The Game of Meaning: Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters's "Merz."

This article discusses the concept of abstract montage as it relates to a piece entitled "Merz" by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters in Germany. The author states that critics have acknowledged Schwitters's exploration of collage and assemblage. She asserts that critics misread his artistic intent as a nostalgic quest for order and beauty, pointing to the frequent transgression of boundaries and use of different media in his collages. Through the artist's writings, the author intends to show that Schwitters' practice of abstract montage embodied an understanding of a universe made up of malleable signs out of which he fashioned art which played with traditional ideas of ordinary signification. She says his art contains the parody of object, in which there is the repetition of object with critical distance that marks their difference rather than their similarity.