This thesis is a radical reinterpretation of the Hannover Merzbau ( Cathedral of Erotic Misery) by Kurt Schwitters. It proposes and demonstrates that two of Schwitters' own photographs of the work should not be viewed as being descriptions of a "constructed" Merzbau, but rather understood as complex constructions that generate a critical questioning of the modern site of perception. / Through an exploration of language (as understood within Giambattista Vico's New Science) the photographs come to deconstruct themselves within a context of simultaneous readings; allowing both the "secret" space of the modern Merzbau, and the sacred place of the Cathedral to exist simultaneously.

Work of a lifetime and linked intimately to his own life, Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau is the expression of the MERZ collage, in a work that brings together architecture, theatre, sculpture, painting and literature. His work evolves through time, based on two specific moments: the extraction of fragments, and the assembly of these elements into a new harmonious and meaningful entity. To Schwitters, the MERZ collage is not the mere manipulation of forms; it is the continuous process of transformation, from their initial state, of various fragments found in his daily environment, including material doomed to destruction: debris, rubbish, scrap, trash, remnants, etc. This transformation consists of one fundamental theme: uniting two opposing forces of reality---art and non-art---into one world: the Merzgesamtweltbild. Art is singled out as the supreme value of human existence, which has the power of transforming waste matter into a work of art. What is seen, through the artist's eyes and soul, is a colour, a light, a shadow, a line, a form, a space, a depth...What occurs in the MERZ collage is the true metamorphosis of the visible, sensible ordinary world.

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Zugl.: Freiburg (Breisgau), Univ., Diss.

This thesis centers on Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Barn (1947-1948), exploring the relationship between nature and the Merz principles of formung (forming) and entformung (un-forming) within the context of this late work. The Merz Barn, the last of Schwitters’s Merzbauten, has yet to receive the extensive level of research accorded to its famous Hannover predecessor, resulting in an underdeveloped grasp of the project as a whole within Merzbau scholarship. The present study considers Schwitters’s increasing orientation towards nature as a model for artistic creation to elicit an understanding of the ways in which his paradoxical Merz formula, “Formen heißt entformeln,” evolved during his period of exile. I contend that Schwitters employed the organic processes of natural growth and decay to realize the principles of formung and entformung in his Merz Barn. Furthermore, the sculptural interior underscores the dialectical exchange between forming and un-forming, highlighting the liminal space between the opposing processes.

During the early 1920s, the German artist and poet, Kurt Schwitters, developed a method of creating models of architecture using found objects based upon his Merz approach to art. While many leading architects joined the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and Bruno Taut's Gläserne Kette at the end of World War I to speculate upon what to build for the new post-war German architecture, Schwitters challenged the predominant views by probing how it could be designed through models. Compared to the normative practice of molding clay and casting plaster into scale models after completed designs, Schwitters assembled found objects into two models, Haus Merz during 1920 and Schloss und Kathedrale mit Hoffbrunnen in 1922, to imagine new combinations and transformations of material, form and space in building designs. Schwitters' Merz interpretation of found objects as models of architecture held that all materials have an ineffable transitory content that contributes to their identities as natural or man-made utilitarian things. In the Christian medieval exegesis of religious objects, the interpretation of materials as a dichotomy of visible form and invisible content was described as "anagogy." However, unlike this Christian conception of the invisible that was transcendental and a priori, the anagogical Merz interpretation seeks to find the invisible within the visible through the active imagination of found materials assembled as a model of architecture. This dissertation examines Schwitters' proposed use of found objects to construct architectural models as an anagogical approach to the material imagination of architecture. / Ph. D.

Diss.--Marburg--Universität Marburg, 1991.