Too Soon, Too Late. (The delivery of KCommerzbank stationery to Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn, Ambleside, Cumbria, in anticipation of the eventual relocation of the bank’s Head Office). (2013)
40,000 sheets of KCommerzbank letterheaded stationery, cardboard boxes, and leaves.
various dimensions♦
Too Soon, Too Late, is the third and final element in Because... through which Chodzko proposes that one of Germany’s leading banks, Commerzbank, from which Schwitters appropriated the word Merz, is relocating to the Lake District. Perhaps this move can be seen as a response to the financial crash of 2008, a downsizing as economic measure, or possibly it is to achieve a humble back-to-nature location as an ideal place to reflect on the neo-liberal myth of inexorable economic growth. Perhaps this move (in the near future) is an attempt to absorb and erase Kurt Schwitters’ identity as a revenge (served very cold) for his ‘theft’ of the Merz name Commerz Und Privatbank back in 1918. But perhaps the move is instead a homage to Kurt Schwitters and an attempt to apply his Merz approach to the running of their bank.
Apparently, having been delivered over-enthusiastically ahead of the move, boxes of Commerzbank headed paper have been stacked up in the Merz Barn entrance in Elterwater, as though sealing it off, a bung to its supernatural forces. Before being presented at Tate Britain this excess stationary has sat in this Lake District location for months, covered in fallen leaves and soaking up rainwater.
Too Soon, Too Late, as well as a sculpture, appears as an event in the video Knots (the second of the three parts of Because…) and also as a series of photographs, apparently recovered from the ‘exploded’ Frank Lloyd Wright office wall, in HeadInsideOutsideIn♦
Adam Chodzko discusses Too Soon, Too Late, in Ooze, a performative lecture (originally staged at Tate Britain). “An excavated thinking in parallel” about the making of Because..., in which Chodzko combines fact and fiction, text and moving image in order to build an elaborate narrative about longing, creation and fragmentation, endings and beginnings, networks of people and isolated individuals, separations and notions of home.
♦
Related works:
Because… (2013) [ installation at Tate Britain, 2013 ]
Knots (2013)
