Occupying Merzbau – the critic, her words and the work

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) constructed the work Merzbau [Merz building] inside his studio in the family residence in Hanover, Germany. The interior developed from a series of Merzsäulen [Merz columns] which eventually grew into a continuous spatial structure along with three of the studio’s four walls. The central floor space was left empty while some elements stretched across the ceiling above. Only three photographs, taken in 1933 by a local photographer, have survived as evidence of the work which was destroyed by allied bombing during World War II. Schwitters had, by then, fled Germany and travelled to Norway where he would start the construction of a new Merz building. The following examines the Hanover Merzbau as a work of art embedded in the fabric of a conventional residential house. It explores how, employing the intermediary space of the artist’s studio, the work unfolded an inhabitable wall space built from scrap material collected from the streets of Hanover. If Schwitters seems to have grounded himself between the interior and exterior of his house through the intricate weaving of a liminal living space, the following addresses this space between the ordinary/familiar and the extraordinary/strange that Merzbau negotiated. It does so for the purpose of framing the work’s attempt at transcending its everyday domestic setting. Radical writing strategies developed by French novelist George Perec (1936-1982) are employed for experimentation with the way that insight into Merzbau is produced. This approach involves detailed descriptions of places and scenes that complicate the extra/ordinary nature of these in pursuit of a space beyond named the ‘infra-ordinary.’ Three positions between the artwork Merzbau, the conventional dwelling house inside which it was built, and the critic evaluating the work, are developed for the purpose of foregrounding the act of writing as a critical and creative spatial practice.