Gustav Metzger, 'auto-destructive' artist . By Matt Schudel Washington
Post . WASHINGTON - Gustav Metzger, the founder of the
"auto-destructive" art movement whose politically motivated creations
were designed to mock modern society by disintegrating over time, died
Wednesday in London. He was 90. Mr. Metzger developed his concept of
auto-destructive art in 1959, defining it as "art which triggers its
own destruction. The concept and process influenced guitar-smashing
rock icon Pete Townshend, among others. Mr. Metzger saw the movement as
an outgrowth of the absurdist dada movement of the 1920s, but it was
also a response to the painful circumstances of his own life. He left
his native Germany as a boy and grew up in England, but his parents
stayed behind and died in the Holocaust. He later described his
nationality as "stateless" or as "escaped Jew. For Mr. Metzger, art
became an instrument to strike back at authoritarianism, nuclear
weapons, commercialism, and modern media. "When I saw the Nazis march,
I saw machine-like people and the power of the Nazi state," he told the
Guardian in 2012. "Auto-destructive art is to do with rejecting power.
Mr. Metzger discovered his ideal medium for auto-destructive art with a
form of action painting. Wearing a gas mask and protective goggles, he
gave a dramatic demonstration of his work in 1965, spraying
hydrochloric acid on nylon, which melted, curled and shredded into
tatters. He executed the work at an outdoors site in London, revealing
St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance through acid-burned holes.
"Auto-destructive art was never merely destructive," he said in 2012.
"Destroy a canvas and you create shapes. Sometimes reclusive and
sometimes a public provocateur, Mr. Metzger wrote artistic manifestos
and expounded on his notions at art schools. In 1962, Townshend - who
later became the creative force behind the rock band the Who - was a
young art student who attended one of Mr. Metzger's lectures. "He had a
profound effect on me," Townshend told the Guardian in 1998. "I took it
as an excuse to smash my new Rickenbacker [guitar] that I had just
[hocked] myself to the eyebrows to buy. I really believed it was my
responsibility to start a rock band that would only last three months,
an auto-destructive rock group. The Who would have been the first punk
band except that we had a hit. Mr. Metzger made another contribution to
rock history when he was credited with inventing the psychedelic light
show. In 1964, he began to experiment with placing liquid crystals
between glass slides. By heating and cooling the crystals, he could
produce vivid, randomly changing colors, which he then projected onto
walls. The Who and another influential 1960s British rock band, Cream,
soon asked Mr. Metzger to provide lighting effects at their
performances. Never one to settle on a single form of expression for
long, Mr. Metzger organized a month-long London symposium in 1966
called Destruction in Art. The idea was to show audiences the
destructive forces at work in society. One of the artists at the
symposium was Yoko Ono, before she was married to Beatle John Lennon.
She presented a work of conceptual art known as "Cut Piece," in which
she sat on a stage while audience members used scissors to snip off
pieces of her clothing until she was almost nude. Another artist burned
a stack of books in front of the British Museum. After a third artist
dismembered animal carcasses and bathed in their blood, Mr. Metzger and
other organizers of the forum were arrested on obscenity charges.
"Metzger wasn't interested in the ruins or the beautiful aftermath,"
Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott wrote in 2013. "Rather, he
was seeking ways to enact or represent destruction, driven by the
age-old idea that art should somehow reflect society. One artist
strongly influenced by Mr. Metzger's notion that art should be
confrontational and emotionally difficult was Damien Hirst. Among other
works, the British artist has shocked viewers by sealing dead sheep in
large tanks of formaldehyde. Mr. Metzger was an admirer of Hirst's
work. "Very interesting, those little sheep," he said. Gustav Metzger
was born in Nuremberg, Germany. In 1939, he and a brother were sent to
Britain as part of a program to rescue Jewish children in
Nazi-controlled countries. He studied art in England and Belgium and
worked as a furniture maker, carpenter, and junk dealer before
embarking on a career as an artist. His early abstract paintings were
seldom shown in public until he was in his 80s. In 1960, Mr. Metzger
helped organize the Committee of 100, a British antinuclear group. He
was arrested, along with philosopher Bertrand Russell, for leading a
sit-in of thousands of people outside Britain's defense ministry. An
avowed Marxist, Mr. Metzger often spoke out against the commercial art
world and, as a form of protest, refused to make, sell, or exhibit any
art between 1977 and 1980. "The need to create is inherent in human
beings," he said. "We need not fear that art will fade away if the
current commercial system was phased out. Many young artists considered
Mr. Metzger a visionary, but not everyone was impressed with his work.
In 2004, one of his art installations at the Tate museum in London
consisted, in part, of a bag of garbage. One evening, a janitor tossed
it out with the trash.
