Gustav Metzger loathed cars. He saw modern private transport as a symptom of a development that, no matter what political system promoted, would lead to ecological abyss. As an artist, he responded to this with drastic means and developed the so-called “autodestructive art”, which he proclaimed in his first manifesto in London in 1959: art that destroys itself – as a metaphor and aesthetic equivalent of a fatal global economy. Metzger stretched large amounts of nylon onto steel frames and sprayed it with acid, which ate away at the pictures and caused their skin to hang like shreds. He called it “art for industrial society” and demonstrated it on the street, such as on London’s South Bank in 1961. Metzger wrote himself into the annals and the catalog of Documenta 5 from 1972 with a macabre environment that, although with the director Harald Szeemann agreed, but was not realized for supposedly economic reasons. It would have overshadowed many things in Kassel: the exhaust gases from four cars were supposed to be introduced into a large cube made of transparent film, which would therefore have been contaminated. In a letter from Metzger to Szeemann from April 1972, stored in the Documenta archive, it says: “Please remember that I don’t want a car with significant curves like the Volkswagen. Something like the Ford Cortina with its long flat surfaces would be ideal who were murdered in concentration camps in Poland, was aware of the disturbing associations of his ominous suggestion regarding the Holocaust, but clearly wanted to avoid them. Back then, he had already planned the setting against the ecological footprint of cars on a much larger, almost gigantic scale with no fewer than a hundred and twenty cars, and wanted to set an example at the first United Nations World Environmental Conference in Stockholm. It was only in 2007 that he was able to create a reduced version at the Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. It was with such works and ideas that Gustav Metzger, who was born in Nuremberg in 1926 and sent to London in the last children’s transport in 1939, made a name for himself has. The work of the stateless artist is as radical as that of the Russian-born Boris Lurie, who escaped the Holocaust with his father under dramatic circumstances; Connection lines could also be drawn to the work of Hans Haacke. Gustav Metzger, untitled, 1949Axel Schneider/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024Metzger’s oeuvre critical of capitalism emerged in the contemporary orbit of Fluxus and Happening, which undermined the traditional concept of work, and had an immediate impact beyond the art world. Pete Townshend, guitarist of the rock band The Who, would later remember a London lecture by Metzger in 1962, from which he took the impulse to “smash my new Rickenbacker that I had just saved from my mouth” on stage to found an “auto-destructive group”. After the emigrant, who died in 2017, was honored at the Documenta in 2012, the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art is now dedicating the first solo museum exhibition to him in this country. One can only be surprised that this hasn’t happened long ago. She shows in detail the beginnings of the young draftsman and painter, which are autobiographically based: Metzger remembers his childhood and his mother bathing him. Then, based on Rembrandt’s “Family Portrait” from 1665, he draws the family at the table and abstracts them in a series of sheets with a bitter end: the heads of his “Family Group” mutate into rectangles that look like concentration camp guard towers. Metzger had in Leeds, who was still a cabinetmaker during the war, then studied in London with the painter David Bomberg and left behind quite appealing pictures, such as an expressively painted table with a round top that made him think of a mushroom cloud. The turning point in his work was the year 1959, when Metzger began to become politically active against nuclear weapons. At the same time, he uses the possibilities of technology in room-filling color installations such as a shimmering “Liquid Crystal Environment”: Metzger inserts heat-sensitive crystals into glass slides, which are rotated in projectors. So these images fluctuate in a flowing river of pure beauty. “Public Adverts, Cheap Flights”, 2005-2009VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Since the restless artist hardly conserved his works, he pretended to reconstruct them in every exhibition. In one of his most famous actions in 1970, Metzger filled an acrylic glass box with plants, mounted it on the roof of a small car, left the engine running and led the emissions through a hose into the cube. Metzger criticized the poisoning of the environment by poisoning the environment (and thus provided some templates for the controversial Spanish performance artist Santiago Sierra). It must have been strange to witness this process. In order to demonstrate the drastic nature of such a work of art, it does not have to be reproduced specifically; a photo documentation would also do the job; In the exhibition you stand a little at a loss in front of the replica glass cube with the dead greenery or a car that was demolished on site – the latter, by the way, is one of his weaker works. What becomes clear, however, is that Metzger drew a line between artistry and activism. It was not enough for him to represent the correct moral position. He did not hesitate to cut down trees and encase them overhead in concrete bases, which now, also newly installed, serve as an eye-catcher at the foot of the MMK Tower – as does one of the numerous advertisements from airlines with grotesque cheap offers that could be mistaken for satires (“1 Million Seats, £1, One Way”); Metzger collected them in series, and now one can be found on a poster at the entrance.More on the topicThroughout his life, Metzger kept his distance from the art market. His call for “Years without Art, 1977–1980” in an exhibition at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, in which he calls for an all-round art moratorium, was met with expectedly no consequences. One of the idiosyncratic twists in his work in the 1990s was a long-term, intensive study of the painter Vermeer, about whom Metzger wrote theses and gave lectures. During this time, the series “Historic Photographs” was created with photo documents from the Warsaw Ghetto and the infamous ramp in Auschwitz, which Metzger displays oppressively in sculptural form. The Frankfurt retrospective is one of the most important exhibitions of this year, and it is to be welcomed that that MMK would like to purchase them completely and create the catalog raisonné. We would like to receive the necessary financial support for this project, including from institutions that, according to their statutes, are only allowed to support German artists, but not stateless ones. Gustav Metzger. Museum of Modern Art in the MMK Tower, Frankfurt, until January 5, 2025. No catalog.
Go to Source