CHRIS FREMANTLE

What art have I seen?

Posted in Exhibitions by chrisfremantle on April 26, 2013

Schwitters in Britain at the Tate Britain.

Schwitters after Duchamp yesterday evoked a further set of relationships.  Fascinating to see these two masters of the 20th Century, one sometimes derided and the other not well known.  The Duchamp exhibition, well described here, is explicitly about influence.  The Schwitters exhibition is a more traditional historical narrative shaped by geography and war.  It has two contemporary responses Laure Prouvost and Adam Chodzko attached at the end.  There are also interesting similarities in the exhibition design, though the Barbican is perhaps more compelling.

Peter McCaughey reminded me, Schwitters’ interest was achieving the smallest, shortest, gap between idea and realisation (“Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork” Merz Painting, 1919 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Schwitters).  What is the relationship between Schwitters and Latham?  One second drawings?

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