'The Thing about PIN'

In 1946, after many years in exile, Kurt Schwitters (who had moved to Ambleside in 1945) and Raoul Hausmann (since 1944 based in Limoges) resumed contact. The pair had not corresponded in some time, and they decided to put together a small magazine; they eventually settled on the title PIN for the publication. PIN aimed to offer art and abstract poetry to a new generation. The project was initiated in the autumn of 1946, then found itself in trouble. Schwitters thought he knew just the person to publish their little magazine: E.L.T. Mesens, a Belgian-born Surrealist who had in 1938 settled in London, where he became director of the London Gallery. Mesens was not a major publisher, but he published the London Bulletin and organised exhibitions of Surrealists as well as an exhibition of Schwitters’ own work. However, Mesens did not want to publish the work, and this led to its demise. The PIN magazine did not make it to publication, but in 1962 a heavily annotated edition was published by the Gaberbocchus Press, led by Stefan Themerson, and in 1986 a second, bilingual edition was released by Anabas-Verlag. ‘The Thing about PIN ’ Cole Collins A fancy A thing of fan A right thing of phan World needs new tendencies in poeting and paintry1 These words are the opening lines to the manifesto for PIN. They not only deliver the impetus for its creation, but offer a way to read it. But how exactly are we to read it? Kurt Schwitters’ and Raoul Hausmann’s PIN is a thing of mystery and uneasiness. Its status as a ‘thing’ has as much to do with this as its failure. For me, the issue of not knowing what category, medium or form in which to neatly box PIN determines the initial slipperiness and difficulty of approaching it with any solid theoretical framework. Is it a literary magazine? Is it an experiment in typography? Is it best considered as a manuscript (despite its ‘publication’ in 1962)? Is it an art object? These questions are at the centre of this essay; however, I do not expect to even begin to answer them—for that would be another failure in the history of this small, troubling product. Instead I want to consider two points: 1) what is this ‘thing’ and to hold on to that term; and 2) how does failure fit into the equation of understanding it? Thinking things through Theories on the ‘thingness’ of things lies in Heidegger’s expression of the idea that the thing itself is not determined by the physicality of the object, and somehow the thing cC 1 ertheless material linguistic politics of translation, and a concomitant pressing sense of urgency for new forms of transnational and international communication.5 becomes a thing in spite of its purpose; that is, the concrete value is transcended and thus might be discounted as an aspect of its existence.2 Heidegger, in "The Thing” (1962), tries to introduce the notion of thingness through distance: the discussion begins with film and radio, and their transcendence of distance by transmitting news from afar to the person listening in on their radio, or sitting in the cinema watching a film. He then discusses distance as though it were absolute, distinguishing between near and far. He goes on to discuss that our means for testing this distance is by the ‘things’ that are near to us.3 He writes: Further to this, Jasia Reichardt’s ‘edition’ of PIN is problematic. Its title, PIN and the Story of PIN (1962) suggests that PIN will be the feature. Instead the long introduction of how it came to be is a narrative constructed through tracing the letters sent between Schwitters and Hausmann, and instead of really offering any answers, only complicates matters. The story suggests that it was set to fail from the beginning, and that perhaps enthusiasm does not transcend distance. Moreover, why ‘Story’ rather than ‘History’ for the title? Yes, in German, Geschichte can mean either ‘story’ or ‘history,’ but the publication was published first in English by the Gaberbocchus Press, the London-based company owned by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (Polish by birth), and so the German link seems tenuous despite both its creators’ nationalities. There is a third element to the thingness of PIN though, and it does not lie in distance or semantic categorisation of its genealogy. The authorship/editorship/creatorship of this work is ambiguous. An original mock-up of the title page, which Reichardt includes in her edition, shows Hausmann as the lead editor.6 Reichardt’s edition lists Kurt Schwitters’ name first, and then Hausmann on the front cover; on the frontispiece she lists Hausmann first, followed by Schwitters, with the addition of herself and a designer. She does not list herself as an editor, and instead she ‘introduces’ the work. The oscillation of editorial position suggests either a perception that Schwitters and Hausmann had an equal partnership, or highlights tensions between the two throughout the duration of the project. Reichardt’s introduction would attest to the latter. It is only further complicated by the inclusion of the designer, Anna Lovell. This seems to suggest that the bits of PIN we are presented with are perhaps not in their original form (hence, my earlier suggestion of giving consideration to the ‘finished’ article as a manuscript). And one must wonder if it was Lovell’s choice to include facsimiles of letters and handwriting (all of which belong to Schwitters) interspersed throughout Reichardt’s introduction; and is it deliberate that it resembles a collage? Furthermore, in 1986 Michael Erlhoff and Karl Riha published a new bilingual edition of PIN that shifts us even further from its subject. Buried in its large wedges of translated texts, commentaries and background material is a facsimile of Reichardt’s 1962 PIN book but—according to the Table of Contents—the editors don’t recognise her introduction (along with Lowell’s interpolations) as part of it and leave her factual errors and her evident polishing up of Schwitters’ original faulty English untouched and uncommented; in fact she is barely mentioned in this edition. On balance, it is an unsatisfactory and unenlightening publication that lacks both a list of illustrations and references to sources. One might justifiably ask if the editors ever consulted Schwitters’ and Hausmann’s manuscripts and correspondence What about nearness? How can we come to know its nature? Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly. We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing? Man has so far given no more thought to the thing as a thing than he has to nearness. The jug is a thing.4 There then ensues a discussion of the jug as a thing. Before thinking about the ‘thing itself ’, I want to dwell on this notion of distance. Heidegger’s use of distance here is physical, in that it relies on a measurement of space between the subject and the object, and thus perception and interpretation follow (as with the jug). If we turn to PIN, distance likewise plays a crucial role in any effort to grasp its complexities. It has a physical distance: the work is created by two artists who are physically apart, and communicate by letter; it literally traverses geographical boundaries. It is distant in language: Hausmann (Austrian) and Schwitters (German) are not using their mother tongue; much of what Hausmann writes is in French, and Schwitters is writing almost entirely in English. It is distant from its own time: it experiments largely in the old ways of Dada and Merz, movements which had largely become thought of as preSecond World War. It (the ‘original’ idea and version of PIN) is distant from its time in which it is published (but not too far!), for the same reasons it is distant from its own time; its praxis is somewhat out of synch with the early Sixties. It is also distant from readers today, and I think this distance, coupled with the above distances, has prevented us (academics and scholars) from engaging critically with PIN. Jane Goldman has identified issues relating to time and place in her unpublished essay, “Is There a Modernist Period?” (2015), in which she investigates the periodisation of modernism(s) and modernity through PIN as a way to argue against any clear periodisation. She writes: The ‘Now’ of Schwitters’ and Hausmann’s PIN is elusive and precarious not only because of the magazine’s near still birth and its tenuous hold on survival into print nearly two decades later in 1962, but also because this ‘Now’ appears first in the facing and otherwise mainly French version of the manifesto, thereby hurling its readers into the highly unstable but nev- cC 2 In my whole life I did my things alone, not working with anybody. That made them exactly as I wanted them to be. I am not saying that ‘Pin’ would be very different, but I could not change my mind if, later I would have every reason to like it. … To put it bluntly, my name will not appear anywhere in ‘Pin.’ … Take what you like from what I have contributed—you are the only boss. I shall not be taking any decisions, you alone are responsible. … I hope, you will understand and won’t mind, we are friends, but each one of us will work alone.10 (now in the Themerson archive in Warsaw), or were just spouting generalities on the basis of the 1962 introduction—which in itself, as noted above, reveals virtually nothing about the nature of the original.7 Setting aside the complexities of the 1986 edition, perhaps the most interesting way to consider Reichardt’s 1962 PIN is indeed as collage, made up of found things: letters, ideas, drawings, plans, sketches, pictures, photomontages, handwriting samples, facsimiles. The intertextuality which extends beyond mere nods to texts is not unlike the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and other Beat stars of the 1960s. Here the texts are integrated to create new and interesting combinations, and provide an experimental form of language which creates novel words and sentence structures that defy conventions and interact with the sometimes scatological (and illogical) loose plots of the stories. This is particular to the case of Burroughs, whose druginduced adventures were the basis for much of his writing. Naked Lunch (1959) and The Nova Trilogy, also referred to as The Cut-Up Trilogy (1962-64) are primary examples where the folding in and collaging of sections of text proffer interesting and absurd writing. However, in this case can Burroughs be given full credit? Or must we consider these works as collaborative efforts? After all, the product requires a reliance on pre-existing materials, appropriated and restructured. This letter comes before the manuscript was rejected by E.L.T. Mesens, when the authors were still attempting to persuade him to publish PIN. Yet, the change seems sudden, and Schwitters’ unwillingness to appear as an author/editor is odd behaviour. Reichardt posits that it is due to his illness, and he feels too weary and burdened to be troubled by editing. But what caused this enthusiasm to die so quickly? I have no answer. Perhaps Schwitters foresaw the issues that were later to come to light when the manuscript for PIN was eventually shown to E.L.T. Mesens, who (as Schwitters reported to Hausmann on 29.3.47), thought it out of touch with the times. However, what if this ‘failure’ to get PIN published, is not a failure at all? Perhaps if we consider failure as Jack Halberstam (formerly known as Judith) understands it, we might be able to consider PIN as an altogether other form. In Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam explores the correlations between queerness and failure through low-culture. She focuses her examination on animation and popular film, as well as cartoons. I should state at this point I am not trying to reconcile Hausmann and Schwitters, or PIN for that matter, with a queer culture of politics in the same way that Halberstam does; I think her understanding of academic failure to engage with low culture and low theory might offer an interesting insight into the failings of PIN as a scholarly recognised piece of work. It may come from its perceived lack of political or cultural engagement; it may stem from an anxiety surrounding the ‘originality’ of the text being called into question by the published version; it may come from its own anachronisms, and the slipperiness of dealing with these make it far more difficult to understand or to neatly categorise; it may even stem from the fact it was, in short, a failed endeavour. That it failed seems apt: Schwitters wrote to Hausmann that it would likely not be until 1950 or even 1960 that PIN would meet the printing press (Reichardt, p.17). But this seems to have been caused by Schwitters and Hausmann’s own failure—the exiled Schwitters, winning second prize in county fairs for his paintings of flowers, and Hausmann in the south of France, impoverished. Yet artists such as Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso continued to make money throughout the Forties, Fifties and Sixties until their deaths (Schwitters in one letter calls Picasso a ‘gangster’11), and perhaps the lack of commercial success should be considered here as part of their failing to publish PIN —perhaps that no one knew their name was Collaborations Don’t Work Collaborations in art are not uncommon; early twentieth century Künstlerehepaare (artist-couples) are the subject of many books and are in some cases evoked as a discussion of feminist politics (see Dorothy Rowe’s monograph on Marta Hegemann as an example).8 However, it seems very few of these collaborations are profitable (financially and personally). With the rare exceptions of Gilbert and George, and perhaps Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton, the collaborative efforts of artists never seem to be as successful (commercially or otherwise) as the individual’s output. The idea of PIN seems to have been, according to Reichardt’s introduction, conceived of by both artists.9 It also seems that each editor had his own designated role. Hausmann was working on the structure, as well as contributing his own poems; Schwitters appears to have been collecting phrases, and almost managing Hausmann’s work, editing it, proofing it, as well as contributing his own poems for the publication. Yet towards the ‘end’ of the project, in a letter sent to Hausmann, Schwitters reveals he no longer wants to be involved with PIN : Dear Hausmann! I don’t know how to tell you. I was thinking about for it long time, but now as I am lying ill in bed, it becomes more and more clear to me, that it is nonsense for me to participate in the work of anyone as a companion, even with you. cC 3 source: ‘Phantick, (from phantasia), such as are haunted with vain and illuding visions.’ (OED) ‘Phantic’ is serendipitously close to ‘antic’, etymologically related to ‘antique’ (yet meaning grotesquely distorted), and to the specialist linguistic term ‘phatic’: ‘designating, or relating to speech, utterances, etc., that serve to establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information, communicate ideas’ (OED). Phatic communion is ‘speech communication of this kind; (also) trivial or purely formal verbal contact.’ (OED) ‘Phantic’ describes phantom utterance, like a phantom limb, nevertheless serving vital social function in making and keeping human community. A ghostly present absence exceeding ‘need’ yet essential and indispensable, it harbours grotesque, antique forms. ‘Phatic’ (Branislaw Malinowski’s coinage) was first recorded in a modernist touchstone C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’ Meaning of Meaning (1923): ‘a new type of linguistic use—phatic communion […] a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words.’ (OED; Ogden and Richards, p. 478).14 reason enough for no publisher to take the task on. Thus it comes down to more than mere artistic merit, and focuses attention towards the political and economic capital involved in art. Recently, in a Sotheby’s auction, a 10” x 8” collage from 1947 (the same year PIN was conceived) fetched £122,500; a Hausmann lot sold in 2006 for 5,160 Euros, dating from 1966 (only a few years after the publication of PIN ). A copy of PIN, as it exists in the published forms by Gaberbocchus Press and AnabasVerlag, can be picked up on the market for approximately £30-60 (40-80 Euros); and yet both artists are recognised for their contributions to the early twentieth century art movements in Europe and America. The market value of the text was practically worthless in 1947 and thus no publisher would take the project on.12 If we indeed concede that ‘collaborations don’t work’, a line recently used by the collaborative effort FFS, the musical partnership of Scottish Alternative Rock group Franz Ferdinand, and the American electro-synth duo Sparks, we might have found the truth behind PIN ’s failure. The lyrics of Collaborations Don’t Work begin to unpick the reasons why collaborations fail: Collaborations don’t work You start off deferential And strangely reverential You both feel it’s essential.13 Goldman’s discussion connects the temporal, spatial, philosophical and aesthetic, as well as the linguistic, issues which surface in any reading of PIN. Furthermore, she examines PIN as a political text—as a call to arms, pointing out the semantic connections between PIN and ‘pain’ (French: bread), and premises her argument (as she is coming from a literary tradition) on the work as a text. Yet, she goes one step further and reads Hausmann’s and Schwitters’ ‘thing of phan’ as political resistance to eugenics. She argues: ‘Celebrating language’s materiality is here restorative justice, countering the instrumental discourses of (fascist) eugenics dominating public language’ (p. 21). The discourse of eugenics is a branch of medical science which argues for the improvement of ‘inborn’ (that is genetic) traits in human beings for the supposed sustainability and prolonging of the population. In a lecture given at the School of Economies (University of London) in 1904 to the Sociological Society, entitled ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims’, Francis Galton states: These lyrics suggest that collaborations falter because the two parties instinctively hierarchise each other; it supposes that the two are working together out of mutual admiration and, one would assume, to mutual benefit. But Hausmann and Schwitters are too good friends and have a history too old to essentialise such respect, and so cannot work together, because there is nothing to be gained from one another. The song descends into exploring the deviations often associated with collaborative groups, and works, but in this instance these do not apply to Schwitters and Hausmann. The reason this collaboration did not work is a mystery; but it is clear that it failed. Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage. The improvement of the inborn qualities, or stock, of someone human population will alone be discussed here. What is meant by improvement? What by the syllable eu in "eugenics,” whose English equivalent is "good”? There is considerable difference between goodness in the several qualities and in that of the character as a whole. […] We must therefore leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character is good or bad.15 ‘The thing of phan—fan’ That Schwitters and Hausmann first conceived of their creation as a ‘thing of phan’ only compounds the uncertainty and difficulty in compartmentalising PIN. Goldman enters a discussion of ‘phan’—the abbreviated ‘phantic’—in her essay, “Is There a Modernist Period?” (2015): ‘Phantic’ is German Schwitters’s English translation of Austrian Hausmann’s French ‘fantômes’ (PIN, p. 48). But why not use ‘phantom’, an adjective and noun like the French? The English ‘phantic’, possibly adjectival here, is an obsolete, rare noun meaning ‘a possessed person’, or in one 1656 cC 4 The character of the text is not high stock, and so in its rallying against the discourse of eugenics, usurps them entirely by appearing as a hybrid breed—an unwanted and unaccepted form in the discourse of eugenics. The hybrid form between painting and written words (particularly in the case of Schwitters—‘paintry and poeting’ as well as his wordy-collages) is to be taken seriously. PIN ’s manifestation is text format, but it is interspersed with collages, photomontages, typographical experiments (hybrid visual-literary forms), and even hand-drawn images; its hybridity and intertextuality/inter-materiality are integral to our understanding of its form. The avant-garde expression is through a form which is highly irregular, even by the standards of some of the early modernist magazines, which although experimental and irregular are plainly understood to be (‘little’ in some cases) magazines. The notion that poetic justice is enacted through something not entirely poetic is interesting as it sets up yet another dynamic; a dynamic which interrogates the boundaries of poetry. Apollinaire masterfully played with the form of poetry, and adopted a form which transgressed the simple boundaries of textuality and visuality. and the correspondence between Raoul Hausmann and Jasia Reichardt, as well as the preliminary designs by Anna Lovell for PIN. Folder 2 contains photocopies of the letters sent between Schwitters and Hausmann. Folder 3 contains Hausmann’s own publications. And Folder 4 contains Jasia Reichardt’s text (the ‘Introduction’ to PIN and the Story of PIN ) and her notes. Thus, a conclusion cannot be categorically drawn. Instead, I hope to have demonstrated that PIN , because of its thingness, can be represented in multiple ways. It does not mean we have to reject what already exists, or to pick a singular definition; but it does suggest that we have to consider it with and without its chronology, and to consider the unseen/unread politics inherent in its form. © Cole Collins 2015 PIN Intervenes Now Interventions are needed in order to establish the merits of PIN as a serious piece of art. It complicates the notions of form, space, time, definition, success, failure, editorial intent, authorial intent, authorship, collaboration, textuality, visuality, aesthetics, the manuscript, publication, market economies, artistic merit, need, supply and demand, usefulness, and many more. This essay did not set out with the intent to define the form of PIN, nor was it an attempt to understand the work. Instead, it was an opportunity to offer a possibility of re-reading the works we have tended to ignore and failed to understand in much of the scholarship. It was my intention not to draw attention to the failure of PIN itself, because this is well documented in the scholarship by ways of neglect. With exception for Reichardt’s efforts to recover the text, and Goldman’s very recent attempt to give a new context to the work by exploring a re-definition of the ‘modernist period’ through a work which cannot be confined to a specific time period, the scholarship on PIN is almost non-existent. It should also be noted that this article is in no way an exhaustive exploration of PIN. Such an exploration would require one to have looked at every letter sent between Hausmann and Schwitters (twenty-four letters and twenty-two manuscripts showing the keywords ‘PIN’ are returned searches in the Kurt Schwitters Archive in the Sprengel Museum); equally one would have to examine all of the correspondence between Jasia Reichardt, Anna Lovell and Raoul Hausmann and Stefan Themerson. The Themerson Archive in Warsaw holds four folders specific to Hausmann and PIN: Folder 1 contains correspondence between Raoul Hausmann and Stefan Themerson, Hausmann’s ‘rewordings’ of Schwitters’ poems, a list of contents and materials sent by Hausmann, Cole Collins is a PhD student in History of Art at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. He graduated with an MA (Honours) and MLitt in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. His research interests are predominantly in gender studies and Dada. His doctoral research is focused on Kurt Schwitters’ collages which feature women, ascertaining a feminist perspective in these works. Cole has recently published, ‘“From the front, as from the Back”: Feminist Perspectives in Anna Blossom has Wheels’ (Sch… The Journal of the Kurt Schwitters Society, 2014). Cole holds a Leverhulme Trust grant which has allowed him to travel to Hannover to conduct his research in the Kurt Schwitters Archive. He is also working on a forthcoming publication which uses the transgender aesthetics and politics of performance artist Genesis Breyer P-ORRIDGE to explore the queer aesthetics in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando (1928). cC 5 Notes 1.‘Une fantasie/Une chose fanfan/La juste chose saisie/Le monde a besoin de tendances nouvelles en poésure et peintrie’, appear on the page opposite the above quote. The English rendering is by Schwitters; the French is Hausmann’s. Reichardt. 1962, pp.10-11. 2. I have chosen Heidegger to think through the notion of ‘thingness’ because his theories are most suited to PIN itself. The materiality, unformed nature of the manuscript, and the precarious situation PIN sits in academically and generically allows for the interpretation of thingness to be understood like Heidegger’s jug. The external appearance is not at all the internal; and its relationship to the outside world, via the interpretation of the person who gives the sign (in this case, Jasia Reichardt) its signifier (the thing itself ), one of the points Heidegger makes in his essay. Furthermore, Heidegger was, and is still today, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century; and while he is a contemporary of Schwitters, he is not a contemporary of Reichardt (or even Hausmann) who are to be understood as the creators of PIN as it appears in the form with which this essay is preoccupied. 3. Heidegger 1962/2001, pp. 163-80. 4. Ibid, pp. 164-5. 5. Goldman 2015, pp. 13-14; with special thanks to Dr Goldman for allowing me to read and cite her essay. 6. Reichardt, 1962, p. 10. 7. In 1962, Reichardt wrote that the final format was never decided upon and the printer's dummy was never completed. In a letter to Hausmann of 29.3.1947 Schwitters described PIN as consisting of a manuscript of sixteen pages with a cover designed by Hausmann and an extra Merz portfolio by himself, but noted that it needed more work and that the page order was in disarray. 8. Rowe 2013. 9. Reichardt 1962, p. 2. 10. Ibid., pp. 13-14. In reproducing this letter to Hausmann of 22.10.46, Reichardt has significantly polished up Schwitters’ ungrammatical English. I have included her ‘corrected’ version for the purposes of this essay. 11. Ibid., p. 15. 12.This is not based on actual figures, but instead I am proposing that E. L. T. Mesens saw no/little financial gain from the printing of PIN and thus rejected the offer to publish it. In other words, I suggest that this decision may not have been made purely on the merits (or lack thereof ) of the work; or indeed based on the reputations of both artists, but on the economic viability of the ‘product’. 13. FFS, ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’, from the album F.F.S., 2015. 14. Goldmann 2015, pp. 15-16. 15. Galton 1904. Bibliography FFS, ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’, from the album F.F.S., 2015. Galton 1904 Francis Galton, "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims.” http://galton.org/essays/19001911/galton-1904-am-journ-soc-eugenics-scopeaims.htm Goldman 2015/2016 Jane Goldman, "Is there a Modernist Period?” (2015), unpublished manuscript. Heidegger 1962/2001 Martin Heidegger, "The Thing”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, NY: Harper Collins 2001 (First published in 1962 as Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen, Niemeyer) from lectures given by Heidegger in 1935/36.) Rowe 2013 Dorothy Rowe, After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013. Reichardt 1962 Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann (1962); PIN and the Story of PIN, ed. Jasia Reichardt, London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1962. Erlhoff/Riha 1986 Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann, PIN und die Geschichte von PIN, ed. Michael Erlhoff and Karl Riha, Gießen: Anabas-Verlag, 1986. cC 6