Excerpts from a discussion between Carina Plath and Gustav Metzger, London, 27 April 2007.
CP: Mr. Metzger, can you tell us how the idea for the project in Münster came about?
GM: It started with the 1997 catalogue for Skulptur Projekte where Walter Grasskamp writes that the destruction of Münster was a reaction by the British and American governments to the destruction of Coventry by the German air force. This gave me the idea to work on this destroyed city and commemorate the past with this project, using the stones scattered day by day throughout the city. This spawned the next idea: that one could actually take the same principles to Coventry and in this way create a connection between two cities and two countries.
CP: Do you think of your artistic practice in terms of sculpture?
GM: Not really. However, in my installations I usually work in three dimensions. If it was up to me I would rather characterize myself as a painter, which has more to do with my development as an artist. In my life I’ve painted far more pictures than I’ve created sculptures. My paintings were figurative and abstract, with a Surrealist influence. But I gave this up as I wrote the Manifesto of Auto-Destructive Art and concentrated on developing auto-destructive art, which at the same time comprises kinetic art, they go hand in hand. Mind you, the auto-destructive monuments are the most important thing for me and they are naturally sculptures. But they were unfortunately never realized and exist only as models.
CP: What triggered the writing of the first Manifesto of Auto-Destructive Art in 1959?
GM: My personal development since childhood. Experiencing the »Reichskristallnacht« [Nazi pogrom of November 1938] when the remaining members of my family saw the burning synagogues. If that’s not destruction, then what is? Synagogues that people had entered almost on a daily basis for a whole lifetime. No explanation was needed to tell us what was going on.
CP: Destruction, on the one hand this is a recollection of the war, but it is also a very potent ant-bourgeois moment that directly recalls Dada and similar performance-oriented artistic practices. When you create a monument that then disintegrates, destruction is deployed as a means of production.
GM: That’s exactly what happens. And it has been misunderstood so often. If one only thinks about the destruction, then one loses sight of so much that is immanent to the theoretical work that preceded it or is evident in the realization of the work. One should rather imagine a waterfall, where water repeatedly cascades into itself, where a destruction of the form takes place, a shift or transformation of the form. That is the objective of auto-destructive art, to create this transformation and show it to the viewer.
CP: One can understand your project for Münster on the one hand as being based on destruction and as a kind of monument. On the other hand, it is naturally just like a kinetic sculpture in the city, one that grows only to disappear again after 107 days. These are all aspects you have described in your manifestos on auto-destructive art. The question this poses for me is that of future prospects. One could also understand the project that someone who was greatly affected by the war personally wants to remind today’s youth that this war actually took place.
GM: Art as a warning reminder, precisely, this is one aspect of auto-destructive art and at this point I come back to the war that I lived through. Apart from what the Germans did in the concentration camps, apart from the burning cities everywhere, and then of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was my childhood and youth, and it was my rite of passage. All this coalesced with the necessity I felt to express something through art, to accomplish something that can exist in relation to the world. And for me that means facing up to history.
CP: I see in your project for Münster a number of links to auto-destructive art, for instance the random generator and the loose form that grows bit by bit. Aspects of kinetic art are evident through the forklift that moves through the city and is itself also part of the sculpture. This fundamental idea, to give a city a monument that it cannot actually use as such because it vanishes again in the moment of its culmination and has no real value in a bourgeois sense, is something that I find extraordinarily interesting.
GM: Yes, that’s right, all of what you said is relevant. One central concern of mine is how the young generation no longer takes an interest in these things. They’re not interested in history, but through this work I want to prompt them to think about history, and perhaps motivate them to change their way of life. In this sense it is also a kind of a memorial that sends a warning to today’s youth.
CP: Many people may wonder that someone with your biography is so strongly concerned with the »culprits«. One could have expected that you would have rather tended towards a work on Münster’s Jewish population.
GM: Accounting for the past is important, it’s as simple as that. I’m strongly in favor of moving away from continually burdening Germany or Japan with guilt. I back any attempt to critically reappraise history.
CP: In this respect your work here is not just retrospective perspective but also formulates one directed towards the future, one of conciliation and not just commemoration of an historical event.
GM: Yes, that’s what I’m attempting at any rate.