Berkeley Flaneur: Meta-merzbau

Early in August the Flaneur made the scene at Berkeley Art Museum to dig the freshly-installed Merzbau replica.

It was a club house for reading and performance created by collage-artist extraordinaire Kurt Schwitters. The occasion for this reconstruction from photographs is a Schwitters retrospective show. Although associated with the Dada movement he was more or less kindred and concurrent. He made association with Dada Zurich only after not doing so with Dada Berlin. His work is constructivist, cubist, and it fits into a broader avant garde as much as it does with the raw provocation of Dada.

Yet if Dada can be considered as design or style--the disordering of the typographical senses is there, the endless chance juxtapositions available to an artist's eye in mass produced printed matter. Assaults on figurative elements, leading to the illustrated dreams of Surrealism, are very rarely present in the works by Schwitters on display. One in which a traditional religious image is lost in his patchwork collage is as close as it gets and you must look hard to notice it as possibly somewhat scandalous or transgressive.

But so gorgeous are his collage tapestries -- torn tickets and scraps all over-colored by pigment mixed with glue that dried to appear so timelessly old yet with a frisson of the new--simultaneity intact. His weaves of rich old papers are virtuosic works of pure color and pattern as profound as a great Persian rug.

The Merzbau united Schwitters life and art in a living space. Despite whatever inhibitions of movement in space it creates, like a cave, a tepee, a lean-to, the cathedral ceiling effect is in play. The lights change every few minutes inside and outside the chamber. Outside the windows an artificial verisimilitude prevails. Inside it's slow to recognize familiar enough objects in the Doctor Caligari-like expressionistic architecture --only it's white and chapel-like instead of a noir underworld nightmare. It would make a fine bedroom for a child. Did I dream that there was a transporting soundscape going on as well? Was there a glacier scouring a moraine of the mind? I can vouchsafe that it is a nice place to be inside a wee bit stoned.

Kurt Schwitters created the original Merzbau on property owned by his parents. Fleeing the fascists he relocated to Norway and attempted to replicate a merzbau there. He later dwelled in a rustic version while living in the rough. A smattering of remnants exist from these latter structures and only photo-documentation exists of the original work.

After a few digital image-capture sound effects had emanated from the Merzbau while I was the only occupant. A demure museum guide came in to tell me that sort of thing was not in fact encouraged.