A Ball of Twine: Marcel Duchamp’s “With Hidden Noise"

Kurt spent several years working on an analysis of western art through an exploration of a ready-made sculpture created by Marcel Duchamp in 1916 called "with hidden noise" (shown below). The "hidden noise" emanates from an object placed within the open core of the ball of twine when it's turned upside down. Speculating on what the object is, Kurt's 350,000-word opus (edited by his close friend Clifford Barney) is the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship and learning, knitting together art, history, culture and society into a well-woven fabric. 

You can read Kurt's "Pretext" here or...
The entire work resides on a server at Sacramento State University; here's the link.

Unconventional Art History Teacher Fights Termination

In 1967, while an assistant professor at UCLA, Kurt was notified that his contract was not going to be renewed. Had it been renewed, he would have become a full, tenured professor. He was loved by his students, and as the article from the L.A. Times notes, "This rapport with students swelled one of his classes, a survey of 20th Century Art, from 75 students in the fall of 1965 when he started at UCLA to 450 students when he taught it last fall." He was wildly popular with students, but not with his Art Department chair. In comments, Kurt is quoted about two main areas of disagreement, "The first was the subject matter and the content of my courses...such as playing rock-and-roll and maybe even my choice of slides." He went on, "The other major area of concern was the methodology, the syllabus, specifically the unorthodox classes and bringing in outside speakers and for following methods other than the strict, didactic approach that usually makes art history so deadly dull."

Among the guests he invited to speak to his classes was Rock and Roller Lew Reed, just at the beginning of his career. Phil Spector dropped in, and Andy Warhol. And then there was the "book burning" art-piece on campus, and the art-event when Kurt led his students in throwing an old black and white television off the Santa Monica Pier. This is what Kurt meant by "unorthodox." UCLA just was not ready for Kurt, who in student letters to the Daily Bruin was deemed "a genius." And of course, he was.

He lost his appeal, despite the uproar of his devoted students.

L.A. PARTY 1968

A former student of Kurt's recently provided this poster announcing a Kurt von Meier event at the Douglas Gallery in Los Angeles in 1968, entitled "L.A. Party". It's a classic Kurt conception of its time; the L.A. riots and student anti-war demonstrations were all over the news, and the title "L.A. Party" is simultaneously ironic social commentary and invitation. Close inspection of the poster shows strong horizontal scan lines, like the enlargement of the image on a black and white television tube. Kurt appreciated Marshall McLuhan's take on media and TV - "The medium is the message" - and his poster doubles down on TV coverage of riots, wars and demonstrations as a form of "entertainment." 

A semiotic analysis of the image, and Kurt deeply appreciated semiotics, reveals three L.A. cops in helmets "man-handling" a petite woman, who is faceless in the image. The cop on the right is looking at the cop on the left somewhat anxiously, who (stripes of authority on his uniform) seems to be either directing the activity or interceding; the expression on his face shows some amusement. Meanwhile, "the kid," probably a rookie not much older than the young woman, is doing the work of handcuffing. To the left of the young woman's hair one can see a small image of a black woman, hands cuffed behind her back, being walked down the sidewalk by two helmeted policemen. If he were present, Kurt might remark on the way some things never change.

The image, Kurt would have noted, also displays a classical composition employing diagonals forming a triangle; the young woman is a the lowest point of an inverted triangle in the center of the image, and the two older cops each occupy the corners of the upper points of the triangle.