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Kurt Schwitters,
Das Sternenbild (1920)
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Schwitters's Merz art, to which this Dadaist collage belongs, is one of the most radically nihilistic artistic expressions in Modern art. Discarding all iconographical traditions, Schwitters uses random fragments of waste paper, scraps of cardboard and tin, litter and other haphazardly found objects to create a picture that in its incoherence and unrelatedness is a comment on Modern post-War existence. Short, disconnected newspaper phrases, pointless numbers, and extrapolated syllables draw our attention to the crisis of language and communication prevalent since the turn of the 20th century. In concordance with Italian Futurism, with Tzara’s linguistic iconoclasm and with Schwitters's own decomposition of language in his Ursonaten, the Merz paintings present life as a "heap of broken images" (T.S. Eliot) and decry communication as an exchange of meaningless phrases and fatuous letters. |
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