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: I think what interests me about this series of works is how you turn photography into a tactile experience by making a viewer crawl under a sheet to come into physical contact with an image. I’m less comfortable with the connections made between the Israeli police and the Nazis, which seem crude. But I remember you saying somewhere that you felt that as a Jew it was important for you to say that Jews shouldn’t persecute other people.
GM: That’s right, yes, I stand by that. I think the discussion is so important, and I had planned to go much deeper into it than I have done. I’ve moved on with other works, but these two works are central for me, because in Israel this is a burning topic, and it will never go away. And it’s absolutely vital to what Israel is, this discussion.
MG: Did you see the works as provoking discussion, rather than making a point about the connection?
GM: Well, both. I think my art is about the offering of complex experiences to an audience. For example, the work Jerusalem, Jerusalem (1998) includes an image of the 1967 six-day war on transparent plastic; to experience it you literally scrape your whole body against the photographs, which is rather unpleasant, of course, but I want to open up possibilities for the audience to experience the difficult areas of life.
MG: You started the ‘Historic Photographs’ at a time when photography was mainly distributed on paper, but nowadays the computer screen is the main conduit for the distribution of photographs. Some of the most famous photographs of our time, such as the Abu Ghraib images, have been distributed via email. So do the new digital procedures of image distribution interest you, and have they made you think about new ways of working with photography?
GM: I don’t have a computer and have no technology, except electric light, heating and a radio. I don’t have a telephone or mobile telephone, and, of course, it’s a statement of the way I want to live. So it’s difficult to answer your question, because I almost never see photos on a screen, but the issue that you raise is an important one. I have to reflect that maybe I’m losing out by withdrawing from what is so familiar to most people in London. Maybe I’ll start to disintegrate in relation to a world that is being transformed so constantly, and consistently. I have to face up to that.
MG: At what point in your life did you decide not to use some forms of technology, such as the telephone, for instance? In the early 1970s you worked with computers and were interested in new technologies.
GM: You’re hitting on a very central point. There was a time when I was totally fascinated by technology – for example, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson talked of the ‘white heat of technology’ in 1963 – and science is, of course, a necessary, inevitable part of technology. I was interested at an early stage in computer art, and, as you know, I was editing a magazine, Page: The Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society, for three years until 1972. I was also absolutely fascinated by and involved in developments to do with art and technology and science. And of course, auto-destructive art is based on science and technology. On the one hand, destructive art is a rejection of the way things are, but it’s also dependent on the way things are. But in the mid-1990s I began to withdraw from the way things were and entered the field of deep ecology. This appealed to me more and more.
MG: But before that, you had a telephone?
GM: No. I have never had a telephone.
MG: I think it’s worth saying that this interview was harder to arrange than most. You were contactable only via the regular mail, and we’re so unfamiliar with dealing with letters nowadays. Do you see these strategies as part of your project as an artist?
GM: Yes. And it’s in connection to my personal resistance to technology that, as I said before, I would like to use my body to make something in art.
MG: It’s interesting to think that there’s a connection, as you said, between rejecting technology and a return to handmade art. Some critics see handmade paintings and drawings as inherently reactionary. But you’re repositioning them as radical.
GM: This is connected to my rejection of the system of capitalism.
I don’t have the instruments that keep the system going. I’ve rejected them, I don’t want them; it’s not important, we can survive without them. In fact, I believe we would survive far better. It’s lunatic the way people behave, the way they interact and the machinery that’s in use.
It is beyond lunacy.
MG: I’m sorry if this question appears crude, but many people have thought about World War II and the Holocaust as a profoundly modern calamity, inasmuch as Nazism used technology as no previous power had used it. And the Final Solution was only possible through the use of new technologies of transportation and of killing. Your whole history is touched by these events – you lost your parents and family in the Holocaust – and I was wondering whether you consider your ongoing rejections of technology as connected to the memory of the Holocaust?
GM: It’s all connected. I experienced the Nazi terror as a child, and you can never, ever forget that. And this has shaped my entire existence, and it will always continue to do so. It’s just so big and so dominant and so widespread; it affected billions of people, and still does.
MG: It’s interesting, because a lot of my research has been on artists’ reactions to the Holocaust, mainly thinking about American art, but there are very few artists whose lives were actually personally touched by it in the way yours was. A number of survivors made works that celebrated Jewish heroism in the Warsaw Ghetto or works that concentrated on the memory of the dead, but very few have made work that politicized the memory of the Holocaust by connecting its implications to ongoing present crises as yours has.
GM: We can go back here to the origin of my involvement with art. It started with being deeply concerned with communist politics, from the age of about 17 in Leeds, when I was working in a furniture factory. At the age of 19 I moved to London and decided to give up being a political figure and become an artistic figure. I realized, though, that I would never give up a political commitment to the world, and I have maintained the feeling of responsibility that is central to left-wing politics. That’s why, when I look at the present media, I continually ask what is my responsibility, and should I respond? This connects with the horror that I had and the horror that others had around the Nazi period.
MG: I have friends in the United States who are involved with ecological Jewish campaigns and organizations, which look to sources in the Torah and the Talmud for ideas on ecology. Are any of your sensitivities to ecological disasters informed by your contact with Jewish sources? After all, you grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household.
GM: A very firm yes. The childhood experience is something that one never escapes. Certainly I haven’t escaped it, and I don’t want to escape it.
MG: Do you have an ongoing connection with Judaism now?
GM: Not directly. But what I experienced as a child will always be visible, and I welcome that. And again, responsibility is at the centre of Jewish life – responsibility and the sharing of experience and the treasuring of life. And I hadn’t thought of it, but since you are leading me in a certain direction, I would say that my concern with extinction, which has dominated my lecturing in recent years, must be connected with this Jewish emphasis on the value of life, and the value of every life.
Mark Godfrey is the author of Abstraction and the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2007) and curator of the exhibition ‘Matthew Buckingham: Play the Story’ at Camden Arts Centre, London and other venues.
Mark Godfrey
