![Schwitters performing Ursonate - Marlborough Fine Art [photographer unknown]](http://images.suite101.com/1814749_com_kurt.jpg)
“In Schwitters, Apollo and Dionysus always went hand in hand - and occasionally stood on their heads.” This is Hans Richter's assessment of the multi-talented Kurt Schwitters, painter, poet, activist, sculptor, and author of Ursonate (roughly translated as “sonata in primal sounds”), a prolonged sound poem written in the 1920s and widely performed by Schwitters and by many other poets and artists since his death in 1948. Ursonate is structured very classically, like much of Schwitters' work, but its contents and meaning contest this structure utterly.
This is what Richter means by Apollo and Dionysus holding hands. It is a more extreme example of the language challenging structure of writers such as Raymond Roussel and André Breton. In order to reach the audience with utterly foreign material, the material is put into a format which is partially familiar, allowing the viewer or reader an entrance into the experience. Richter gives an account of one of Schwitters' performances which demonstrates the power of Ursonate to transcend preconceptions and deliver the audience into a broader state of awareness. Referring to the audience's conversion from mockery to admiration, Richter writes that “something had been opened up within them.”
The Structure of Ursonate
Ursonate functions in parallel and simultaneous regressions, returning to both a more primal form of communication and to the roots of the language itself. Instructions for the proper emphasis on these basic linguistic sounds are given by Schwitters in his essay, My Sonata in Primal Sounds: "the letters that are to be used are: aaaueeieuioouubdfghklmnprschchwz. The vowels are: a e i o u ei eu au a o u. When the r's are to be pronounced singly, the following orthography is suggested: RrRrRrRrRr. The same goes for SchschSchsch, or LILIU, etcetera.”
The precision of these instructions indicates that Schwitters was not merely engaging in anarchic noisemaking, a charge which was perhaps more justified in relation to some of his Dada associates. Schwitters had a definite program in mind, but its highly idiosyncratic nature made it appear senseless to the uninitiated. In fact, not only was there a plan of sorts behind the overall work, in addition many of the sounds actually had specific meanings, as in the line "De des nn nn rrrr", which originated from the word 'Dresden'.
Schwitters was not absurd in the sense of being against rationality, but rather in his transcendence of rationality, and subsequent inclusion of the concept of reason within a greater creative spectrum. Schwitters' good natured refusal to be hemmed in by reason comes through clearly in his writing: “the elements of poetry are letters, syllables, words, sentences. Poetry arises from the playing off of these elements against each other. Meaning is only essential if it is to be used as one such factor. I play off sense against nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal matter. I pity nonsense, because until now it has been so neglected in the making of art, and that's why I love it.”
Art Against Logic
This whimsical attitude, however, should not be mistaken for a lack of determination in Schwitters' art. He also writes that “the more intensively the work of art destroys rational objective logic, the greater the possibilities of artistic form.” Essentially, Schwitters saw reason as either a tool or a prison, depending on one's relationship to it. He insisted on its identity as a tool, and thus escaped its prison.
In Schwitters' work we find yet again the recurrent theme (as in the work of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein) of the work being differently interpreted by different readers or listeners. Schwitters writes that “the association of ideas cannot be unequivocal because it is dependent solely on the associative capacity of the beholder. Everyone has different experiences and remembers and associates them differently.”
Not only does this attitude undermine many of the more dogmatic theories and movements of his day, it also sets the stage for the later theory of post-modernism, with its shifting categories and absence of objective absolutes. Through the propagation of subjective methods of both making and absorbing art, Schwitters sought to maintain both the freedom of the individual and the strength and diversity of art itself. Not that these goals were primary or even conscious; it would be more accurate to describe the motivations for Schwitters' art using the words of his friend Hans Arp: “What can I do? It grows out of me like my toenails. I have to cut it off and then it grows again.”
Sources
- Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
- Schwitters, Kurt. Poems Performance Pieces Proses Plavs Poetics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
