Lessons from Schwitters: Obsession and Patience

I was recently rejected from the tiny, and hence necessarily selective, visual arts program at my university.  I met with the director afterward, and I remember one question from our conversation particularly vividly.  He asked me how I felt about being rejected so soon after deciding to pursue art seriously.  My response: “It would be really easy for me to give up right now, but I’m not going to.”

Like many people, and I find this especially true of young artists and writers, I often struggle with doubt.  I find myself doubting whether I am talented enough, determined enough, connected enough, or creative enough to succeed in a field so competitive that it is famously starving and success in it is commonly understood to be fantasy.  Rejection is always difficult to take, but it is especially difficult to ignore when accompanied by such doubt.

I couldn’t really say why I wasn’t going to give up this time, I wasn’t so sure why myself.  After reading a wonderful article about choosing graphic design over law school, conversing with some writers both in person and by text, and carefully chewing on every epigraph at the exhibit Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, I have developed a much clearer understanding of what it means to devote one’s life to art.

My friend Allen Williams says: “Poetry is an obsession.”  My secret graphic design crush says: “Design is not just a hobby or a vocation. It is an obsession. It is my addiction.”  And that is just the thing.  Whether poet or painter, pianist or photographer, our art is our obsession.  It is what we do because nothing else is quite as fulfilling.  For his part, Schwitters speaks his obsession through Merzbau.

Schwitters’ crowning achievement, Merzbau was at once studio, venue for performances or soirées, a full-featured living space replete with guest room and study, his parents’ home (the home he lived in as a boy), and a walk-in sculpture, a concrete extension of Schwitters’ mind where his thoughts grew out of the walls as assemblages of plaster and wood.  Merzbau is the most incredible manifestation of the artist’s hunger I’ve ever encountered.  The humble, single-roomed reconstruction on display at the Princeton University Art Museum is disappointing in its simplicity (the intricate abstract sculptures that hid in niches along the walls of the original Merzbau could not be reconstructed from the few photographs that exist to record it, so they are represented by blown up photographs), but it is enough to imply just how incredible Merzbau once was.

From what I gather from the exhibit and his chronology, Schwitters did not get there without a great deal of doggedness.  When he first began to receive international attention after the 1919 publication of his satirical love poem, “An Anna Blume“, Berlin Dadaists responded with typical hipster rejection, saying that it was too sentimental.  This was not the first time that he’d experienced such dissuasion, nor would it be the last.  When he applied to the Berlin Academy in his early 20s after 3 years of art school at the School of Applied Art in Hanover and the Royal Saxon Academy of Art in Dresden, he was rejected as “untalented”.  When he asked to join Berlin Dada in early 1919, he was rejected for being too involved with Expressionism and too romantic.  When he asked Bauhaus for permission to recite his poems there in 1921, he was again refused.  Repeatedly, beginning in 1933, the Nazi party would publicly vilify Schwitters in exhibitions of “degenerate art”, driving Schwitters out of Germany and into exile in 1937.

Somehow, though, whether because Schwitters had absolute confidence in his talent, because he had no desire to do anything but art, or because he was able to afford not getting paid for what he did as the only son of a relatively well-off couple (at least before leaving his personal affects behind when he fled the Nazis), he continued to entirely devote his life to his art until the very end, although admittedly his art toned down to a more representational and less avante-garde variety during he aged in Norway.  I, for one, am inclined to believe that Schwitters persisted because he was totally obsessed.

Although Schwitters produced his first pictures at 18 and subsequently had his fair share of time in art school, it took him a while to truly come into his own as an artist.  Whereas Frank Stella was producing paintings that shifted the boundaries of contemporary art within 18 months of his graduation from Princeton University, Schwitters was already a father, married and 31 when he first alighted on the idea that would define him as an artist for the rest of his career.  It was in the winter of 1918-1919 when, inspired by his newfound friend the Dada collagist Hans Arp (also known as Jean Arp), Schwitters produced his very first collages, and in one of those first pieces he discovered Merz.  Merz became a term for his art and a defining philosophy for all his creative endeavors, whether literary, musical, or visual.  He did not begin work on Merzbau until his late thirties.  Almost all of Schwitters work that can be found in museums today was produced in his middle ages.

So some artists are child prodigies, violin virtuosos by the age of twelve or publishing novels before hitting twenty, and I don’t mean to discount their talent.  Mozart was no less phenomenal a composer for discovering his genius so young.  However, for most of us, finding the key to our creativity takes a long time.  As my poetry professor told our class, “poet years are like the opposite of dog years… 40 years is young.”

Like Schwitters, it may take us until our middle ages and our first children before we find our great spark, but as was the case for him, we don’t become artists without first creating art.  Schwitters discovered Merz through the process of actively making art and scoping out new ideas surrounding art.  In the words of Paul Muldoon: “You may think this is something you’re going to do when you grow up. Incorrect. This is it. Do it now, please. Don’t postpone it.  … Try to do things that may fall flat.  You need to be willing to fail. If you don’t take those risks, nothing interesting is going to happen.” [quotation taken from here]  We do as Muldoon suggests because we must; we find our obsession, and though it may take us a decade, or even decades, to receive outward validation, the only thing we can do is to keep creating, keep making mistakes, keep facing rejection, and keep trying again.

Notes:

• I don’t claim that 30 is old!  Only that it’s easy when you’re 20 to think that it’s either now or never, when really it could take 5, 10, or 20 years of hard work and countless rejections before things start to look up.
• I also don’t claim to really know Schwitters.  The Schwitters featured in this essay is equal parts fact and the fictive twist of perception.  Get to know him yourself at the Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage exhibit at Princeton University Art Museum until June 26, or via the Merzbook.
• In 1943, Merzbau was destroyed by Allied bombs years after Schwitters had already left Germany.  Even so, Schwitters kept creating art.  He would attempt the construction of other Merzbaus in London and Norway, but by then he was tired from exile, internment, eventually a stroke.  He died shortly after receiving a fellowship from MoMA that would have offered that opportunity.   The Merzbau in Lysaker burned down 3 years after his death.