In Memory of Gustav Metzger
IT WAS THE CULTURAL COMMENTATOR FRED KAPLAN who observed that many of the great epiphanies of the 1960s were set in motion in 1959. This is certainly true in the case of Gustav Metzger—1959 was the year he wrote his first manifesto on “auto-destructive art,” a public art form that held up a mirror to a social and political system that Metzger felt was progressing toward total obliteration. Auto-destruction, he wrote, was “an attempt to deal rationally with a society that appears to be lunatic.”
I heard of Gustav years later. I was on an eight-city lecture tour of the UK with not much to lecture about because I was only twenty-three. To avoid embarrassment, ten minutes into my talk I would always put on a Fischli & Weiss video while I went out for coffee and a cigarette to gather my thoughts. It was quite an exhausting trip but one that ended in Glasgow with a moment of total ecstasy: I discovered the amazing Scottish arts scene. Roddy Buchanan, Jonathan Monk, Christine Borland, David Shrigley: I met them all in one night. And Douglas Gordon too, of course, which was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. I was reading about Robert Rauschenberg at the time and was taken with his idea that paintings could be clocks. Douglas told me of two British artists just as relevant to my interests: John Latham—whose time-based art we are currently showing at the Serpentine—and Gustav Metzger.
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