Night Waves - Kurt Schwitters

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2013

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the Tate Britain opens a new exhibition of the work of Kurt Schwitters, art critic Charlotte Mullins joins Matthew Sweet to review and to reassess the oeuvre of the German painter and sculptor. Dr Rupa Huq discusses her new book On The Edge, in which she argues that the English suburb has transformed from a paradise to a pressure cooker. As gender has been a topic for national debate recently, Julie Bindel, Jane Fae and Lynne Segal debate the concept of gender as a social category. And Lara Feigel discusses her new book The Love Charm of Bombs, a wartime biography of five writers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds.
0:32.1	This is a download from the BBC. For more information and our terms of use, go to BBC.com.ukuk slash radio three.
0:40.6	It's all kicking off on nightwaves tonight.
0:57.0	The Trump is a message to stop. The Trumpton riots and Trempton riots by half-mobile. The Trumpton riots by Half-Biscuit, an event that of course meant an awful lot of work for Chippy Minton.
1:04.9	Later, we'll discuss how the 2011 riots have changed our views of the British suburbs.
1:10.6	We'll also ask whether gender is a
1:12.7	cultural fiction and where that might leave those of us who have crossed its borders. And we'll
1:17.6	discover how a generation of British writers were strangely grateful to the Luftwaffe for improving
1:23.3	their writing and intensifying their romantic lives. But first, how did one of the great
1:28.6	figures of European Dadaism come to die in Kendall, where the mint cake comes from? The answer
1:34.6	lies in the unfriendly reviews he received in the mid-1930s from the Nazis, who regarded his
1:40.4	work as degenerate and let it be known that they were keen to interview him about it.
1:45.0	You can see why his technique offended them. It is extravagantly impure. It embraces all conceivable
1:51.2	materials. Cotton wool, boxes of licorice all sorts, bus tickets. A substantial Schwitter's show
1:57.8	opens this week at Tate Britain, dealing with this late period work,
2:02.3	made in exile during the war and its aftermath. Charlotte Mullins, the editor of Art Quarterly,
2:07.7	went to see it. Charlotte, Schwitters had a name for this approach to art. Metz. Is this the key
2:12.9	to understanding his art? Well, it came up very early on in his life.
2:21.5	Mertz was a part of a word from Comer's and Private Bank.
2:25.8	So he took a fragment of a word and decided to create a whole life around it.
	...

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