| Artist: | Schwitters, Kurt |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Okola | |
| Date of Work: | 1926 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Post WWI | |
| Movement: | Hannover Dada | |
| Medium: | collage | |
| Subject: abstraction made out of bits of junk and castoff materials that had a history, a life in the world. Schwitters works to blur the boundaries between art and life in his anti-art collages and assemblages he calls "merz," from the second syllable of commerce in German. Style: the image clearly owes a debt to cubism in its abandonment of illusionistic, one-point perspective and its acceptance of so-called "base" or lowly materials (collage), but Schwitters goes further to suggest an order based on random chance rather than the tightly interlocked network of the cubist grid. Cubism was much too aesthetic and concerned with formalism for the Dadaists. "Okola" is a collage of junk materials made from the street and arranged to suggest random chance and the absurd. "I could not see the reason why old tickets, driftwood, cloakroom tabs, wires and parts of wheels, buttons and old rubbish found in attics and refuse dumps should not be as suitable a material for painting as the paints made in factories." Schwitters deliberately uses materials that are not precious as part of his Dada anti-masterpiece aesthetic, though many of the other Dadaists found him too bourgeois and concerned with aesthetic issues. It is, however, the way he transforms art into life and life into art, thereby blurring the boundaries between art and life, that truly makes him dada. Context: Dada anti-art, working deliberately against the aesthetic and the academic in the spirit of Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto to create an art of the streets rather than the museums. Anti-decorative and anti-sentimental about humanity; also anti-expressionistic in that it is not about the artist searching his own tortured soul or expressing his internal spiritual angst. Dada fought its own war, away from the muddy trenches and back in the cities where it was possible to put blinders on; Dada mounted its attack on the bourgeois morality and complacency that condoned the war from the stages of the cabaret and the streets rather than from the safety of the artist's studio and the art galleries. Dada is an "art" of protest that tried to point out the absurdity of the war, which they saw as hypocritical and morally bankrupt. Schwitters was somewhat at a remove, being a one man Dada movement up in Hannover in northern Germany. | ||
