Protest and Survive
An interview with Gustav Metzger, one of the key figures of postwar British art. In a career which has spanned over 60 years, the artist has employed materials including cars, newspapers and photographs to explore personal and social issues surrounding memory, history and ecology
Gustav Metzger is one of the central figures of postwar British avant-garde art. He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Nuremberg in 1926 and arrived in London in 1939, with the help of the Refugee Children’s Movement. He is best known for his demonstrations of ‘auto-destructive art’, notably the presentation at the South Bank in London in 1961, and for his part in the organization of DIAS – the Destruction in Art Symposium – in 1966, an event that brought to London key figures associated with Fluxus and Viennese Actionism. In 1969 Metzger collaborated with rock bands including Cream and The Who, accompanying their concerts with multiple liquid crystal projections. His environmental projects and campaigns are less renowned but now appear as crucial precedents for many contemporary projects – for instance, Simon Starling’s Kartenhaus, shown at Portikus, Frankfurt in 2002. In their connection to the history of the Holocaust, Metzger’s works with cars anticipate Santiago Sierra’s 2006 project to pump exhaust fumes into a sealed disused synagogue in Stommeln, Germany. A 2006 recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts, Metzger continues to produce new work, all the while responding to invitations to execute proposals dating from the 1960s and 1970s (for instance, from the curators of the Sharjah Biennial) – some of which have not been realized until now.
Mark Godfrey: I’ve heard you are involved in a new campaign about ecological issues, in particular about the art world’s overuse of aeroplanes and transportation.
Gustav Metzger: At last year’s Art Basel I felt that something should or could be done in relation to the flights, both of artists and gallery people, and the transportation of works of art.
MG: What was your idea?
GM: The idea is to launch a campaign called RAF. This stands for ‘reduce art flights’, but in Britain it’s also an acronym for the Royal Air Force, and in Germany for the Red Army Faction – there are a number of echoes within the title. Anyway, nothing came of it in Basel, but I thought I could do something at the Frieze Art Fair. This could have been picked up, but I did not pick it up, nor did anybody else. Then I was involved in the 24-hour talk marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, and I brought it up in the course of my statement. This was mentioned in the Artforum coverage of the event.
MG: So it’s a potential campaign that you’ve talked about but haven’t realized?
GM: Yes. I have been invited to take part in the Münster sculpture project. In connection with that, I was invited to the city for a couple of days and, going through the Stadtmuseum there, I came across a black and red Royal Air Force poster from about 1942, and it occurred to me that this could be used in relation to Münster, which was flattened during the war from about 150 air raids. And so it would be possible to have a campaign based on this particular poster that uses the colours and various combinations or meanings of RAF. It would be declared Münster’s Second Bombardment. But there are several problems I have in launching this campaign. One is that the leaflet could become a collector’s item, and the other is that I am in a state of withdrawal from publicity. I don’t like to say, ‘follow me’: I find it embarrassing and difficult. I am doing another project, though. I read that the Allied bombardment of Münster destroyed 80 to 90 percent of the city, and it was done in retaliation for the German attack in 1940 on Coventry and Coventry Cathedral. So for 109 days in Münster there will be a series of stones laid, in 109 different places in the city, in commemoration of the bombardment. A forklift truck will move around each day, depositing stones at specific points. We are also trying to get Coventry to do the same, and are working on it.
MG: Why are you using forklift trucks?
GM: I’m fascinated by them. In 2003, at T1&2 Artspace in the East End of London, I had an exhibition entitled ‘100,000 Newspapers’. During the show the gallery held the world’s first congress on forklift trucks. Ever since, I’ve wanted to use forklift trucks. They are rather aggressive and have a particular way of behaving.
MG: This summer will see an unprecedented amount of art travel, with people flying from all over the world to Venice, and then to Basel, Kassel and Münster. But travel in the art world has been increasing since the late 1960s, when you began to show your work. At what point did you begin to think that art-world tourism was worth addressing?
GM: At Basel, last year. At that point there wasn’t much discussion in the press about flights, and I don’t mind saying that at different times I have been a little ahead of events.
MG: Yet over the last 25 years institutions such as Tate Modern have become receptive to art from China, from South America and from Eastern Europe, places that were traditionally not represented in major Western museums. The expansion of the art world – which necessarily involves transport – has had a positive side. What do you think of this?
GM: There are positive benefits, yes. Communication and information are at the centre of our civilization. But my objection to flights is also an objection to the massive commercial growth of the art industry, the dealers and the auctions. I’ve talked about this since the early 1960s. This centres on my ongoing and endless opposition to capitalism and my attempt to discuss issues. I suffer from this not being recognized.
MG: But I think it’s a very obvious part of your work. In 1974 you proposed Years Without Art: 1977–1980, a three-year strike by artists. By producing no new work, you imagined that artists could cripple the market – which obviously was a heroic failure inasmuch as no one stopped making art. Similarly, the same fate may await this new project of reducing art flights: it won’t have an actual effect on the number of flights that people take; in fact, more people will go to Münster to see this very project. So what do you still believe to be the value of launching campaigns that will have a limited success?
GM: This is one reason I haven’t launched any campaigns in the last few decades. And the other aspect of this is that, when something is happening in society, I don’t see the point of me coming in and duplicating it. In my life my work has quite consciously entered areas which others have not reached, which others are not interested in reaching. For example, in 1959 I was walking through Fulham, on the edge of Chelsea, and there was this cardboard box on the street that staggered me, and which I eventually exhibited at 14 Monmouth Street in Covent Garden. And from then onwards the direction of much art of the early 1960s was all about finding niches that others hadn’t explored, finding discarded or neglected materials or ideas. Now, when everybody is speaking of global warming, I question whether this is something I should be pursuing.
MG: I think it would be interesting to see a project that did address the ecological cost of this period of exhibitions in Europe, in terms of the carbon footprint of documenta and Venice, say. Do you see ‘Reduce Art Flights’ as going beyond a poster project and becoming something that addresses practical ways in which art-world tourism could become carbon-neutral?
GM: I don’t think I would go in that direction at present. So much is happening in this area worldwide, it would simply be a drop in the ocean. I would rather spend my energy on developing as an artist, and seriously making works of art. I believe it is the duty of the artist to do that, the duty of a person who has certain capacities. Art is at the very centre of society, in my view. I’ve thought that since I started to make art at the age of 18. Yet in the last ten years art was made for me, rather than by me, by photographers, technicians and, of course, curators. So now I would very much like to spend time physically with my hands and my body and my feelings. I want to sit somewhere and do drawings, and eventually paintings – I want to make something that will then stand for me, and next to me.
MG: That’s an incredible thing to hear. For most people who have followed your work for the last ten years it would come as a surprise that you want to put your energies into a handmade art practice.
GM: Well, I need to reorganize myself, in order to pursue this. But again, I wouldn’t give up what I’ve been doing for the last ten or 30, 50 years; it can go in tandem.
MG: But to return to projects that you’ve done that relate to the environment. In the recent Sharjah Biennial you reconstructed a version of one of the projects that you first proposed in the 1970s. These projects involved lining up cars and fixing their exhausts so that they would pump into a kind of a clear plastic structure that would cloud up during the course of an exhibition. One project, Project Stockholm, June (Phase 1), was conceived for the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972; it involved 120 cars. The project was never realized. Can you say something about the invitation to make it for the first time in Sharjah?
GM: Actually my work with cars and exhausts dates back earlier. The first idea was to get a lorry with an open platform on the back. I wanted to construct a plastic structure on the lorry that would be fed by its exhaust: that concept was around 1964. Then in 1970 I realized a work called Mobbile, which comprised a small car. Its exhaust went into a plastic box, and in the box there were bits of meat hanging and flowers and green stuff. The car was driven around near the Hayward Gallery, where there was a show of kinetic art. Then in 1972 I was invited to take part in the inaugural show at Gallery House in London, which was part of the Goethe Institute, with Stuart Brisley and Marc Camille Chaimowicz. I was given an entire floor, with five or six rooms, and in the first one I exhibited the model for Stockholm; it’s this project that was realized recently at Sharjah.
MG: It’s extraordinary that you were thinking about the connection between pollution and art back in 1972. So many artists were interested in systems and in physical processes, but few addressed environmental matters in this way. There are some resonances, though, between yours and Hans Haacke’s early work.
GM: I met him at a private view at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, when he was a very young man, in the spring of 1964, and he kindly invited me to his studio, but I couldn’t go, as I had to go to Holland early the next morning. But if I had gone, I would have seen his early kinetic works with water running down Perspex boxes. So there’s a very direct link with my work, and early Haacke.
Mark Godfrey
