Kurt's lectures at UCLA during 1966 were carefully transcribed as class notes, and luckily have been preserved within his archived material. This particular lecture from October 14, 1966 was lecture 5 in his undergraduate Art 1C class in Art History. And the history of Art History itself is the topic of this lecture.
Audio Lecture: Kurt Schwitters
Schwitters used the word MERZ to describe the style of his work, derived from the second syllable in the German word for commerce.
Iconoclastic but not malicious or mean-spirited; this is how Kurt describes the ground-breaking Dada-period artist Kurt Schwitters. This lecture delivered at UCLA in 1965 is straight-up art history; for those of you who are interested in the history of Dada and its relationship to art and life in the world of the 1920s, this recording provides a stream of Kurt's observations, understandings and insights. He does this as he describes a series of projected slides, their content, style and context. Picasso, Braque, Moholy Nagy and the cubists also are discussed.
The recording runs about 45 minutes and takes a few moments to load.
Here are some links associated with the work of Schwitters:
Wikipedia (Schwitters)
Wikipedia (Art Style - Dada/Merz)
Google images
Art 110A Lecture at UCLA - 1966
Some students, faculty members and administrators at UCLA were puzzled and dismayed by Kurt's teaching methods. His undergraduate art history lectures were wildly popular, and by 1966 upwards of 400 students were in attendance. He played rock and roll, brought in guest lecturers, and taught in a very unconventional style. In this lecture (drawn from word-for-word class notes) from December, 1966, he directly addressed criticisms he'd heard, and took pains to explain why he was teaching in the way he was: "This approach involves fundamental issues; it involves keeping open the live questions. This is very dangerous; it unsettles a lot of people; you keep the door open, you inevitably let the draft in...it gets very uneasy. You also inevitably let the light in, and that's another point."
Lecture on Audio: Art & Mythology 114-A - "Civilization"
This is an audio of a lecture given on March 4, 1975 to his Art & Mythology class at Sacramento State University. It's a classic Kurt lecture, all at once an engaging, notes-free, improvised performance presenting scholarly information and humorous schtick woven within the serious truths of ancient wisdom. It begins with an extended critical riff on receiving mailed sales material about Time-Life's offer of Sir Kenneth Clark's "Civilization" educational slide-strips. It runs about an hour and takes a minute to begin playing. Enjoy!
