The Babel Fiasco (Part VI: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery)

We tread toward Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (KdeE), Ariadne’s thread in hand, along the narrow corrifdor of a house in Hanover.  Not without some apprehension, we follow the art critic Rudolph Jahns: “we entered the column itself through a narrow door, which was more like a grotto… there were grottoes of various types and shapes, whose entrances were not always on the same level… I then experienced a strange enraptured feeling.  This room had a very special life of its own.  The sound of my footsteps faded away and there was absolute silence.  There was only the form of the grotto whirling around me.”

Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends or Merzbau was the life work of Kurt Schwitters, an artist of the radical avant-garde in Germany between the wars.  Kurt called it a column.

He also called it a Kathedrale.  Schwitters’ Kathedrale begins with a column – the highly mutable First Day Merz-column.

The column rises from a rectangular base it holds a myriad ‘offerings’ that reach their zenith at the death mask of his infant son, Gerd.  The base is adorned with several of Schwitters’ earlier collages, one of which is entitled The First Day Collage.  The collage is an intriguing addition, it contains several extra-textual references to religious and/or esoteric art including winged Renaissance putti and the folds of fabric from the virgin mother’s clothing in a Stefan Lochner painting, Madonna in Rose Bower (c. 1448).  The image is replete with a host of seraphim and cherubim, angles at the cloth of the Blessed Virgin.

A significant figure of the collage is a column, a visual device in the manner of a literary trope it is made up of a “…composite (columnar) form-shaft, fluted capital, and an animal bust, apparently a lions head, perched on top.”  Next to the column stands an angel who reaches out to touch the column.  It is this collage that gives us our first clear evidence of the themes that would guide the development of The Cathedral of erotic Misery.

Kathedrale… the use of the word is not incidental.  Schwitters avoids concentrating on the direct representation of the Gothic – as in the Gothic Revival of the 19thC.  Rather he seeks the underlying discourse projected by the cathedrals; he incorporates their hermeneutic content into the body of his kathedrale/column.  It is this hermeneutic streak that allows Schwitters to explore and, indeed, transubstantiate the profane into the sacred within the many layers and grottoes of the KdeE.

The Kathedrale is an attempt to apprehend the mystical underpinnings of space and form.  Elizabeth Burns Gamard, in her book on the Merzbau, sujjests that the German word Aufbau is fundamental to our understanding of the design arts in Germany during the early years of the 20thC.  Aufbau reflected the search for primary origins.  Literally, the term means “of building,” conceptually, however, the term refers to the construction, organization and structure of living systems.  We are here reminded of Hegel’s reading of the Babel Tower as being a living system where the “community was at the same time both the ain and the content of the work.”

The Dada-Constructivist Hans Richter describes how the Kathedrale pulsed with the stuff of the world, with the profane refuse of his community.  “he cut off a lock of my hair, put it in my hole.  A thick pencil, filched from Mies van der Rohe’s drawing board, lay in his cavity.  In others there was a piece of a shoelace, a half smoked cigarette, a nailparing, a piece of Doesburg’s tie, a broken pen.  There were also some odd (and more than odd) things such as a dental bridge with several teeth on it, and even a little bottle of urine bearing the donor’s name.  All these were placed in the separate holes reserved for the individual entries.  Schwitters gave us several holes each, as the spirit moved him [...] and the column grew.

The poignant memoir describes Schwitters’ friendship caves.  Much like the small prayer chapels in a Gothic cathedral the caves and grottoes are meditations on Schwitters’ friendships.  The profane object captured from an individual is transformed into a sacred object – a reliquary – like the body parts of saints.  Stored, adored, and adorned as if they contained the very essence of the individual – the ‘grotto saints.’  This is Schwitters at his alchemical best; like lead into gold or water into wine, Schwitters takes the profane and transubstantiates it into the sacred.  Thus, the grottoes become like the Porta Coeli of the Gothic Cathedral, they are like a myriad of gates into heaven, no longer singular but ever multiplying like the Hathedrale itself, for the KdeE was not staatic but emerged like a spatial palimpsest, layer on layer built upon another.  In order to transverse it one needed an Ariadne’s Threead with which to find ones’ way.  The Kathedrale/Column in this way can no longer be the ever heavenward will to eternity but becomes the labyrinth residing within the column.  The successive layers become memories of Schwitters’ attempts to negotiate a path through the chaos of his existence.  In a bid to understand this idea we turn to Gilles Deleuze and his understanding of the spontaneous line extracted by Paul Klee, a close associate of Kurt’s.  For Klee, according to Deleuze, the point is not firm but moves alsong an inflection such that one “will never be able to fix upon a certain precise surface in a body”.  Similarly the Kathedrale undermines the normative categories of measurable space and time by creating spatial and temporal dimensions that, through the intense interplay of symbology, superadjacency , and form is immeasuable.  The inflection of our line through the Kathedrale and through architecture is the pure Event of the Line but for now it is not in the world; it is the world itself, or rather it si the beginning, as Klee used to say, “a site of cosmogenesis,” “a non dimensional point” “between dimensions.”

It is this principle of the KdeE that prevents us from finding a vector through its space.  We are weightless in the heavy space of the immeasurable, we are unable to find a point of rest.  We se infinite variation – not due to the form of the KdeE but because it functions as a living system, itself a discreet fragment of the world beyond its walls.

It is in this way that we understand the prohibitive aspects of the Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  For Schwitter was protective of his Merzbau, few were allowed in and fewer still explored the layers of its deep space (six layers deep in places).  Kurt even whitewashed the windowpanes from the inside.  For Schwitters, the KdeE is both a refuge from the worl and the reflection/personification of it.

Thus schwitters acknowledges the Babel Fiasco, he begins with a column and builds a labyrinth, fighting to find a way into heaven.  There is a twofold recognition: in the first, a hope for the eternal and in the second a recognition of the worldy.

The KdeE truly becomes an erotic misery in a glimpse of the last diorama, in Schwitters’ own words:

Shiny-fissured objects set the mood.  In the middle is a couple embracing: he has no head, she no arms; between his legs he is holding a huge blank cartridge.  The big twisted around child’s head with the syphilitic eyes is warning the embracing couple to be careful.  This is disturbing, but there is reassurance in the little bottle of my own urine in which Immortelle [everlasting flowers] are suspended.

This is the Post-Babel Family, a pisture image of fear and impotence, the syphilitic child warning the lovers in the very act of a hiopeful union.  It is rare indeed that a bottle of your own urine might be thought of as a reassurance.

The Babel Fiasco Part VII: The Forbidden House.

For more on the Merzbau please read Elizabeth Burns Gamard’s book Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau The Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  This essay owes much to her excellent book.