Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Karen Marta

Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, UK: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2024

288 pp., 17 x 23.6 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Released early last month in Europe and early next in North America, this title functions as a biography of artist and activist Gustav Metzger, told in his own words, through interviews with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Metzger - the 'Auto-Destructive' artist who died in 2017 at the age of 90 - spoke with Obrist numerous times over more than two decades. There are several instances in the book in which Metzger controls the conversation, insisting that they linger longer on a topic, to provide sufficient context. There’s an urgency for the artist, as if he is anticipating the volume and is determined to get the story right. 

In the five-page Preface, Obrist credits Douglas Gordon for introducing him to Metzger’s work, recounts how difficult it was to initially track him down (he had no fixed address) and then how their friendship formed around this series of ongoing interviews. He first took Metzger out for coffee, but the artist drank only boiled water, something Obrist says he picked up from him and continues drinking today. 

Hans Obrist is an infamous workaholic, and particularly prolific when it comes to conversation. A New Yorker article from a decade ago estimated that he had already conducted twenty-four hundred hours of interviews: during studio visits, on airplanes, walking down the street. He brings three digital recorders with him to every interview, to ensure no conversation is lost.  

A small sampling of the artists he has spoken with includes Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari, J. G. Ballard, Björk, Lee Bul, Christian Boltanski, Danial Buren, Christo, Douglas Coupland, Robert Crumb, Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Gibert and George, Zaha Hadid, Richard Hamilton, Koo Jeong-A, Miranda July, Jeff Koons, Doris Lessing, Arto Lindsay, Katja Novitskova, Yoko Ono, Rosemarie Trockel, Ai Wei Wei, Emmett Williams, and Hans-Peter Feldmann (who answered Obrist’s inquiries with images). Obrist has published upwards of fifty books of these interviews, including an earlier title on Metzger. 

The reverence the renowned curator has for his interviewee is clear from his knowledge of the work and his curiosity about the backstory. "Every word of these interviews,” he writes in the preface, "is a moment I hold near to my heart.”

The conversations in Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist are presented chronologically at first, always careful to frame early stories in the context of Metzger’s later work, and typically in relation to the subject of Destruction. 

“Auto-destructive art is an attempt to deal rationally with a society that appears to be lunatic,” Metzger explains early on, citing the influence of Dada and and Russian revolutionary art from 1910 to 1920. 

At the age of twelve, Gustav Metzger was living in Nuremberg and was told by his mother to rush to the synagogue and bring home his father. “So I went and asked someone to send him out for me,” he explains, “and when they did he was stopped by some Nazis in the street, and they took him away.”

So, even before his teens, the artist was overwhelmed with guilt at having unwittingly sent his father to his death, and traumatized by seeing his sisters marched off at the same time. Most of his family perished at the hands of the Nazis, but he and his brother were sent by boat to England, as part of the Kinderstransport, in 1939.

At sixteen, he wanted to become a composer but was daunted by the prospect of having to learn “at least fifteen instruments” during the war, so took a job at a furniture factory. Here a co-worker (a "keen Trotskyite") introduced him to left wing politics, loaning him books on Marx and Lenin. 

Determined to work as an artist, he reached out to Henry Moore, proposing himself as a studio assistant. Moore met with Metzger, but couldn’t offer the young enthusiast any work, as he was waiting for his former assistant to return from the army. Instead, the acclaimed sculptor suggested that he attend art school.

He visited the Slade School of Fine Art to determine if it would be a good fit, and a fortuitous meeting with a student in a staircase dissuaded him. Metzger was told “Don’t come here, it’s a rotten school. Find somewhere else.” The advice came from someone who would eventually become one of the institute’s most famous alumni, a Pop Art pioneer and knighted by Queen Elizabeth. "He didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know who he was - we were both young people - but I realized later that it had been the Scottish artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi." 

Metzger ended up taking classes at the Cambridge School of London in 1946, and later (with a grant from the Jewish Community in the UK) attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He subsequently attended painter David Bomberg’s classes in the early fifties at Borough Polytechnic in London. 

By the end of the decade, Metzger began to develop his theory of Auto-Destruction, and to produce art works by pouring acid onto nylon. 

Developed by the multi-national chemical company Dupont, nylon was first introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair as a new synthetic material for women’s stockings, selling sixty-four million pairs the following year. Shortly afterwards, most nylon production was diverted to military use during World War II, for parachutes, parachute cord and flak jackets. Metzger would likely have enjoyed the connotations of a material used for both fetishized commercial consumption and wartime destruction.

Much like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (a gesture which would’ve faded into obscurity had he not published his own periodical where he could write about the piece under a pseudonym), Metzger’s Auto-Destructive art works were likely less influential than his manifestos and other writings on the subject. 

Metzger worked with Mario Amaya, the editor of Art And Artists magazine, to create an issue dedicated to the subject of Auto-Destructive [see below]. Released in August of 1966, the issue featured images of the Nylon works and some of the artist’s writings. It also served as a promotional vehicle for Metzger’s watershed moment: The Destruction in Art Symposium.

DIAS, as it became known, was a gathering of international artists, poets, composers and scientists to speak or present art works on the subject of Destruction in Art. It took place between the 9th and 11th of September, in 1966, at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden, London. 

The event featured papers, performances, actions and events by Metzger, Günter Brus, Henri Chopin, Al Hansen, Juan Hidalgo, John Latham, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Robin Page, Wolf Vostell, and many others. Several of the works were controversial, and the event attracted international media. The Art And Artists issue from two months prior had teased the possibility that guitarist “Pete Townshend of the WHO group will give a talk, and the WHO itself may take part in a concert”. Neither happened. 

When Obrist brings up Townshend, Metzger changes the subject to Yoko Ono. He obviously has enormous respect for her, and played a very pivotal role in her life. Ono came to London to participate, and was the only female artist to present a paper at the symposium. Composer Annae Lockwood was at DIAS, setting a piano ablaze, but the event was otherwise an entirely masculine affair. 

Ono gave a brilliant (and somewhat skeptical) talk, and performed a few works, including her classic Cut Piece, in which she kneels on the stage in her best dress next to a pair of scissors. The audience is invited to come and cut off a piece of her clothing and take it away with them. It went on to become one of the most legendary works of Performance Art. 

John Dunbar, the co-founder of Indica Gallery, attended the Destruction In Art Symposium and saw Ono perform. He invited her to produce an exhibition for the gallery, and less than two months later Ono met John Lennon at a preview, a day before the opening. 

Her simple back-cover-blurb for the book reads: "Gustav Metzger was an incredible artist. His energy changed the world.”

The promise of a rock star at the event was not deliberately deceptive. In the early sixties, Pete Townshend had been a student at Ealing College of Art, where he attended lectures by Metzger. In his 2013 book Who I Am: A Memoir, he wrote “Encouraged by the work of Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of auto-destructive art, I secretly planned to completely destroy my guitar [on stage] if the moment seemed right.” Rolling Stone magazine characterized the action as one of “50 moments that changed Rock and Roll”, influencing countless other guitarists, from Jimi Hendrix to The Clash to Kurt Cobain. 

Later in the book, Metzger reveals that he had hoped to have The Who perform at DIAS, but the band’s management dissuaded them. He then discusses some light show work he did for Cream and Pink Floyd. One could write an entire volume about the contemporary artists who ended up as footnotes in the history of pop music.

In addition to Ono’s endorsement, the back cover of the book includes a testimonial from Marina Abramović. She writes "Good art has to have many layers of meaning, so that every century can use it as needed at the time. Gustav Metzger’s art has many layers, but the most important is his ability to predict the future of mankind. This is why he is so relevant and important today.”

From his pioneering development of the concept of destruction in art (preceded only, really, by Jean Tinguely) to his Art Strike of the late seventies, to his campaigns for environmental awareness, Metzger was often far ahead of his time. More books about the artist and his work have been published in the seven years since his death than in his entire lifetime and long career. 

It’s possible that he felt this in tangible ways. “Hopefully somebody who is out there, listening, waiting, may respond to this cry of mine,” he tells Obrist. 

Edited by Karen Marta, Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist is a handsomely produced,  richly illustrated publication, augmented with a comprehensive chronology. It serves as a great introduction to Metzger’s work and a an excellent resource for those interested in the subject of Destruction in Art (I wish I had it last month when I gave a three hour lecture on the subject). 

The exhibition Gustav Metzger. And Then Came the Environment opened at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles on the 13th of September and continues through to January 5th, 2025.