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
MG: But, I think your work addresses pollution in a way that, at least at that point, his work didn’t.
GM: Yes. Another aspect of this strand of my work occurred when Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah came out in 1985. It is nine hours with intervals. I was completely knocked out by a section that dealt with the origins of the concentration camp deaths. It’s documented very clearly that the first experiments involved putting Jews into sealed lorries and pumping exhaust fumes into the back. It came as a deep shock to me to realize there was a connection between the works I had been planning and the original Nazi experiments for gas chambers, but deep down I must have sensed that connection all along.
MG: I’d like to come back to this subject in a moment, but I want to finish asking you about the ‘exhaust’ pieces. As well as Mobbile and the Project Stockholm, June, you made a proposal for the famous 1972 documenta and another, in 1992, for the occasion of the UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro called Earth Minus Environment. Why was the documenta project never realized?
GM: I had two letters from Harald Szeemann inviting me to take part in documenta. I didn’t reply. One day I was talking with artists at the ICA in London, and in walks a man with a beard: Szeemann. We spent the rest of the day talking and eating nice Indian food. I sketched out a proposal for documenta titled KARBA. This only involved four cars positioned around a three-metre plastic cube. Szeemann said that the technicians could execute it and that I didn’t need to come to Kassel to oversee the work. Anyhow, it wasn’t made, and so I was never in documenta, except in the catalogue.
MG: And you don’t know why it wasn’t done?
GM: I had to very quickly send in a biography and bibliography and a proposal. To give an idea of the project, I sent a photo of the Stockholm model, which as you know includes 120 cars. I have a feeling that when I sent it in, Szeemann thought that I had suddenly moved from proposing a piece with four cars to something much more ambitious, and he lost interest. I can understand that: it was a very difficult situation.
MG: I was thinking perhaps that making a gas chamber in Germany might have been something that people had a problem with then.
GM: That is an important point, because when I proposed this idea, in 1972, I hadn’t seen Shoah and made the connection. This is the first time anybody has made the connection between my documenta project and the Holocaust, so I’m grateful to you for making that point.
MG: Whereas nowadays projects that address German history are obviously well exhibited in Germany, in the early 1970s there was a great repression of the memory of the Holocaust. Do you know of a recent project by the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra? I don’t know whether he knows your work, but he recently parked a number of cars outside a disused synagogue in Stommeln and had pipes connecting from their exhausts to inside the building and left the exhausts running. He wanted to provoke a discussion about the memory of the Holocaust.
GM: No, I have not come across that project.
MG: I think it’s hard not to think of the precedence of your work.
GM: It’s certainly fascinating.
MG: Anyway, as I understand, all these proposals involving cars whose exhaust pipes would lead to sealed cubes never got off the ground, except in Sharjah.
GM: No. I had an exhibition in this magnificent art gallery in Lund two years ago. The curator, Pontus Kyander, was determined to realize KARBA within the courtyard of the gallery. Every hour a motor started, and the exhaust went in and the water ran down the inside of the three-metre cube.
MG: I didn’t know about that. But Lund is a very different place from the United Arab Emirates, which is associated with petrol and the petrol economy. Were you interested in remaking the larger Stockholm work in Sharjah for that reason?
GM: It started with an invitation given by the artistic director of Sharjah to Eva Scharrer, a German critic and author living in Basel, to become one of the curators. She decided that she would try and realize the 120 car piece. So, I was happy that the organizers accepted this project, which was the biggest and most expensive to stage for the Biennial. However, the site couldn’t contain 120 cars, so the number was reduced to 100. For the first week the motors ran at certain times. Of course, exhibiting in that area is very problematic. I was invited to go, but for different reasons I did not. Now, you might say: ‘How can you talk about ecology and nature in a part of the world where there is so much anti-nature, and which is so dominated by technology, industry and advanced forms of capitalism?’ There are problems, I think, for anybody taking part in the Sharjah Biennial, but at the same time one can argue that, if any place needs to think about these issues, it’s that part of the world. So, for an artist – and I think there are about 70 artists involved – it’s surely interesting to face up to these challenges.
MG: One of the interesting things about this series of projects is that, in order to put the question of pollution into people’s minds, the work produces pollution. Do you see that as being similar to the structure of the ‘auto-destructive art’ demonstrations of the 1960s, where, in order to address the threat of nuclear war, you performed destruction by painting hydrochloric acid onto stretched nylon canvases?
GM: I’m very glad you’re entering this area. I relate this to homeopathy, which puts poison into the system in order to generate energy that could defeat the weakness, or the illness – in this case, the homeopathic dose of pollution. But doing all of this is not just a demonstration: it is a form, it’s a creation, an attempt to show a visual experience that is unavailable except through destruction or pollution. And it’s a very beautiful experience.
MG: What do you mean by ‘beautiful’?
GM: Well, beautiful because you see the water, the swirling smoke and the colours of the exhaust fumes as they enter the sealed cubes. This is, for me, very important. The Stockholm project was envisaged as having two phases. For phase one the cars were outside, but for phase two they were to be brought into the container, which by now contained all these exhaust fumes. And if the cars did not combust, small bombs would be set off to destroy them. That is the project in its entirety, but there was no question of doing the second phase in Sharjah: it remains to be done. So, hopefully, bit by bit, this work will finally be realized one day.
MG: And you locate a kind of a beauty in the visual event?
GM: Yes. It is very important for me to have this experience, and to offer the potential experience to an audience.
MG: When did you begin to think of homeopathy in connection to your work?
GM: Around 1961, as a tool that could be used. It was all to do with the term ‘in your face’, which is rather popular in England right now. The existence of danger is something that has been excluded from art, and I have felt the need to bring it in. The first reaction to the 120 cars, surely, must be revulsion. How can somebody make something so horrible, something so dangerous, when the world is already so dangerous? How dare this artist say: ‘Well, I’m going to show you that it’s even more dangerous and risky’? And the point behind it all is, I want them to face this reality. These works started by me saying it is not good enough simply to draw the horror of the world. It’s necessary to demonstrate the dangers of nuclear energy and the dangers of car exhausts. This is the driving force behind this kind of development.
MG: Earlier on you were talking about the connection that you made after seeing Shoah to works of yours such as Mobbile and the earliest forms of the gas chambers. This brings us to the subject of the memory of the Holocaust in your work. It is there most obviously in the series of works called ‘Historic Photographs’ (1995–ongoing) and also the Eichmann and the Angel installation you had at Cubitt in 2005. Why was it only in the 1990s that you began to work explicitly with imagery related to the Holocaust, when it had touched you as a child, and throughout your life?
GM: I should explain how the ‘Historic Photographs’ began. I was visiting Italy, and one day in 1990, on the front page of every newspaper, was a photograph of two Israeli policemen with guns, guarding a group of Arabs lying on the ground: it was the ‘Massacre on the Mount’, and it caused a furore worldwide; it was one of the most intensively discussed events in my lifetime, I would think. And this started me thinking of ‘Historic Photographs’. The first works in this series were paired: I hung an enlargement of the ‘Massacre on the Mount’ photograph behind a sheet, and on the floor beside it placed an image of Jews being persecuted by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938: the photograph shows Jews being made to scrub pavements in Vienna. This was covered by a huge sheet. I wanted to make works that would use photographs that the viewer wouldn’t initially be able to see. The ‘Massacre on the Mount’ work was called To Walk Into, and the Anschluss image To Crawl Into (both 1996). You had to walk or crawl under the cloths and scrape or feel the photographs, which was part of my point. This relates to what we were saying earlier about confronting the viewer directly with destruction. The positioning of the two photographs in the pairing was crucial. On the one hand Jews are dominating Arabs, and on the other you have Nazis dominating Jews. It’s well known that in Israel there are arguments along the lines that Jews dominate Arabs as a kind of revenge to being dominated by Nazis. So this is the topic for discussion; and from this idea I moved onto other forms. Each of the ‘Historic Photographs’ has its own theme: Vietnam, the Oklahoma City bombing …
Mark Godfrey
