Merz
メルツ / 1919–1948 / Style / Avant-garde
A one-man movement flying a word clipped from a bank advertisement as its banner, building compositions solely from refuse—tickets, wrapping paper, torn type. Its attitude of treating rubbish as building material, and its abstract placement of typographic fragments, decisively shaped the vocabulary of collage and magazine design.
Pasted refuse such as tickets and wrappers / Fragments of torn type and numerals / Diagonal axes of construction / The colour of aged paper
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Collage-driven editorial and zine layouts built from printed ephemera · Craft-minded branding that composes real tickets, stamps and offcuts
- Type
- Salvaged letterpress fragments—mismatched sizes, partial words, stray numerals
- Composition
- Tilted constructive axes locking scraps into an abstract armature
- Material
- Aged tickets, wrappers, stamps and torn print, glued with visible edges
- Caution
- Avoid arranging the scraps as nostalgic decoration—Merz is construction with rubbish, so every fragment must serve the composition's axes, not evoke the past.
- Further study
- The page layouts of the magazine Merz / The space of the Merzbau / The collaborations with Constructivism