Mz 601, 1923; paint and paper on cardboard; 17 × 15 in. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Schwitters’ hallmark was hybridity.  He started his career as a painter and then moved to collage, assemblage, and sculpture, all while never truly leaving painting behind.  He was associated with and influenced by many movements, including Dada, Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism, appropriating what he thought useful or provocative from each and synthesizing it with fragments from the next without becoming dogmatic about any of them.  In 1919 Schwitters coined the term merz to describe his work.  The origin of this word was a scrap of an advertisement for a bank, and is taken from the German word kommerziell (commerce).  He saw that snippet of a word as the embodiment of what he was trying to accomplish—to take a part of something and make it his own—and he organized his practice around it.  As curator Lucinda Barnes explained, “The merz approach is to connect everything.”

The works in the exhibition are mostly small, some no bigger than the palm of your hand.   Schwitters clipped bits of words from various sources and mixed them with other materials such as paper, fabric, feathers, and paint. Like the word merz from kommerziel, the words are fragmented.  But rather than making them incomprehensible, this practice opens the text up, transforming each word from a linguistic fence to something looser and more associative.  They sometimes provide clues to his interests and lifestyle.  For example, a few collages attest to Schwitters’ more pleasurable habits: snippets of labels from wine bottles, chocolate wrappers, and tobacco often make appearances.  The intimacy of each composition invites an almost forensic inspection, and I often found myself nearly fogging the glass with my breath in order to identify and understand each assortment of fragments so meticulously combined.

pink collage, 1940; collage, paper and tissue paper on pasteboard; 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.; Collection of David Ilya Brandt and Daria Brandt.

Mz. 310 Carneval. (1921) is one such composition, where fragments of small, readable text are mixed with parts of individual letters and torn pieces of striped paper in a confetti-like arrangement.  Another is Mz. 410 irgensowas. (1922) (“something or other”) where the text fragments take on an almost Constructivist look.  In both of these, Schwitters covered the edges of the collage with a mat to create a clean, perfect rectangle that reigns in the implied chaos of the interior composition.  By making the edges precise and regular, Schwitters creates a window from which to view this arrangement, mimicking the era’s growing interest in the camera-eye, selecting and framing the world.  In contrast, the two small examples of his Oil wiping on newspaper (1939) feature compositions mounted on top of a substrate instead of matted beneath it.  In these, the edges are irregular and raw.  Often the compositions can be “read” like a Rorschach blot.  pink collage (1940) only looked abstract from a distance, but as I drew nearer it resolved into a dark tree trunk with white mountains rising up behind it.  Up close, the compositions have a particularity and a specificity that makes them seem representational.

Mz x 19, 1947; collage, oil, paper, and cardboard on cardboard; 6 1/8 x 5 1/4 in.; Collection of Ellsworth Kelly.

At first, Schwitters claimed that the collages were “not intended to mean anything, [but] only to be strong compositions in color.”  He later amended this view: “Poetry arises from the interaction of these elements, meaning is important only if it is employed as one such factor.  I play off sense against nonsense.”  Although the work is considered historical, the approach that created it is thoroughly contemporary, and artists such as Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha have cited Schwitters as an influence.   He anticipated the rise of commercialism, created collage work to materialize the saturation of information in the modern world, and predicted the indiscriminate use of varied materials as a way to reflect on the society in which it was created. The intimacy of scale and the way the work seems simultaneously expansive and specific makes it well worth seeing in person.  Upon attending an exhibition of Schwitters’ work in 1959, Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “I felt like he made it all just for me.”

Ed Ruscha, I Think I’ll..., 1983.

“Presentness is grace,” Michael Fried wrote at the end of Art and Objecthood, his damning critique of Minimalism. It’s a strange moment in the essay and I can’t even begin to properly understand it, let alone explain it and I won’t try. I point it out because it has stuck with me since I first read it in graduate school and I wonder about it. A lot. I agree with him as it pertains to living, presentness is grace, an undeserved and great gift, but how does it relate to art? I mean, should art be present in the same way I should be; should it exist as I should try to live?

This is a central question for me, especially when I make art. How much of my work should reflect who I am and how I try to behave in the world? I’ve wondered this since a friend of mine in undergrad pointed out that I’m a funny guy (believe me on this point, please), but that my paintings were desperately serious. “Ugh, the horrors of war!” he said. “Man, where are the jokes?” He was right. I needed to lighten up. It was an important lesson for me. I can’t be one way in the world and make art that denies that experience. Still, does everything have to relate one-to-one to life? Should my work be a direct expression of my beliefs, experiences and way of life?

I’ve been told that if I want to know what I really believe, I should look in my life. If I say I believe in harmony, but there is only chaos in my life, then, well, I really trust in chaos, don’t I? This principle comes in handy, as I find it impossible to think my way out of these types of questions. So, when I want to know what I believe about art, I have to consider art that I really love and really think about. Which brings me to Marcel Duchamp.

Marcel Duchamp (With Pipe), 1957. John D. Schiff.

When I think about Duchamp I can’t help but be impressed by how damn smart he was. That’s clear, when you consider his development of the readymade and how it reveals the function of the viewer (or institution) in determining an artwork’s status as such. But what really bowls me over, what really kills me, is his ability to let the work unfold, in short, his timing.

So much of his art works on multiple levels all at once, with layers of humor, philosophy, linguistic play and autobiography inextricably mixed, so that the sum is greater than the parts. With in it all, I’m suggesting, is an extraordinary sense of timing. I mean timing both in the sense of being able to tell a joke, but also that his works contain a temporal play, in which they must be experienced through time. That they anticipate meaning accruing to them or being revealed…eventually.

Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915

In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915, was Duchamp’s first readymade, a snow shovel as a work of art, it bore its name, Duchamp’s signature and the year of its designation as a work of art. It’s pretty straightforward, really. It’s a serious work that masquerades as a dumb joke. The act of nomination in the work changed the understanding of what an artwork was or could be and that’s not funny business; it’s deadly serious. The theme of the work, though, is the joke that the shovel is seen not for what it is (an object), but what it will do. Right now, it’s a thing, but later it will have meaning, due to its effect. Someday, we’ll see it not as a thing, but the thing that did that thing. So, is it present?

Marcel Duchamp, Monte Carlo Bond, 1924.

In 1924, Duchamp produced the Monte Carlo Bond, an editioned work (only eight were made, but thirty were proposed) to raise funds for a trip to the roulette tables in Monte Carlo. Duchamp’s intended purpose was to break the bank, there, using a system of play that he had devised. This work in its embodied state was really about something else, something in the future. Though it existed in the hands of its purchaser, it was nothing more than a sign of some future possibility. Additionally, the piece, being about roulette, calls to mind the game itself and, particularly, sense of anticipation. Every bet is a potential winner, until the ball stops on a number. While the ball is in motion, anything is possible and the future is held out as a hope.

Marcel Duchamp, Tzanck Check, 1919.

Tzanck Check was a work (or was it?) Duchamp made in 1919 to pay for some dental work he couldn’t afford. A large, hand-lettered version of a check made by Duchamp and made out to his dentist, Dr. Daniel Tzanck, for $115, it engages in a play between the real and the fictional. In a sense, it was a real check standing in for $115. In another, it was an artwork, potentially, worth far more. As a real check its value is determined by its present context. As an artwork its value, like a bet at the roulette table, could be far more, but only in the future. So there’s a play between now and soon in effect, too. Finally, as an aside, really, I wonder if Duchamp chose Dr. Tzanck as his dentist, so that he could make this check out to him and employ a sly pun on the word “thanks.” Of course, I may be retroactively attributing this linguistic genius to him, but, then, doesn’t his work suggest this type of slippage in time, anyway?

Thinking about these works has helped me to develop my own sense of how artworks should exist in the world. Certainly, an object, a real one, must (and will, necessarily) have a presence in the present, but, for me, it comes alive, when it can and must develop meanings through time. To boil it down Michael Fried is right: presentness is grace, but existing in time, that’s living.