Emma Ridgway on Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger with Jeremy Deller: June 5 2009, UN World Environment Day, Whitechapel Gallery, London
Does the fact that an artist like Gustav Metzger, who has been creating politically agressive aggressive works for 60 years, is so much in the spotlight at this late point in his career say anything about what we want of our artists now?
Tomorrow, RSA curator Emma Ridgway talks about the work of Gustav Metzger as part of Gustav Metzger Decades 1959 – 2009, currently at London’s Serpentine Gallery. It’s at 3pm Saturday 7 November at the Serpentine.
If you want a flavour of the talk, Ridgway’s recent interview with Metzger about his appeals to artists over the years, is a vivid demonstration of how passionate he is about art’s need to involve itself in the political sphere:
You were an activist before you were an artist. Was there a particular moment, or was it through Bomberg, that you decided that contemporary politics was going to be a core part of your work?
Yes, my interest in politics was there from the age of around 17. That was in wartime, around 1942 – 43, when I was living in Leeds and there I almost completely converted to the idea of becoming some sort of revolutionary figure –art at that point had no place in my conception of the future. It was only in the late summer of 1944, when I felt I would move away from the ideal of becoming a political activist to becoming an artist. So moving into art was a way of moving forward without giving up the political interest; because I thought one could fuse the political ideal of social change with art. For example, the writing of Eric Gill who was both an artist and a craftsman and politically involved was a kind of inspiration to me. I could see this possibility of using the ideas of social change within art, with art and not simply through political, economic activity.
Sometimes we visit exhibitions together and discuss the work. On a number of occasions you have been disinterested in the work because it lacked any political bite or ethical aspect. Is this something you feel artists work must contain?
Yes, I think that is inescapable and the more the world changes, is changing, in the direction of more speed and more activities. And the more that happens the more necessary it is for people to stand back and, not merely in the art sphere but in every sphere of intellectual activity, to stand back and distance oneself and come up with alternative ways of dealing with reality than going along with a direction that is essentially catastrophic and consuming itself and turning itself into a numbers game. Where the technology, especially the technology of the mobile phones and this endless sound machinery that people force into their biological mechanism, seems to be unstoppable; and the more it goes on, the more we need to stand aside and distance ourselves from this rush towards destruction.
Photograph by Benedict Johnson
Nature as violence: Gustav Metzger
I like this flickr photo Gustav Metzger’s Flailing Trees at the Manchester International Festival by Pete Birkinshaw aka BinaryApe, especially for the title BinaryApe gave it: Iä! Shub-Niggurath! 
The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
That reference, along with his link to Wikipedia, confirms him to be a fan of the fantastical writings of H P Lovecraft. This association brings out something scary in in Gustav Metzger’s work. Metzger had described the trees as being the victims: “This piece is all about brutality, the brutality we humans display towards nature.”
Seeing it as the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young inverts Metzger’s intention. As James Lovelock warns, it’s nature that’s soon to turn on us.
Madeline Bunting in today's Guardian: the "quiet powerhouse" that is RSA Arts & Ecology
Madeleine Bunting’s article on the role of arts in changing perceptions about the environment kicks off by looking at Radical Nature’s The Dalston Mill project, and discusses new work Gustav Metzger and new thoughts from Tim Smit and gives a very warmly appreciated nod to the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre’s work.
Something bizarre is happening in the area of Dalston, in London’s Hackney, where I live. As I write, half a dozen men are hunched over planting half-grown wheat on derelict wasteland. Next to them, architects are building a windmill that will generate the energy to power two bread ovens. When it opens on Wednesday, it will host breadmaking, music, theatre and feasts for anyone who wants to step away from the noise of the shops and traffic-clogged nearby streets.
It’s an installation linked to the Radical Nature exhibition, at the Barbican, in London, but it’s evidence of an art that is penetrating some of the least hospitable places, very far from galleries, to open up conversations in unexpected ways around our relationship with land, food and each other. Can we think differently about the way we use land, produce food and relate to each other?
The origins of Dalston’s wheatfield lie thousands of miles away, with Agnes Denes, one of a generation of American land artists who took art out of galleries and away from making objects to be bought and sold. In 1982 she planted wheat on two acres of wasteland on Battery Park, two blocks from Wall Street; her harvest was worth £158, produced on land valued at $4.5bn. The photos of waving golden wheat juxtaposed against the Manhattan skyline became an iconic image of environmental art. With her collaboration, her idea is now being recreated in Hackney.
At a time of growing anxiety about how we feed a crowded earth – food security was discussed at the G8 last week – her image of fertility and sustenance is even more poignant, and no longer outlandish. Such possibilities of food production in the city could be commonplace for our children. Havana, famously, learned to largely feed itself from within its city limits after imported Russian oil dried up in the 1990s.
The point about Denes’s work in Dalston – and the exhibition at the Barbican – is that it raises for a new generation the role art can play in shifting attitudes towards our natural environment. With fortunate timing, Tate Britain also has a retrospective of another land art pioneer of Denes’s generation, Richard Long. Or look north to Manchester’s International Festival and Gustav Metzger’s extraordinary uprooted, upended trees set into concrete. On every side, artists are putting their shoulder to the wheel, trying to prompt the revolution in values and attitudes required to deal with environmental crisis.
The WWF have just published an interesting piece of work on the need for new ways of reaching out to different identity groups (more of that later today), but it’s intersting to see Bunting spotting art’s role in transcending the boundaries of existing interest groups.
George Orwell: "all art is propaganda"
There are several curators who have been making the running in laying out the territory of arts’ response to environmental issues, from Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna of the excellent Latitudes to Maja and Reuben Fowkes of translocal.org. There’s a good wide-ranging interview with Maja and Ruben Fowkes in Antennae Magazine in which they discuss altermodernism, the macho nature of Land Art, and how in sustainable art, form becomes a matter of ethics. All great stuff. One thing in the interview pulled me up short though:
As curators, can you provide some idea as to how art has been influential or can be more effective in making people more environmentally aware? Should it ?
We do not envisage art to have utility. As soon as art is seen in this way it is connected to the art market and we’re back into the capitalist, market-driven, growth model of production. If the utility of art is understood as a vehicle for advocating social changes or raising environmental consciousness we come to the problem of art as propaganda, which can also be counterproductive, as it undermines the subversive potential of artistic autonomy.
It’s true this view represents an orthodoxy within art – that artists should not be looked to for their “utility” - but Maja and Ruben Fowkes present this orthodoxy in a way that shows up how questionable this notion is.
Utility isn’t the quality capitalism prizes in art, it’s its lack of utility. Capitalism, the market, call it what you will, drives art forward by seeing art as the ultimate surplus value – as an entity with no purpose.
Jake Chapman is always good on the notion of surplus value in art. This is him discussing George Battaille’s The Accursed Share:
The best argument for a work of art pertaining to that surplus value is that it’s an act of absolute pure capital, pure taste without purpose. I think you could assert that about high modernist art but it’s impossible to say that now, because contemporary art is anthropological, and it’s social.
[Read the full interview by Simon Baker in Papers of Surrealism [PDF 728KB]]
To resist the idea of art having no utility is to resist the market’s attempt to commodify it. I’m with Bob and Roberta Smith on this one; in Hijack Reality Patrick Brill writes about how artists should be happy with the leaden box ticking culture of public commissioning, because at least it is a tangible acknowledgement of a value in art that is non-monetary.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes say:
If the utility of art is understood as a vehicle for advocating social changes or raising environmental consciousness we come to the problem of art as propaganda, which can also be counterproductive, as it undermines the subversive potential of artistic autonomy.
Firstly, there is nothing less endearing about the world of art than art proclaiming its own autonomous subersive potential. Secondly, the idea that propaganda and “subversive potential” are mutually exclusive doesn’t bear close examination.
As George Orwell said, “all art is propaganda”. The importance, he went on, is to distinguish between “good” and “bad” propaganda.
Interestingly, Emma Ridgway’s excellent interview with Gustsv Metzger found him referencing Eric Gill as a major influence. I’ll leave the last word on this to Eric Gill:
Art which is not propaganda is simply aesthetics and is consequently entirely the affair of cultured connoisseurs. It is a studio affair, nothing to do with the common life of men and women, a means of ‘escape.’ Art in the studio becomes simply ’self-expression,’ and that becomes simply self-worship. Charity, the love of God and your neighbour, which, here below, every work of man must exhibit, is lost. If you say art is nothing to do with propaganda, you are saying that it has nothing to do with religion – that it is simply a psychological dope, a sort of cultured drug traffic. I, at any rate, have no use for it. For me, all art is propaganda; and it is high time that modern art became propaganda for social justice instead of propaganda for the flatulent and decadent ideals of bourgeois Capitalism. (excerpt from a letter to The Catholic Herald, 28 October 1934)
Gustav Metzger: artists "taking moral standpoints"
Forty-eight years ago today, Gustav Metzger took a bottle of hydrochloric acid to the South Bank and set about destroying suspended sheets of nylon in an act of what he called Auto-Destructive painting. For Metzger, whose personal world view was formed in the shadow of World War II, this was an act of protest against war, capitalism and the commodification of the art world. Half a century on he is still making corrosive art. The Manchester International Festival opened yesterday, with Gustav Metzger’s Flailing Trees, 21 literally up-rooted willow trees , as one of its centrepieces. “This project,” he says, “is about brutality, the brutality with which we human beings mistreat nature.”
On the RSA Arts & Ecology site curator Emma Ridgway interviews Metzger about his long career and, in particular, the various “appeals” he has made to artists to become more politically engaged.
Gustav Metzger: In the broadest sense it is a question of artists being part of a much wider community — a world community — and facing up to the world-wide conditions that may make future life impossible. To oppose those world developments that are extremely destructive. Taking moral standpoints and from there moving into political activities, however modest, to affect the world.
Emma Ridgway interviews Gustav Metzger.
Should we still be flying for art's sake?
When Emma Thompson joined the protest against the third runway at Heathrow earlier this year, MP Geoff Hoon was scathing. “She’s been in some very good films,” he said. “Love Actually is very good, but I worry about people who I assume travel by air quite a lot and don’t see the logic of their position.”
I remember being extremely disturbed by what he said. Shocked even. Here was a former Defence Minister and Chief Whip, one of the tough guys, publicly coming out in favour of an excruciatingly meandering rom com. One of Richard Curtis’s worst, in fact.
Less surprising was Hoon’s attack on an actress for joining the ranks of the climate protestors. When artists lend their weight to a cause they open themselves to charges of hypocrisy. Who is she, an actress who flies across to Hollywood on a regular basis, to tell us not to fly?
The poets John Kinsella and Melanie Challenger are currently writing a work for the RSA Arts & Ecology website called Dialogue between the body and the soul, which grew out of both the poets’ decision not to fly to poetry readings. Now, even if every published poet in the world gave up flying it would hardly dent the world’s carbon footprint, but for each of them it is a major decision. Poetry is an endangered species of an artform, and practitioners have to take their audience wherever they find it. For Challenger, who is a new poet starting out, this is the kind of public commitment that could hobble her career for good.
Interestingly, there have been rumblings of unease elsewhere in the art community about the amount of too-ing and fro-ing required by the modern art machine. Two years ago Gustav Metzger initiated Reduce Art Flights; a manifesto contribution to Sculpture Projects Münster that called for artists to go cold turkey on their addiction to international travel.
With full cognisance that it is ‘a drop in the ocean’, the RAF ‘manifesto’ nevertheless invites voluntary abandonment – a fundamental, personal, bodily rejection of technological instrumentalization and a vehement refusal to participate in the mobility increasingly endemic to the globalized art system.
And earlier this year artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow invited colleagues to sign a “I will not fly for art“ pledge. Garrett and Catlow are the people behind furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery. The Geoff Hoon in you might feel tempted to note that both are committed to the ideas of virtual art in networked space. Give up flying? Well, maybe that’s easy for them to say.
The point is there is no one-size-fits-all pledge. That’s the unfairness of Hoon’s jibe. We may accept that air travel has been the UK’s fastest growing emissions sector in this decade, and that carbon emitted by planes in the atmosphere is more damaging than carbon emitted by cars on the ground. We may perfectly reasonably oppose plans for further airport expansion. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want Emma Thompson to fly to the US to make Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang. (OK. Bad example.) Some artforms would disappear without travel. For others it’s more of an indulgence.
As Dialogue between the body and the soul winds to a conclusion, I’m going to use it as an excuse to ask a few writers and artists their thoughts on what they do — and don’t — feel comfortable to publicly commit to. But where do you draw your line? How do you come to your own personal accomodation with this? Are you willing to stick your neck out and risk the Hoonist barbs or does the risk that your campaigning might overshadow your art make you uncomfortable about making such grand gestures?
I’d ask Geoff Hoon himself, but he’s keeping his head down this morning as the latest victim of the Daily Telegraph’s Five Minute Hate.
Manchester Festival announces programme: it's good
The second Manchester International Festival released its 2009 programme this week. It’s turning into the the best multi-platform arts festival in the UK – but then the size of its budget – a whopping £10m this year – probably helps with that. That said, they’re making great artistic decisions. While the Edinburgh International Festival is clearly on the up under Jonathan Mills, Manchester is setting a great standard in new commissions.
And obviously chosing to put an image for Gustav Metzger’s new plea for environmental sanity Flailing Trees, which is one of those commisions, on the cover shows a kind of ethical intent which other festivals need to match.
More about Metzger’s sculpture here.
Can art lead on carbon reductions?
Matthew Taylor in his blog on Monday sent out a mobilising call for ideas and active engagement by individuals and communities in addressing the absolute imperative of decreasing our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. At the moment, as Peter Head said recently in this Arts & Ecology interview, despite the talk there’s little sign from central and local government that we’re any closer to moving towards that target.
The arts have to be more involved than we are in responding to this.
Heaven knows, there’s abundant creativity in the arts sector, which is what is massively needed. I believe there’s also the will amongst an increasing number of individuals and organisations. We have some brilliant initiatives afoot that demonstrate this – galleries and theatres from TATE to Arcola are activating energy reducing strategies. Tipping Point, Cape Farewell and Julie’s Bicycle are doing their damnest to get everyone to wake up. Julie’s Bicycle is launching the Green Music Guide next month – an action plan that aims to reduce the London Music Industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2025. Many artists are incredibly carbon light already, Gustav Metzger being a prime example of someone who addresses the underlying issues in his work, someone who has refused to fly for decades and who nobody could accuse of materialism.
But somehow the impetus for fundamental change is still lagging somewhere in the inactive bracket of our collective arts sector behaviour and image. The message isn’t going out that we are fundamentally bothered. What the public sees are the financial successes, Damien Hirst’s auction being a sublime example, that are splashed across the media.
How do we encourage and reveal, far more publicly, the altruism and ideas that are currently under the radar? We are planning an Arts & Ecology month in June which celebrates and encourages altruism and treading lightly on the planet. Please get in touch if you are involved in initiatives that we don’t know about.
Here’s to getting more visibility for positive action!
Image: Still from Whole Earth by Christopher Keller 2006/7. Currently on show as part of the exhibition Moral Imagination: Current Positions Contemporary Art in the Face of Global Warming
Gustav Metzger
The podcasts of the Nuclear Forum are now all online. There’s a wealth of material there. Particularly striking is the final contribution (at the end of the third file) from the artist Gustav Metzger. Touching on art, his obsession with the newspaper and on humanity’s relentless urge to self-destruction, it should probably be listened to as a whole – it’s a kind of prose poem as much as a statement – but here, meanwhile, is a brief extract (with a personal endorsement for The Guardian):
There are restaurants where diners are placed next to glass tanks with sharks gliding along the glass walls. That is how we, thanks to Hubble, view or can view galaxies safely ensconced in our earthly habitat. We are told repeatedly that life on earth started as star fragments entering earth… Is it, then, that we are joined at the hips with the entire universe with galaxies engaged in that constant and endless creative destruction? The stars entered our blood stream ages and ages ago – still coursing through our veins? Have we internalised the universe? According to theory we are perpetually bombarded, penetrated indeed, by cosmic rays and so totally fusing with the cosmos with or against our will. We might as well accept, there is no choice except to run through permutations again and again testing, testing, testing. We do need to face stellar realities, understand that we are linked to the incomprehensible, destructive powers beyond us and ask are we affected, are we in irresistible chains of connections?
Nietzsche’s vision for the future of evolution of the human being peaked at the mountain, the mountain tops, that was “xxx” years ago, that is a figure in chronological time, but when we reflect on this in real time we are then faced with totally different perspectives. In the time since Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Nietzsche, 1883] humans have entered space flight and are exploring outer space. Computing power, as you know, doubles every eighteen months, time is so packed, our understanding of time is so complex so extraordinary and expanded in so many directions that it is understandable that we transpose Nietzsche’s simile to our accepting the burden of aligning ourselves to the stars and galaxies. For him, mountain peaks were the top, for us I suggest stars and galaxies are our kind of equivalent of what he was driving towards.
Let me now endeavour to bring this all back to earth, the earth of the Evening Standard, and of the Today programme. Humanity, I suggest, needs to enter the state attained by the aeroplane as it touches down at the end of the journey when the flaps on the wings emerge to hold back the plane’s advance. We need to uncover and restrain the human drive to the extreme. Intellectuals have a duty to tell the public that the game is up, that there will be no permanent life on earth. We need to search for the origins of destructive drives in human beings, emersion in contemplating the awesome, and indeed beautiful, imagery of galaxies as we can apprehend it through Hubble, may lead to cathartic resolutions.
Photo: 100 000 Newspapers. A Public-Active Installation by Gustav Metzger 2003, T1 2 Artspace, London, exhibition view.
Big thanks to Naomi Darlington for transcribing Gustav Metzger’s talk.
More nuclear
Ruben Fowkes of Translocal at art and sustainability blog on Gustav Metzger’s appearance at the Forum:
The last presentation was by the veteran conceptual artist Gustav Metzger, who used the categories of ‘presience’ and the ‘extreme’ to approach the notion of apocalpyse, looking back to moments in modern art history, such as Picasso’s Guernica, while picking up on amusing but significant slices of life culled from the British press, such as a report that Abramovich is buying a house in Kensington, in order to pull it down and build a bigger one, but bomb proof. His message was in the end quite pessimistic, as he said that no one wants to realise that ‘there is no permanent life on earth.’
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