ABSTRACT
What is the difference between a medieval reliquary and a collage by Kurt Schwitters? There is no difference, you might reply, because the two things cannot even be compared to each other. The reliquary is a religious object displayed in a clerical context, a collage by Schwitters is a work of art clearly belonging to the twentieth century. What the two do have in common is not obvious at first sight. They share a strategy of representation. The reliquary uses the remains of a human body and transforms it into a holy object, the collage uses debris and makes art from it by simply placing it in another ‘framed’ context. To represent by using material as a self-referent signifier is the method of choice in both cases. I am convinced that this link is more than coincidence. It corresponds to the ruptures and discontinuities of the historical development from material to spatial representation. The question we have to ask is not only what is represented but more importantly how it is done. It is my thesis that the First World War was crucial in reintroducing the idea of representation by material into so-called high-art. ‘Things’ were seen in a different light after and through the war experience in the trenches. The emergence of a new aesthetics of material in the post-war art of Dadaism, the rise of the collage as the new artistic technique, and the experiments of Max Ernst with frottage, are intimately linked to what happened during these four years of unparalleled destruction. I would further state that the category of objects commonly known as ‘trench art’ (as defined by Saunders 2000, 2003) played an important role in the ascendancy of material. My attempt to explain the conditions, experiences and ruptures that lead to the rise of a principle will be the content of the following pages.
