This exhibition brings together the ghosts of the past and the future in the form of an indeterminable contemporaneity in Ambleside for exiled artist Kurt Schwitters. The art work is about constructing hybridized costume which will, both in terms of sartorial style and political imagery, trace Schwitters’ escape from Nazi Germany and occupied Norway to the Lake District. The historical background of Schwitters’ residence in Ambelside will also motivate references to other refugees in the area with similar personal histories (e.g. the 300 children who came from Auschwitz to Ambleside in 1945). The work traces the hostile background that Schwitters and others carried with them during the time of the war; these traces end up in our own time with its particular and yet comparable circumstances of asylum, right-wing extremism, and marginalized art. For FRED 08 the artist Amanda Newall attempts to embody the resulting personal and public turmoil for Kurt Schwitters from a contemporary perspective in a series of costumes produced for the Armitt Museum.
For Kurt Schwitters and other war refugees, Ambleside was a place of cultural displacement and a drastic convergence of references. ‘Is there something here you would like to remember?’ approaches the site as a confluence of the different events and identities. This is done by exploring the diachronic and spatially hybridised possibilities of costume. The costume(s) will thus be constructed to negotiate modality and fact, imagined and lived histories, into a contemporary form for site-specific viewing.
Living in exile during the war Kurt Schwitters attempted to create a work in his Merz barn outside Ambleside that never became completed due to his untimely death. In connection to this effort, the costume work will also draw attention to what artists meant to Ambleside during Schwitters’ time and what artists mean to the area now. A paradoxical outcome of the theme of marginalization is the fact that Kurt Schwitters, a significant figure in the German art world, was cast aside in the context of English art.
The costume will consequently juxtapose influences such as (a) Schwitters’ avant-garde aesthetics, as, for instance, collage techniques; (b) the historical context of Nazi Germany, also with reference to other refugees in the Lake District; (c) the sanctuary of Ambleside and its surroundings; and (d) topical inclinations allusions toward cognate belligerent or intolerant circumstances. Ultimately the work will address ideas of nationalism verses individualism, within a global sense of identity.
The costume will allude to different people’s clothing relating to ideas of extended sites. Joseph Bueys, for instance, wore a hunting style utility over jacket that he became famous for. Walter Benjamin wore more formal types of clothing, just like Schwitters used to. However at the time he lived in Amleside, people described Schwitters as shabby in his overcoat and beret.
The costumes will, moreover, be indicative of war and incorporate symbols that associate national identities with nationalist or other power-laden symbols. These references will be treated as raw material for re-contextualisation re-examination and no longer as fact. Rather the symbols and other signs will be reascribed meaning within a new and critical context. Some of the symbols and clothes have been reinvested with interest through various subcultures and disturbing racist realities, such as skinhead culture.
The work combines old with new features in such a way that neither one is independent of the other. This rearrangement is meant to inculcate how we experience space and history. The material and symbolic application will question our relationship with contemporary notions of site as well as question ideas of the past. The predicament of evolving into contemporary conditions will come into question. What follows is thus an embodying process of a global world of coordinates that moves and collides in quite unexpected ways. |
