SOURCE: "Schwitters: Performance Notes," in Dado/Dimensions, Edited by Stephen C. Foster, UMI Research Press, 1985, pp. 39-45.

In the following essay, Lach characterizes Schwitters's Merz works as avant-garde performances of creativity.

The rediscovery of Kurt Schwitters coincided with the discovery of the "event" character of art—with Pop, neo-Dada, happenings, and performance art. It is this event character of art that allows me to present Kurt Schwitters, who died in 1948, as the father of contemporary art currents and events and to celebrate him as the ingenious inventor who did in the 1920s what became, in the long run, the representative art of the twentieth century.

Even if this critical acclaim is often repeated in general terms by artists and critics alike, art historians and critics are right to smile and to feel uneasiness towards these Merz events. Schwitters' art events and artifacts are a flush of ideas; they...