The Ruin and the Ruined in the Work of Kurt Schwitters

Abstract

Scholars have already examined how the avant-garde used, understood and satirised techniques of the mass media. This article examines how Schwitters engaged in a more ambitious project: an exploration of fundamentally new systems of information technology, and of the ways information was communicated, controlled, preserved and discarded. The ruin of Schwitters' lifework, the Merzbau, has been thoroughly examined; this article explores instead how Schwitters literally used the ruin and the ruined, fragments of the immediate past, trash, as his material of choice. I will argue that Schwitters' work, neither straightforwardly politically engaged nor arguably formally innovative, represents a sustained exploration of this first media age and its completely new forms of mediation: the before and after of the ephemera of our society, producing adverts, branding and packaging as a graphic designer and reasserting the same objects as trash, rubbish and the ruined in his collages and assemblages.