Demonstrating Auto-Destruction
Now in his 80th year Gustav Metzger has occupied a unique place for many decades as an artist who has consitently used his practice as a means for demonstration and critique. Metzger's actions began in 1959, twenty years after arriving in Britain as a Polish-Jewish escapee from Nazi Germany. He used political and ecological issues -especailly the nuclear arms race and environmental irresponsibility- as points of departure for the development of his concept of 'Auto-Destructive Art', the first manifesto of which defined this as a "form of public art for industrial societies“, as it thematised the destructive potential of the 20th century. Credited too with influencing the vocabulary of pop culture through his student Pete Townshend of The Who, who attributed his guitar smashing activities to the influence of Metzger's auto-destructive actions. The symbolic power of his creative destruction rings as relevant to the 21st Century as it was in the early 1960s, and Metzger reconstructed his famous action at London's South Bank Centre on 14th October 2006 45 years on, as captured here.