The spirit of Kurt Schwitters looms large over MERZ, the exhibition and artists’ residency space housed in a former lemonade factory and surrounding outhouses in the village of Sanquhar, Dumfries and Galloway. Founded by Dave Rushton in 2009, MERZ takes Schwitters’ collagist approach drawn from his cutting up the German word, ‘Kommerz’ (commerce) to create something new.
The notions of ‘Reconstruction and Fabrication’ that are at the heart of MERZ are best exemplified by Schwitters’ Merzbau (Merzhouse), whereby several rooms of his family home were transformed utilising assorted detritus. Schwitters went on to create similar constructions in Lysaker, near Oslo, then in Cumbria, where he was exiled after fleeing Nazi Germany prior to his death in 1948.
Rushton learnt about Schwitters’ story while visiting Cumbria, and has applied his inspiration’s aesthetic to his own MERZ through an ongoing series of residencies that culminate in exhibitions by resident artists in the gallery or former abattoir now repurposed as the Museum of Model Art. Artists document their process on film throughout, with the results shown on the MERZ website.
“The idea of our current collage residency,” says Rushton, “is that you look into the local folklore, history, tradition, industry, culture, nature, and make collages around that, exploring the locality, and revitalising its history by recreating it, reinventing it or repurposing it in the same way that Kurt might take an old bus ticket and turn it into something else. So we look at what is overlooked or forgotten, irrelevant, discarded, to be repurposed.”
MERZ’s debt to Schwitters is made clear in Untitled (2022), a stop-motion animated film directed by Rushton, and which premieres this weekend as part of an event dubbed by MERZ artist Ric Kasini Kadour as the Schwitters Army Reunion. Over the film’s ten-minute duration, Schwitters speculates on his own and fellow artist Hannah Höch‘s lives while he is exiled in Cumbria, reimagining memories shared between them.
“We were wrestling with trying to find a way of representing parts of Kurt Schwitters life which don't get written about,” says Rushton, “particularly his relationship with women and imagined conflicts about childcare when he was trying to build his sculptures. There were all these tensions that we imagined must have existed in his life, especially when he was in poor health.
“We refracted these thoughts through what might have happened if he'd picked up a movie camera second-hand in Ambleside in 1946, thinking this might be what he dwelt upon and thought about. It is a conjectural film, a conscript, filling in the gaps in his life that must have existed.”
Rushton’s journey to MERZ began as a member of the British wing of conceptualist collective Art & Language before he moved into political and trade union activism and filmmaking. In the late 1970s he began the Red Star Cinema in Edinburgh, and provided print material for various political groups before founding the Institute of Local Television to explore the potential for local TV broadcasting. All films made at MERZ are now produced under the Summerhall TV banner.
Future plans for MERZ include using local clay from a former brickworks to provide a pottery centre where ceramics can be made, “bolting onto the history of the former brick works that made the bricks for the Celtic Stadium in Glasgow, but whose clay fields have been dormant for twenty years until we revive them.”
In summing up MERZ’s approach, as Rushton puts it, “I collage buildings together, taking a bit of one building, and putting it into another. So if it's got a twenty-year life left in it, then I can put it into a shed when I'm rebuilding or whatever. I'm re fabricating.”
And what, one wonders, might Schwitters make of MERZ?
“Well, I hope he would like what we’re doing,” Rushton speculates. “I'm interested in the ways in which legacy doesn't perpetuate this historical, backward looking thing to reveal and understand and look for literal truths. That, to me, is quite dry. I think Schwitters was constantly evolving, constantly changing his work, even when ill and bed-bound he'd make little collages on cigarette packets. There was always that sense of pushing forward and changing.
“I'm interested in legacy that revitalises and reinvents, and is not about fakery. It's about saying there's something that inspires you here, let's see if we can't evolve and work with it and just let it roll. I get a great kick out of artists coming to MERZ. I'm of an age now, and I had my career as a conceptual artist and a filmmaker, so I'm quite happy to just enjoy the pleasure of others finding out for themselves about what they can do.”
Untitled can be viewed at MERZ, www.merzgallery
Scottish Art news, September 2022
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