded to build a sculpture construction out of toothpicks and matchboxes in one of the little upstairs dollhouse bedrooms.

Initially, my daughter found it curious, her daddy making “little cuties” in her dollhouse, places where her little doll family could sit and play. But the more I worked on the dollhouse, the more infatuated I became. It was if the spirit of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists came to not only inhabit but also haunt the little rooms of the dollhouse.

I cracked the little kitchen window and used a felt-tip pen to mark the smashed glass. This became my doll-sized version of Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even.' I molded a tiny urinal out of clay, fastened it upside down to a dining room wall and wrote ‘Fountain’ underneath. Then, using glue and photographs reduced in size, I covered the little ceilings, walls and floors with collage and photomontage. I included every variety of discarded scrap I could put my hands on to fill every available space.

And, since I ran out of room in the dollhouse itself, I even took my daughter’s little dollhouse dolls and made random attachments of tacks, tape, springs and pins to their heads, thus creating multiple miniature versions of the Dadaist head of Raoul Hausmann.

Meanwhile, my daughter has been having mixed reactions. At times she enjoys all the new, unexpected tricks her made-over dolls can do in their full-to-the-brim dollhouse. But at other times, she is frustrated about the lack of empty space.

I can only hope she’ll eventually be happy, or at least tolerant. For, like Kurt Schwitters, who continued to build, combine and add until he constructed himself into a corner of his house and became a flesh-and-blood extension of his unending collage, my fingers have taken to dancing and building on their own.

And, after all, I will have to follow the lead of my fingers and work non-stop at night, starting in the corner of our downstairs family room where my daughter keeps her dollhouse next to a stack of teddy bears. Lucky for me and my family, I suppose, that it will take many more toothpicks, matchboxes, marbles, clay figures, wooden blocks, springs, tea sets, spools and string before my fingers take me to the stairway and the other rooms of our house. show less

The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery was a really great retrospective with lots of fantastic work spanning decades. Her paintings are miracles. This book is lovely and well produced, and a nice reminder of it. The essays are interesting though some of them do cover similar ground but I always learn something reading about Bridget Riley's work and methods.