No Subject

GURU WITH A GAS MASK

**He set up CND, was jailed with Baertrand Russell, showed The Who how to
smash their guitars and inspired Damien Hirst. So why is Gustav Metzger
still living out of a plastic bag? Jonathan Jones reports**

The spectacle of an electric guitar being smashed to pieces against its
amplifier, generating screeching feedback, is not that you think of when
you talk to the reclusive artist Gustav Metzger.  But it was Metzger's
lectures on Auto-destructive art that inspired Pete Townshend, who hard him
as a student at Ealing College of Art, to make the demolition of their
instruments a part of The Who's act. Rock was never the same again.

"It was 1962," remembers Townshend, "the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
He had a profound effect on me. I was doing my first gig with The Who. I
took it as an excuse to smash my new Rickenbacker that I had just hawked
[sic] 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."

It might seem unfortunate that Gustav Metzger should be best known for his
accidental impact on pop music, because he is not a Pop artist. On the
contrary, he conceived of Auto-destruction as the opposite of Pop art,
which fetishised materialism. Metzger wanted to  create art that confronted
the consumer society, eventually becoming so disaffected with art's status
as a commodity that he called for a strike from 1977 to 1980, during which
he neither made, exhibited nor sold artworks.

Yet Metzger is now recognised as one of the most audacious artists to have
worked in post-war Britain. He has become an iconic figure for young
British artists, who tell of a fiery gnome turning up at their exhibitions
loaded down with carrier bags and talk of revolution. Metzger's idea of a
"public art for industrial societies", using acid, nylon and broken glass,
has mutated into the atrocity exhibitions of contemporary art. His concept
of a provocative art of spectacle is echoed in Damien Hirst's
chemical-filled vitrines and Rachel Whiteread's concrete house, and a few
years ago avant-garde ironist Stewart Home even called for a new Art
Strike. Metzger is everywhere appearing at a Los Angeles museum recently to
demonstrate Auto-destruction, and now receiving his biggest ever solo show
in Oxford (which is being sponsored by Townshend).

Auto-destructive art is "art which triggers its own destruction", Metzger
announced I n1960. By definition, it leaves nothing but a few ashes. When I
approached him about an interview, I discovered how comprehensively he
rejects the commodification of art. He sees our obsession with personality
as a way of making art easier to consume. So he agreed to talk only on the
understanding that our conversations did not constitute anything as
individualising as an interview.

In his youth, Metzger planned to have the life of a revolutionary, and
meeting him is indeed like setting up a rendezvous with an underground
leader. He has no phone -- indeed, for years he was listed in museum
catalogues as "whereabouts unknown". All we do know is that he has survived
on a mixture of casual labor and help from his fans. So I had to wait to
hear from him. Then, one day, I was instructed to meet him in two hours'
time near Portland Place in central London. I was told that there was
something I must see.

Everything Metzger did in the sixties had startling repercussions. He is
credited with the invention of the psychedelic light show, and dedicated
1964 to researching liquid crystal projections. Within a couple of years he
was projecting randomly changing patterns of colour at gigs by Cream and
The Who. In 1966 he organised an international symposium on Destruction In
Art. It was meant to be a serious investigation into the pleasure and
horror of human aggression, but instead turned into a pop spectacle report
by the national press in outraged tones.

Destruction In Art was Metzger's most comprehensive exploration of the uses
of violence. Artists presented ideas for all kinds of grotesque, absurd,
sado-masochist exploits. British participant Robin Page proposed to line up
20 frogs and interrogate them; if they failed to answer they would be
executed. But the international visitors provoked the press the most. Yoko
Ono performed her "cut piece", in which members of the audience were
invited to clip off bits of her clothing until she was naked. Austrian
artist Hermann Nitsch slaughtered an animal and bathed in its blood.
Metzger was prosecuted and fined for allowing this obscenity to tak place
on a British stage.

I had read about Metzger as Swinging London's most famous urban guerrilla,
but my encounter with him turned out to be far more serious and unsettling.
the appointed place was the Wiener Library, dedicated to Holocaust
research. Metzger wanted to show me something whose existence is a kind of
blasphemy: a photo album compiled by the Nazi commander responsible for
suppressing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The particular photograph he wanted
me to see, of a Jewish boy being arrested, is used in hes current
exhibition, and it puts the meaning of his art in a new ight.

Metzger is a tiny, intense figure whose severity is lightened by flashes of
wit and whimsy, like his suggestion that he might be the ideal man to
create something to go inside the Millennium Dome. He was born in
Nuremberg, in 1926 to Poilsh-Jewish parents. When Hitler came to power they
sent him and his brother to live abroad. In 1939 he arrived in Britain and
was cared for by the Refugee Children movement. Effectively he was already
an orphan: his parents did not survive the war. When he participated in an
art exhibition called the Festival Of Misfits in 1962, he described himself
as an "escaped Jew".

Metzger's life as a refugee was never going to be easy and his experiences
by the early sixties made it impossible for him to agree wiht Harold
Macmillan that we never had it so good. As a child he lived in a London
hostel, then trained to be a joiner. He wanted to be a composed and
painter, but by the end of the fifties he was dealing in junk in King's
Lynn whil preparing an exhibition of cardboard, boxes, the throwaway
wrappings of postwar affluence.

Auto-destructive art exposed the threat of nuclear destruction which
guaranteed the comfort of the West. Metzger conceived of his violent new
art while playing a leading role in the peace movement. He was one of the
ounders of the Committee of One Hundred [Hundred Faces, anyone?], which
advocated direct action against the nuclear arms race. When he, Bertrand
Russell and other leaders of the movement were jailed, he made an unusually
personal statement in court: "I came to this country when 12 years old and
I am grateful to the government for bringing me over. My parents
disappeared in 1943 and I would have shared their fate. But the situation
is now far more barbarous than Buchenwald, for there can be absolute
obliteration at any moment."

Auto-destructive art was negative Pop. Metzger was fascinated by the first
Pop exhibition. The Is Tomorrow, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, but
his version of tomorrow was nothing to look forward to. In 1961 he
demonstrated Auto-destruction on the South Bank. The most revered symbol of
American culture at the time was action painting, and Metzger turned its
affirmation to horror. He ware a gas mask that suggested nuclear
catastrophe and the stormtroopers who had arrested his family, set up a
huge nylon "canvas" and painted on it with acid. A crowd watched th fabric
of modernity sizzle and burn.

The man in the gas mack wanted no place in a" a society whose basis in the
production, selling and the maintaining of systems of mass murder". Today
he has the same cult status as in the sixties, but the intervening years
are full of mystery. He disappeared to Zurich and Amsterdam for years,
apparently to conduct obscure archival projects, the resurface unexpectedly
as the conscience of art. At a conference in 1980 in German art guru Joseph
Beuys was sounding off about his belief that everyone is an artist when a
little, bearded figure, stood up. "everyone an artist?" asked Metzger.
"Himmler too?"

His contribution to pop culture becomes eve more extraordinary when you see
him in the perspective of 20th-century history. Other intellectuals of the
sixties, like Warhol, still reverberate in pop music, but Metzger changed
the fabric of rock as a sound: he compelled musicians to tear thorough its
plastic surface to expose something brutal. "I enjoyed some of the tunes by
The Who." he said, but his own cultural concerns were absolutely
disconnected from the sixties. He was a European, a modernist. The place
that fascinated him when he first came to London was Zwemmer's art
bookshop, where he found books about the Continental avant-garde. He sees
himself continuing the Dadaist tradition of protest against the rational
structures of modern capitalism. "Musicians, Smash Your Instruments." urged
a Dada manifesto.

Everything Metzger has cone is an attempt to find out if there can be
beauty after Auschwitz. The essence of Auto-destruction is that it dies
rather than becomes assimilated; it is art as suicide. Yet Metzger is not a
pessimist. his light projections hold out beauty and freedom as a
possibility.

***
Gustav Metzger, MoMA Oxford, to January 10 (01865 722733)
***

Alan
Be sure to read _McKendree: A Burning Novel of Murder and Revenge_
by Douglas Hirt, ISBN 0-8439-4184-7  (available at www.amazon.com)