Make and break

Auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger gets viewers up close and personal with familiar images, jolting them into discovering them anew.

By BARRY DAVIS
THE PIECE titled ‘To Crawl Into – Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938 (photo credit: Courtesy)
THE PIECE titled ‘To Crawl Into – Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Gustav Metzger does not want us to get too attached to the fruits of his creative output.
When you think about it, that is a strange ethos for an artist to adopt, considering he or she surely produces work to be ultimately displayed to others.
The problematic nature of Metzger’s statement of non-display intent is further exacerbated by the fact that the 88-year-old Jewish artist, born in Nuremberg, Germany, and resident in Britain, currently has an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum that goes by the somewhat strident title of “Testimony and Action.”
It is a show which is patently designed to make you stop and think and – Metzger’s anti-materialism approach notwithstanding – get as close to experiencing the subject matter as you can.
That is evident from the outset. As you step into the first section of the Metzger show, you are met by the puzzling sight of a large yellow tarpaulin which takes up most of the floor. The only hint of what lies beneath the cloth is the brief text displayed in a non-too-prominent position on one of the walls, which reads: “Historic Photographs: To Crawl Into – Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938.” Members of the public are duly invited to get underneath the tarpaulin, where they find themselves centimeters away from an all-too-familiar monochrome image of Jews scrubbing a Vienna sidewalk.
The same goes for an outsized print of a grim scene in which Jews are lined up, under the superior gaze of a bunch of Nazi soldiers and officers, close to the entrance of Auschwitz. This work is called Historic Photographs: The Ramp at Auschwitz, Summer 1944. The photograph is located on a wall of a narrow, short passageway which, again, forces the observer to get up close to the exhibit. The sense of dread is enhanced by the fact that the end of the corridor is blocked by prison-like bars. The only way out from there is to do an about-face – which, naturally, was something Jews could not do at the time.
“These are well-known images, there is nothing new in them,” says curator Ellen Ginton, “but Metzger forces you to get right up close to them, and to discover them anew.”
Put in the context of the octogenarian’s revolutionary take on the intrinsic value of works of art, getting into such close quarters of the items in Testimony and Action represents quite a turnaround. In 1959, Metzger published the first of a series of Auto-Destructive Manifests and performed the first “demonstration” of such art, thus establishing a one-artist school of art. He termed his new school of thought as “primarily a form of public for industrial societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form color, method and timing of the disintegrative process.”
In 1960, he was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and he then augmented his artistic credo to take in “rockets and nuclear weapons” as “auto-destructive” components of the modern world. “Auto-destructive art reenacts the obsession with destruction, the pummeling into which individuals and the masses are subjected,” noted his newly extended artistic manifesto. A year on, he declared that “auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation.”
Throughout his long and highly fruitful career to date, Metzger has remained as committed to declarative acts, theoretical lectures, written texts, political forums and symposia as he is to creating artistic objects.
In 1961 he was jailed for civil disobedience with the Committee of 100, the anti-nuclear war group formed with the philosopher Bertrand Russell. When he was brought to court, he remained unrepentant and made a highly personal statement to the judge, placing his Holocaust-related experiences in a surprising contemporary context: “ I came to this country from Germany when I was 12 years old, my parents being Polish Jews, 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 barbaric than Buchenwald, for there can be absolute obliteration at any moment. I have no other choice than to assert my right to live, and we have chosen, in this committee, a method of fighting which is the opposite of war - the principle of total non-violence.”
Metzger was born in 1926 in Nuremberg, to a family of Polish-born Orthodox Jews. In 1939, he and his elder brother were sent to England on the Kindertransport; their parents perished in the concentration camps. Metzger has lived in England ever since, and is stateless by choice.
He recalls, as a boy, seeing thousands of Nazis marching through the city, and says the scene left a very powerful impact on him, and that his auto-destructive art can only be understood in the context of Nazi violence.
But his interest in art was first sparked by a much gentler phenomenon. “I was fascinated by the things I saw in the center of Nuremberg,” recounts Metzger, “especially water, and the sound the fountains in the center of the town made. That later got me interested in kinetic art – movement and sound and light and color. By that I don’t just mean color on the canvas, but color that moves through space.”
Several years after that formative childhood aquatic experience, Metzger became fascinated with aesthetics of a more solid nature. In 1942, he worked as a furniture maker and he came across the work of sculptor Henry Moore and other contemporary artists. At the same time he became interested in revolutionary politics, and was introduced to the work of highly controversial Austrian-born Jewish psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.
His political identity ebbed and flowed and, for a while, he lived in a commune of anarchists and Trotskyites. He decided to become a sculptor and, meeting Moore at the National Gallery, asked to become his assistant. However, he followed Moore’s advice that it would be better for him to go to art school to study life drawing.
Metzger studied at various art schools in Cambridge, London, Antwerp and Oxford. The painter David Bomberg taught Metzger and was also a significant influence on his development.
Considering the lasting imprint of that brutal childhood experience, and his later radical and bare-knuckled attitude towards his own and other people’s creations, as well as his strident political activity, hearing such an idyllic description from Metzger, of the gentle issue of the Nuremberg fountains, comes as quite a surprise.
While the artist does not seem to have mellowed with age, the art establishment and society in general have become far more accepting of his previously vetoed offerings. In the early 1960s, Metzger’s simple idea of displaying all the pages from an issue of a popular national newspaper as an art installation was rejected for being too politically charged. Almost half a century on, in 2008 the prestigious Tate Modern gallery in London invited him to restage the piece.
“Since 1960, when I first used newspapers, I have thought a great deal about them,” Metzger said at the time. True to his uncompromising view of contemporary life and politics, he would like us to look way beyond the simple aesthetics of his exhibits. “My attitude is to encourage people to look carefully at newspapers, analytically and critically. In 1960, when I used the Daily Express, I said: ‘This is the world, look at it and deal with it, and I emphasize the need to fight the newspapers.’” Thankfully, Metzger was willing to talk to me.
Another interesting aspect of the now more venerated artist is his predilection for incorporating secondhand material in his creations, rather than making something new himself. In the 1950s he abandoned painting and began using “ready-made” objects, such as cardboard packing cases, newspapers and scraps of fabrics from clothing factories. These ready-made objects, for Metzger, were a means of demonstrating the creative potential of contemporary technology, while serving as a critique of the inherent wastefulness of consumerism.
Some of the items in the current show were first unveiled to the public in his “Historic Photographs” series. The preference for recycled images also feeds off Metzger’s embracing of the Minimalist approach which, for him, means using materials that might ordinarily, and literally, be consigned to the scrap heap of this materialistic society.
Testimony and Action includes media images that have, over the years, taken on iconic status. For instance, most of us instantly recognize the chilling picture of a naked young girl running away from an aerial attack during the Vietnam War. But, typically, the enlargement of the shot, which Metzger calls Children Fleeing, South Vietnam, April 1972 is not easy to see. Metzger has us peering through the narrow gaps in a bamboo fence he has had erected in front of the picture. Once again, we are forced to “get into the action,” rather than, possibly, absentmindedly passing our practiced eye over the monochrome print before uncaringly moving on.
The hide-and-seek tool for getting us on board the emotional bandwagon comes through even more powerfully with Fireman with Child, Oklahoma 1995, that highly emotive Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a red-helmeted firefighter carrying a bloodied infant to safety. Again, we only know that is the picture on the wall from the small informational card for the exhibit, as the print itself is completely obscured by a pile of breeze blocks – so we get to complete the image in our own minds. Again, Metzger has us on board, willy-nilly.
By now, it is clear that the pictorial subject matter in Testimony and Action is more than a little on the rough side. But Metzger is not looking to simply shock us, or shake us up. He feels there is much aesthetic pleasure to be gleaned from such works too.
Back at the Tate Modern five years ago, he countered the idea that the content of the newspapers he displayed was repulsive. “Some people might argue, how can you talk of beauty in the face of what’s there – murder, war, crime, drugs? Well, one can and I think we must,” he declares. “The relevant point here is that we must look at everything, we should look at everything and take it as it is. You shouldn’t say you can’t respond to this beauty because of the subject matter.”
While Metzger’s create-and-break line may have fallen on deaf if not startled ears, at the time he found high-profile empathy from some highly unexpected quarters. In the mid-1960s, The Who rock band gained early notoriety when lead guitarist Pete Townshend began to smash instruments during live performances.
Townshend had been a student of Metzger’s, when he attended Ealing Art College in London, and he cited the artist’s philosophy as an influence on his own on-stage destructive routine. Late ’60s British supergroup Cream also benefited from Metzger’s revolutionary aesthetic offerings, when the trio incorporated the artist’s liquid crystals set on wafer-thin glass in its psychedelic concerts.
One thing is for sure, Metzger has never stagnated, and a visit to Testimony and Action is a stimulating and thought-provoking experience.
■ “Testimony and Action” closes on June 7. For more information: (03) 607-7020 and www.tamuseum.org.il


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