Newcastle honours the high priest of Dada, whose previous exhibitions include the notorious show 'curated' by the Nazi Goebbels on 'degenerate art'. Alan Sykes reportsWakefield-born Helen Petts is a film-maker, a photographer and a painter who also works collaboratively with improvisational musicians.In her latest work, commissioned for the Great North Museum's Hatton Gallery, she has created a film installation with sonic back-drop which follows the high priest of Dada, Kurt Schwitters, as he fled Nazi Germany for Norway and then on again to the Lake District. Schwitters has many passionate admirers, and the Merzbarn, his only surviving 'Merz' construction, made in a barn in the Langdale Valley in the months before his death in the Lake District in 1948, is now an integral part of the Hatton Gallery, and a place of pilgrimage for Schwitters' fans.As an, at the time dangerous, addition to his cv, Schwitters was included in the Entartete Kunst ? degenerate art ? exhibition curated, if that's the right word, by Josef Goebbels in Munich in 1937. Schwitters had fled Germany a few months before the opening of the exhibition ? which also included works by Mondrian, Max Ernst, Kandinsky, Kokoshka, Chagall, Otto Dix and Klee - as his son Ernst had evaded military service, and it became convenient for both of them to leave.In Norway he mostly stayed on the small island of Hjertoya where the Schwitters Hytta still survives. Helen Petts followed him there, camping on the electricity-free island and filming the surroundings, as well as swimming in the icy fjord. It seems probable that, in creating the Merzbarn, Schwitters was, in some way, attempting to re-create the space in Norway where he was happy ? as Helen Petts puts it: "it was almost spooky how similar the landscape around the hytta is to Elterwater, and how like the Merzbarn the hytta itself isSchwitters was forced to flee the Nazis again in 1940 when they invaded Norway. He embarked on the last Allied ship to leave, arriving in Scotland with his son, daughter-in-law, one piece of sculpture and two white mice. Eventually he landed up in the Lake District, where he spent the last three years of his life, occasionally selling portraits and landscapes of local scenes to earn a living. Although depressed that Kenneth Clark, then director of the National Gallery, refused to see him, his morale was lifted in 1947 when a cheque for $1,000 arrived from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, enabling him to start work on the Merzbarn. The wall of the barn which he had partially completed, by then falling into disrepair, was gifted by its owner to Newcastle University in the 1960s, and transported over there - with considerable difficulty - in the 1960s..Helen has followed Schwitters almost obsessively for her film, camping on the island in Norway where Schwitters lived. She has also followed all of Schwitters' walking routes in the Lake District.As the Dutch art historian Rudi Fuchs has pointed out possibly the great achievement of Schwitters was that he discovered disorder as an expressive force in art. The title of the exhibition comes from the description Schwitters gave of the random process he used with the materials for his collages. Helen Petts has used the apparently haphazard images she has made for her film to create an abstract narrative of the last 10 years of Schwitters' life ? following him to his gravestone in Ambleside churchyard - forcing the viewer to concentrate on shape and form, texture and movement, tone and light, both in the film and the accompanying sound-track. Schwitters was a fan of avant garde music and composed abstract poetry using wordless vocal sounds to construct works like his Ur Sonata. Helen Petts has used experimental music and improvised sounds as the sound-track for her film, working with leading experimental musicians Phil Minton, Roger Turner, Adam Bodman and Sylvia Hallett.Helen has said: When I was invited to Hannover Jazz Week to screen some of my music films, I went to the Schwitters archive there and realised what an extraordinary artist he was and what an influence he has been on the musicians I work with who all work in free improvisation. And Schwitters was obviously a walker ? he loved the mountains. In the Hatton, the work will be shown on a large screen in the gallery next door to the Merzbarn, with six speakers immersing the viewer with the accompanying sounds.Helen Pett's Throw Them Up and Let Them Sing: Following Kurt Schwitters' escape from Nazi Germany to Norway and the Lake District is on at the Great North Museum - Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, from June 28 until 18 August (with a Merz musical evening at the Sage Music Centre in Gateshead on June 30th). It will also be displayed at the White Room at the Royal Festival Hall, London, from 31 August to 8 September and at Hall Art Gallery, Kendal from 15 September to 19 November. It has been chosen by the Huffington Post as one of the 21 Cultural Olympiad events not to miss this summer. Here's a clip from YouTube of Petts filming Roger Minton, playing percussion with paintbrushes and palette knives, while Phil Minton sings Dada.ArtLake DistrictNewcastleAlan Sykesguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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