The Schwitters Legacy

Originally published as part of Art and Text (Black Dog 2010) alongside texts by co-authors Dave Beech and Charles Harrison

Relationships between image and language have informed many of the significant developments of twentieth-century visual art. Tensions between linguistic and pictorial description have provided a dynamic basis for experimentation across the previously distinct and autonomous fields of literary and visual practice.
The contradictions that exist between words and images, and thus between description and representation, energized artistic production and critical debate in successive decades of the century. Writers have used visual strategies to extend and disrupt the communicative values of words, while painters have used language to interrogate the conventions of representation. The collapsing of distinctions between these activities was a common characteristic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, a cultural territory populated by painter-writers and poet-printers, notable for a spirit of cross-disciplinarity which served to debate the very nature and boundaries of creative activity.For Modernist poets, visual and graphic form developed as a means of exploring the relationship between language and its subject, extending or redefining the expressive scope of the written word. It is significant that increasing use of the typewriter served to narrow the distinction between the act of writing and the mechanics of print. The work of Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound shows a development of typographic structure as an integral element of the poem and the act of writing. Virginia Woolf hand-set some of her own poems in metal type. The jobbing type of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist manifesto Blast in 1915 reflects a direct integration of
writing and typographic expression. William Carlos Williams said of his 1923 poem Spring and All that “it was written when all the world was going crazy about typographic form”. Throughout the period between the first and second world wars, Kurt Schwitters traversed the disparate disciplines of painting, typography, collage and writing. His work during this period prefigured the emergence of sound poetry, performance and site-specific installation as major tendencies of avant garde practice in the latter half of the century.
The development of these preoccupations in the visual arts can be traced to three major influences: the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance), 1914, the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommasso Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto and the principles of Parole en Libertà (Words in freedom) exemplified in his Zang Tumb Tuum of 1914, andthe Calligrammes of Guillaume Apollinaire, published in 1918.
Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés is significant not only as a landmark in typographic form, but also for its underlying concern for random process and intervention—a characteristic which links this Symbolist work with the emerging twentieth-century avant-garde, from the Dadaists to John Cage and William Burroughs. Apollinaire’s Calligrammes are pictorial poems; texts which by line or profile mimic the visual appearance of their subject. These simple graphic objects serve to embody and articulate a recurrent concern of twentieth-century artistic practice: the ambiguous relationship between descriptive and representational codes.
The pictographic text or poem has a history longer than type itself, one which informs an active tradition of avant-garde practice through the twentieth century, from Apollinaireinto the present. The first Western examples are generally recognised in the work of Simmias of Rhodes from the fourth century BC. Later examples include the work of Venance Fortunatus in the sixth century, figured poems by the English seventeenth-century poets George Herbert and Robert Herrick, and Lewis Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tale or A Long Tale of 1865. Sometimes described as the first concrete poem, Carroll’s poem is a visual and linguistic joke on at least two levels: as a figured poem set to the shape of a mouse’s tail, and the pun in the title which makes use of the homophonic relationship of the two words, as in the mouse’s appendage ‘tail’, and ‘tale’ as in narrative. The homophone serves to highlight theinconsistencies of the relationship between sound and written language, presenting identical sounds that can signify two or more different meanings differentiated only in the spelling of the word. This has been the subject of recurrent visual exploration by twentieth-century artists from Kurt Schwitters to Ian Hamilton Finlay and Tom Phillips.
In writing about the Calligrammes, Stefan Themersonsaid:
“Images, pictures, words.
They all represent something. But.
Do they need to/
Is it an awful crime if they/
Resemble the thing they represent?”
Themerson deftly brings together two areas of debate: the expectation of ‘representation’ in art, and the question of resemblance in the visual form of the poem.
Previously seen as merely a visual conceit, word game or device, the medium of thefigured poem was introduced into the twentieth-century avant-garde in the Calligrammes. Themerson has said that Apollinairewas “perhaps the first poet who succeeded in replacing some of the sound qualities of a sign by its visual qualities”.
Adopting Bertrand Russell’s use of the term ‘sign’, from An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) Themerson goes on to say:
“Russell states that: Signs depend as a rule upon habits learnt by experience. A is a sign of B if it promotes behaviour that B would promote, but that has no appropriateness to A alone.. …language is a species of the genus sign.
Language is one species of the genus sign and
Pictorial representations are another species of the same genus
These two species can be wedded to one another.
They can be wedded either politely and conformably
(as when an illustration is wedded to a text or a caption to a
drawing)
or they can start an illicit liaison,
so intimately integrated
that one doesn’t know any more
who is the bride and who is the bridegroom”
To give a text a pictorial form reveals complex contradictions between visual representation and linguistic description, and reminds us that language is a fragile and illogical construct, bound to its subject by cultural compact alone. While we take for granted the equivalence between the word and its subject, they are not linked by any actual resemblance, but only by the shared perception of meaning inherent in language. For the Futurists, typographic form was less an extension of the expressive capacity of words than a tool for attacking language itself. In the work of the movement’s founder Filippo Tommasso Marinetti, disrupting the linear order of the written word was a metaphor for a larger and more radical agenda: thewholesale overthrow of accepted cultural and political norms and conventions. With the declared aim of destroying tradition, his work and that of fellow Futurists including Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Fortunato Depero and Umberto Boccioni celebrated what they saw to be the destructive energy of the machine age and proposed a graphic language in which visual and linguistic values would be combined, and language liberated from the constraints of linear syntax: parole in libertà. (Words in freedom). As a war correspondent for a French newspaper, Marinetti witnessed first-hand the events of the Italo-Turkish war, and his poem Zang Tumb Tuum was designed to reflect in typographic form the sights and sounds of his experience of the siege of Adrianopolis in Tripoli. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published in 1909 on the front page of Le Figaro. This use of the newspaper page was as significant as the inflammatory language of its content, signalling a new relationship between artistic practice and the mass media. This strategy marked a break from the rarefied contexts in which art and design ideologies had previously been expressed, contrasting radically with the values of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Whereas Morris had developed a design philosophy articulated through hand production, Marinetti’s medium – the newspaper – was an industrially produced and ephemeral artefact, and the manifesto was a political statement utilising popular media and graphic form.
The printed word had become emblematic of modernity, progress and the machine age through the late nineteenth century, as developments in print technology had answered the needs of an emerging consumer society in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The industrialisation of print enabled the development of both a popular press and a graphic culture of advertising and promotion. Newspapers, playbills, advertising and mass market newspapers became a significant feature of the urban landscape. The introduction of fragments of newspaper and other printed material into the still-life canvasses of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris became a key characteristic of Synthetic Cubism. Their presence within a canvas was provocative at multiple levels. The papier collé introduced contemporary subject matter, the ephemera of an industrial age, against the conventions of the still life genre. Introducing an essentially two-dimensional form into the illusionistic space of the canvas, the collage fragment creates a deliberate rupture in the accepted distinctions between two opposed modes of representation, exposing the fragile convention by which we interpret two- dimensional marks as representing three-dimensional space. Graphic ‘perspective’ is revealed as a relative notion to be manipulated and reconfigured; a cultural construct rather than a perceptual fact. The introduction of printed language served as a device to open up this question through the argumentative relationship of word and image within the canvas. As an important critical writer on Cubism, Apollinaire was to recognise the significance of these papiers collées in his book Cubist Painters.(1913) and to make significant distinctions between the different sub-genres within the movement. Advertisements and billboards function as a signifier of modernity and the machine age across early twentieth-century painting. The words within the cityscapes of Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay reflect the increasing presence of the printed word in the urban environment and a developing culture of advertising and publicity. These elements were in turn to play a crucial role in the search for a graphic language to express the modern condition of the USA, seen in the work of painters including Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth and John Marin.
The introduction of ephemeral or banal material is not only a reflection of the changing urban environment but an implied attack upon the orthodoxies of traditional art media and subject matter. These were defining preoccupations in the work of Marcel Duchamp, expressed most controversially in his Fountain 1917,in which a urinal is given the title ‘Fountain’ and the signature of a fictitious artist. Duchamp’s strategy proposes a significant shift in the basis of cultural value; a move away from a concern with the representation of recognised subjects, through recognised skills, and towards an art of appropriation and recontextualisation—values which were to inform much of the development of late-twentieth century art.
The avant-garde in the inter-war period is characterised by cross-disciplinary activity. Visual artists such as Picabia and Duchamp were as much poets as painters. Writers including Wyndham Lewis and Marinetti became increasingly involved in visual practice as artists and typographers. The Dada movement, originating in Zurich In 1916 underTristan Tzara was based in radical literary or dramatic activity, developing anarchic performance and intervention as a means to the disruption of order and convention of literary practice. The later Berlin Dada founded by Huelsenbeck In 1918 included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield and others. More aggressively political than its Zurich forebear, theBerlin Dadaists were also to develop the visual manifestations of Dada activity through photomontage, found objects and typography.
Apollinaire was to originate the term ‘Surrealist’, which denoted as much a literary or theoretical movement as a specifically visual one. The Surrealist principles of ‘psychic automatism’–the term used by Andre Breton to define surrealism through the practice of automatic writing and drawing – and the provocative juxtaposition of symbolic images were to remain potent devices across visual practice through the century. Surrealism attempted to disrupt rational logic through unexpected relationships between word and image, representation and actuality, as a means to a non-linear, dreamlike perception, exposing the contradictions and paradoxes of linear thought and linguistic order. In René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, 1928–1929, the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” expose the limits of language, and establish the autonomy of the image itself. The pipe is an image, and Magritte demonstrates that not only is the canvas not a pipe, but the word ‘pipe’ is not a pipe either. In writing about Apollinaire’s calligrams, Themerson posed questions which test the limits of equivalence between the word and its subject:
“How much deity in a holy picture?
How much table in a table?
A table has four legs
A ‘table’ has five letters”
In these examples we see a convergence of practice which was to continue through the twentieth century. Poets like Apollinaire incorporated visual form into the practice of writing, while visual designers like Theo van Doesburg and Fortunato Depero developed a typography based in an experimental engagement with language. While Apollinaire’s
calligrams explore the space between the domains of visual representation and linguistic description, the visual artists of De Stijl, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism would explore the same interstitial territory using different tools.
The use of typographic materials for visual and representational means was a strategy common to the work of El Lissitzky and Vladimir Mayakowsky, and to that of the Dutch artist-printer HN Werkman. El Lissitzky’s collaboration with Mayakowsky, Dlia Golosa 1923) variously translated as ‘For Reading Aloud’ or ‘For the Voice’ ,comprised a series of images made entirely from typographic elements—using the component parts of language for figurative description. The experimental letterpress work of HN Werkman also used pre-existing industrial forms—the letters of his own printing works—to create representational or figurative compositions. Werkman’s prints made using letterpress type were describedby him as ‘Druksels’; there were also ‘Tiksels’, visual poems made using the typewriter, a method which can be related back to Apollinaire but which also anticipates the sound poems and concrete poetry of the 1960s. In each of these instances the components of the type-case are used as a figurative palette rather than a descriptive medium, testing and refiguring the idea of the ‘sign’. A parallel tendency can be read within twentieth-century abstract painting, in the incorporation of autographic gesture—forms and marks which evoke or resemble the actions of writing without forming readable words—a lineage which can be drawn through Surrealist automatism, the calligraphic abstraction of Mark Tobey and the gestural work of Cy Twombly. Jean-Paul Sartre said of the painter Paul Klee: “It was both his greatness and error to wantto paint a picture at once object and sign.” The repositioning of typographic signs was to be explored and developed in the work of Kurt Schwitters, and can be seen emerging in his collaboration with Van Doesburg and Kate Steinitz in the 1925 children’s book Die Scheuche (The Scarecrow) Schwitters’ work prefigures many subsequent developments in the use of text in art. His collages and assemblages—the ‘Merz’ pictures—re-evaluate art through the use of non-art materials, a development with links both to Cubist collage and the recontextualisation of banal objects, such as in Duchamp’s urinal. Schwitters’ practice crossed the traditional boundaries of fine art and applied graphics. As a dynamic and innovative typographer with links to De Stijl and the Bauhaus, he published a Merz journal that appeared irregularly from 1923–1932, and founded what was to become a successful advertising agency in 1924. His work also encompassed environments and architectural installations: in the period 1923–1936 he worked on the Merzbau, a sculptural project originally titled the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, which eventually spread to eight rooms of his house in Hanover. In addition to major developments in collage, his radical experiments in abstract drama and poetry, cabaret, typography, music, photography and architecture, anticipate the concept of multimedia or cross-media practice. Schwitters was allied with many aspects of the European avant-garde, including De Stijl, the Bauhaus and Constructivism, and is most commonly associated with the early phases of the Dada movement. His relationship to the Dadaists was, however, an ambiguous and troubled one, characterised by the fact that while much Dada output was deliberately temporal or destructive, Schwitters’ work refigures and extends an object-based practice rather than dismissing the art object entirely. In the inevitable rift between Schwitters and the Dadaists, Richard Huelsenbeck referred to Schwitters’ work as ‘Biedermeier Dada’—dismissing as conventional and bourgeois his concern for the creation of permanent art-objects. El Lizzitsky’s collaboration on issue 8–9 of Schwitters’ journal Merz in 1924 promised an alliance of Constructivist and Dadaist ideas, but this also remained unresolved, confirming Schwitters’ work as essentially apolitical and outside the scope of any single defining manifesto or ideology. His work was satirical, absurdist and anti-social rather than analytical; set against conformity, expressionism and sentiment rather than political order. Developing a working aesthetic across differing areas of experimental practice including typography, collage and performance, Schwitters took the extended art-school party of Dada and developed out of that deliberately ephemeral and auto-destructive movement an austere and rigorous personal practice that anticipated and stimulated several major strands of post-war artistic experiment. It included performance pieces and poems which take the form of graphic scores, exploring ambiguities in the relationship of sound to written language and the tension between name and object. This was a contradiction fundamental to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and the discipline of structural linguistics which developed out of Saussure’s work during the interwar years. In Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton’s A Natural History of Typography(1994) the authors note that Saussure “destroyed the ordinary assumption that language exists to represent ideas”.
“For Saussure, the most troublesome feature of the linguistic sign was its arbitrariness: there is no resemblance between a sound such as ‘horse’ and the concept of ‘domesticated quadruped’. No natural link binds the material, phonic aspect of the sign (the signifier) to the mental concept (the signified). Only a social agreement appears to hold the two sides together.”Schwitters’ relationship to the printed word is an antagonistic one characterised by recontextualisation and invention, using found texts and wordless sounds to reflect the quirks and anomalies of accepted constructs, to satirise in turn the faith we place in name, sign and the linear logic of linguistic syntax. His poems and collages reflect a playful and complex response to the contradictions of language; the ambiguous relationships between sound and word, sign and object, materiality and description.
Schwitters’ work reflects two key preoccupations of the pre-war avant-garde: the interrogation and systematic disruption of language, and the recontextualisation of banal materials. These in turn open up crucial questions over the status of the art object, and the nature of the relationship between description and external reality. As we have seen, early avant-garde activity was characterised by cross-disciplinary practices and the dissolution of boundaries between forms and senses; a concern for the visual expression of sound-values and the disruption of formal order within both written and visual domains.
The representation of sound formed an important narrative in the avant-garde typography of the twentieth century. Schwitters’ work highlights the fact that spoken language is made of sound, yet the relationship of speech to written
language is ambiguous and inconsistent. These inconsistencies have prompted attempts at orthographic reform and alternative typographic alphabets—including Schwitters’ own phonetic alphabet, the Systemschrift—and have also prompted a continuum of sound-based works across literary and visual practice. Sound is evoked as the expression of violent transformation in the work of Marinetti, and the vocabularies of visual sound poetry were developed further in the work of Theo van Doesburg, Paul van Ostaijen and HN Werkman. In each case typography is rendered abstract by its revised function in representing sound values rather than words, and becomes an instrument for exploring the ambiguous relationship between sound and language. Schwitters developed this line of enquiry into sound performances, and into poems that were the visual and phonetic representations of wordless sound. In Wand (1922) the repetition of a single word over 12 lines opens up a trance or mantra-like abstraction of language. In the Usonate, composed between 1923–1932, he created a work that functioned simultaneously as poem, performance and typographic score, presenting sound as autonomous fact rather than code or equivalence; as presentation rather than representation. Schwitters died in relative obscurity in 1948 and while his significance as a visual artist was only partially recognised, he had a major influence upon experimental writing and linguistic experimentation. His example was crucial to the emergence of many ‘underground’ art movements of the 1960s, and in particular the development of concrete poetry, as seen in the work of Bob Cobbing, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Ian Hamilton Finlay in the UK, and Emmett Williams in the USA. Houédard described the movement in these terms: “Concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as its structural agent. A printed concrete poem is ambiguously both typographic-poetry and poetic-typography—not just a poem in this layout, but a poem that is its own type arrangement.” This reflects both the opposing qualities Sartre attributes to Klee and the complex ‘liaison’ which Themerson proposes between the two species of signs. Much cross-disciplinary practice in the post-war underground developed from literary beginnings towards visual outcomes, a tendency exemplifiedby the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Originally working in the medium of poetry and fiction, Finlay’s work from the late-1960s onwards took on increasingly sculptural and environmental form, culminating in his sculpture garden, Little Sparta, in Scotland.
Schwitters’s experiments prefigure the role of sound and performance in the avant-garde after the Second World War and the emerging concrete poetry movement, most notably in the work of sound poet Henri Chopin in France and the intermedia artist Dick Higgins in the USA.
In his Manchester Poem from the late 1960s the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri wrote: “Kurt Schwitters smiles as he picks up the two pink bus tickets we have just thrown away.” Schwitters had been dead for almost 20 years, but his imagined presence in Henri’s Manchester reflects his continued significance in the cultural landscape. The impact of his work was probably more profoundly felt among writers than visual artists; in the section “On being a painter and a poet” in his Notes on Painting and Poetry(1968) Henri identifies the importance of Schwitters’s ‘Merz’ as encompassing a spectrum of activities including poetry and performance. He relates this to the work of contemporary ‘intermedia’ artists including Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow and LaMonte Young, artists working across multiple disciplines whom he describes as “in a direct line of descent from the Dada/Surrealist tradition”. Young, Higgins and Morris were key members of the Fluxus movement, centred around George Maciunas, which was sometimes described as ‘neo-Dadaist’ and was characterised by ephemeral, confrontational productions and activities, occupying a playful intermediate space between visual art, performance and publication. The activities of the Fluxus artists popularised the term ‘conceptual’ art, which was to consolidate the principle of art as idea, exemplified in the ‘Statements’ of Sol le Witt. The elevation of ‘concept’ continues the cultural shift initiated by Duchamp, positioning the cultural value of art not in the activity of making but in the idea; a point underlined by his use of ‘readymades’, the recontextualisation of familiar objects and the progressive distancing of the artist from artistic production.
Contemporary with the Fluxus movement were the ‘cut-up’ experiments, scrapbooks and collages created by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs in the late-1950s and 1960s. A writer whose work was characterised by a profound distrust of language, Burroughs employed disruptive visual strategies of collage and ‘cut-up’, creating texts by the random interpolation of multiple sources to disrupt or reconfigure the author’s original narrative or commentary. Cut-ups were a device to counter the confines of syntax, emblematic for him of authority and repression. Reflecting the critical interrogation of language also proposed by Saussure, Burroughs’ work developed the idea of language as a control system. Questioning the assumption that language functions as a neutral instrument for the communication of thought, he took the view that thought and its expression are mediated and therefore compromised by the strictures of language. Rather than being a medium for the expression of ideas, Burroughs argued that language constrains and directs thought into linear routes and conventions determined by the condition of language itself. For Burroughs, language was “a virus” , an oppressive form, predisposed towards linear thinking and either/or logic. By contrast, Burroughs argued for a simultaneous, fluid and non-linear model of experience. The expression of these ideas took multiple forms, often through collaboration with other writers and artists. In Burroughs’ scrapbooks with Brion Gysin the principle of collage is applied simultaneously to both images and texts. The Ticket that Exploded is a novel entirely composed from cut-ups: Nova Express includes cut-up text fragments fromsources including Shakespeare, Rimbaud and Joyce. Robert Sobieszek has said: “ “The liberation he proposes is a total unshackling from all authority; the tyranny of governmental and social constrictions, the limiting controls of language and logic, and even the evolutionary constraints of gravity and time.” The pluralism and inclusiveness of Burroughs’s approach to his materials, appropriated from across both high culture and popular or ephemeral sources, is characteristically postmodern, countering the assumptions of linear progression associated with Modernist thinking. In Burroughs’s work, chance and random operations are used as a focused and incisive device against the tyranny of reason. While his attacks on the restrictions of language paralleled contemporary developments in critical theory, his use of random processes can be related back to Mallarmé, while his use of ephemeral sources and found language has clear precedent in Pound and Eliot. Burroughs’s work has been particularly influential within the apparently distinct areas of film and music. His deliberate disruption of the linear structure of language is echoed in the editing methods of film makers including Anthony Balch and Nicholas Roeg, as well as in the work of writers like Jeff Nuttall and multimedia artists including Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. Eno’s work as a music producer exemplifies the extent to which Burroughs’s principles of random intervention and cut-up have permeated the production of music in the era of digital audio technology.
It has been a characteristic of twentieth-century art to examine and interrogate its own methods and representational codes, and language has been used as both an instrument and exemplar of this process. Painters have used language to break open codes of pictorial representation, and poets have developed the visual form of their work to explore relationships between language and external reality—positing the text as a map of sound, a diagram of rhythmic and sonic structure. In some significant instances, language itself has become the subject matter of visual art. Placing words within pictorial space immediately creates a rift in cultural codes. David Hockney described the baffled reaction of his Royal College of Art tutors to the introduction of words into his early paintings. Larry Rivers’s French vocabulary Lesson, (1961), articulates the tensions and contradictions between naming and visual description, while his use of the stencilled letter (also seen in the work of Jim Dine and Jasper Johns) prefigured the finely articulated dialogue between word and image in the work of Tom Phillips. Exposing the workings of artifice within art and design has been a key preoccupation of twentieth-century creative exploration. Externalising hidden mechanisms and structures within the finished work is a defining feature of post-modern practice.Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Pompidou Centre reversed architectural convention by placing the utilitarian service ducts and other features on the outside, substituting for the traditional skeletal principles of architecture an exoskeleton, designed to free up uninterrupted spans within. The radical Antwerp fashion designers Martin Margiela and the Antwerp Six group exposed the artifices of fashion production by turning seams outwards and making a deliberate statement of the hidden underside of the garment. Barney Bubbles’s record sleeve for Elvis Costello’s Accidents will Happen (1979) was deliberately printed inside out, exposing the printers’ register marks and concealing the graphics on the inside. These diverse examples share a common deconstructive intent: acknowledging and incorporating their own artifice into their visible form. This exposure of artifice has been enabled by the dialogues between art and language, a dynamic which can be traced back to Braque and Picasso. Tensions between image and word, description and representation, have informed and redefined the practice of visual art throughout the twentieth century. The early decades of the century saw the emergence of poetry concerned with graphic form, as Modernist poets explored the capacity of a poem’s visual structure to denote auditory and performative values. Concurrent with this, visual artists incorporated textual material into visual form. Both painting and poetry appropriated public language; reported speech and printed ephemera are interposed into the poems of Eliot and Pound, and the canvasses of Braque and Schwitters.
As communications media converge in the transition from a reading culture into an image-driven one, the dialogues become progressively more complex, the ambiguities more illuminating. As definitions of the domain of ‘art’ expand to engage with a developing range of public languages, the integration of word, sign and representation, continues to provoke critical debate and energise the dynamics of visual practice.