Das Undbild by Kurt Schwitters

Continuing our discussions with appropriation art I came across this piece shown above. It is a collage painting, like a lot of appropriated art and was conceived in 1919. Like the starting with my other posts, I started thinking about the title of the piece. It seems to be some German thing.. "Das".. maybe. "Undbild" stumps me as well. Could be something like, "not building" or something similar. Since it is a collage, it is composed of fragmented images or pieces somewhat not familiar with each other.

I believe this piece was also tagged or put under the style of movement of DaDa as well. When looking at this movement.. as I think I have posted about before, it is very unique. Well, most movements are but it is just so abstract and just.. strange in its conception and use of its mediums. Its mediums being very random things, some highly political and strange use of characters and "serial murderer" type collage pieces. This piece is not so much like the more in-depth Dada but it definitely reminds me of it.

This collage is considered to be appropriation art because.. well it has recycled and adopted or sample aspects of other objects. I guess you could say most, if not all collage art is appropriate but these is definitely something going on here besides just a diarrhea of images thrown on a canvas. Coming back full circle to the title. Simply searching what others have to say on the internet spat back a bunch of thoughts and some nonsense. But filtering the good ones, it is indeed German and I came up with The deconstruction or just simply "and build." Whatever the case may be it has to do with some building of or deconstruction. Of what exactly.. not so easy to filter out.