Gustav Metzger - Avenging Angel?

An essay by Wolfe Lenkiewicz

The elements of the show


Exhibit 1: the bulletproof glass box.

Here we have a glass box roughly replicating the historical one used by Eichman in his trial. With the obvious differences of the glass not being strengthened etc. Its look is also much of a vitrine used in many contemporary artists work. Let us look at the individual, which it caged in 1962:

Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) headed the Gestapo Department IV for Jewish Affairs; serving as 'Jewish specialist' he was the man who kept the trains punctually delivering their Jewish cargo into the death camps during the “Final Solution”.
"The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews, " Eichmann was the man who planned the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union, estimated at 11 million and also approved the use of Zyklon-B, and witnessed the extermination process. Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May of 1945, Eichmann was arrested and confined to an American internment camp but managed to escape due to his being relatively unknown to them.  In 1950, the SS underground helped him to Argentina where he took the pseudonym Ricardo Klement for a decade. Israeli Mossad agents kidnapped him on May 11, 1960. Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes."‘Why me?" ; he asked, ‘Why not the local policemen, thousands of them’? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews.” He was found and guilty hanged on May 31, 1962.

Let us consider this box conceived by Metzger as to be interpreted in three separate ways:

A
To be clear the box has a door in which visitors may or may not open and be seated in the empty chair inside. The box is set up much like a catholic confession where the priest becomes the gallery audience externally as witness to the empathetic individual now “housed” or to be more exact voluntarily and temporarily “imprisoned” and tested by this vitrine of conscience

B
It may also be seen as a time travelling device whereby a person may attempt to bridge a moment of history with the present and evoke through this historical rupture some sense of truthful em- ergency.

C
It could also be seen as a sculptural object not so surprisingly as its position has been transposed from a court of international law to a gallery. This cultural transformation has necessitated a limited aesheticisation in keeping with the delicate subject matter of its past host. An impersonal minimal and late modernist style has been adopted for this purpose. Fair-weather references to less heady subjects than Gestapo but rather juvenile death heads by Quinn and Hirst come to mind.

 
Exhibit 2: the print of Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novas’ and a cue from Walter Benjamin.

(As an aside the artist Paul Klee made a fortune out of exhorting money from the German occupied territories and the art market commercial boom of WW11.)

There is no press release, only this extract from Walter Benjamin in reference to the print of the angel on the wall hung adjacent to the glass box.

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novas’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, and his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Let us look at this quote in relation to history and the notion of time. In some ways the angel is incapacitated and impotent in its ability to turn time backwards. In the quote there is a desire to implement change and a sense of urgency in this to turn back the tide of catastrophe, which has shored up behind its forward movement. In many ways one could consider the Marxist stance as a deliverance from its impotence. I think Metzger has been deeply affected by this philosophy of redemption through history. The general idea is to evoke a historical epoch/person/work and rein act through empathy its historical instance. The past may be seized as it flashes up in an illuminated moment, recognized and never seen again. Gottfried Keller says, “the truth will not run away from us". The picture of the past we hold on to is not the actuality of how it was, but rather a memory we seize hold of in the flash of a moment of danger. This ‘truthful’ historical reflection can be seen as messianic. The Messiah comes as a redeemer but also as an attempted victor over the antichrist. Only when the victor has won over evil will the living and even the dead be safe.

Historians essentially sympathise with the victorious. Alexander the Great invoked a historical idea of Achilles and realised the victor warrior in his campaigns across Asia. History has written him up as a hero and sympathised with his achievements. A sympathy with the victor always benefits the ruling class allowing “the wind blowing in from paradise” to paralyse the angelic and ethical retroactive force and so enabling progression through history of these victory trophies.
A Marxist historical perspective is that of the class struggle where the access of basic material things is necessary without which the spiritual and aesthetic things could not take place. The victor whom has amassed their success on the downtrodden is being brushed against by the attempted reversal of events by the courageous and resourceful qualities of the abused workforce. The glory of the victor will be brought into question at each and every turn in past and present tense.
Cultural treasures (historical-hysterical)

Let us examine a crude Marxist argument, which may be put forward as having a detached and neutral response to the cultural treasures used by the ruling class as simple propaganda. This engenders a distrust of all cultural commodities as suspect and to be put on as some kind of aesthetic political trial. Objects. Gallery walls, expensively made materials, large scale installations in guilds and churches etc or corporate art.
Metzger is certainly responding to this by drawing up auto-destructive manifestos, art strikes and impersonal near symbolically non-aesthetic exhibit/archives. The nature of the container of these exhibits is also symbolic as they are alternative art spaces or institutions. This negative economy model must be presented as evidence to which is damaging to the accused (which is not of my concern at this juncture) but also to the artist, which is plainly wrong. As an example we may take the artist Michelangelo Buonarotti onto the witness stand ( via a similar messianic impulse of evoking a historical personage). Unlike the making of simplistic and plainly fascist sculpture/Arcadian propaganda art for the Reich, Buonarotti has codified and problematised his art for the Vatican institution it is made for. The supply and demand of the rulers has been truly beneficial but also a cause for concern and maintained as a tradition. During the Counter Reformation it is a near miracle the work survived at all. The cultural treasures themselves are also rupture points in history, which can and must be seen as radical socio-economic negotiates. It is too simplistic to burn and destroy as a conceptual latter day Savonarola.

I hereby ask the jury to consider my accusing of Metzger of aesthetic arson, a bonfire of vanities fanned by deconstructive hysteria rather than interpretive history.  Historical materialists view them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin, which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.

The conformism, which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning, attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work, which was supposed to tend toward technological progress, constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularised form.

Exploitation of nature.
According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labour, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labour, which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations, which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labour.
We need history, but not the way a spoiled
Loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.
Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History
The avenger the Spartacist group
Redeemer of future generations

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. Man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time.
He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history - blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelled**The Hegelian term ‘aufheben’ in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.
For the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

The container of the container the gallery - alternative spaces – intentional communities.                                                   

2

The sixties

The utopian model of sixties optimism being the Tim O’Leary tune in switch off and drop out is the common cliché of the flower children era. Trotsky’s and Beuys’ philosophy was doing their rounds. Grand pro-active discussions were taking place and they thought the world would fall in and follow the proposed patterns. Eden was not far away. 40 years later at the age of 81 Gustav Metzger has not changed in his essentialist position.

Aesthetics ethics and politics

1. The son of Jewish holocaust victims Metzger found himself shipped off to Britain as a refugee child. Many of his early works were informed by his teacher friend David Bomberg in their south London school. Strained by Bomberg’s sycophantic following Metzger pursued his own studies into painting already considering the vital questions threatening human existence. One of his first oil paintings was of a nuclear explosion. The question he asked was how might the triumvirate of significant meaning in art be devised. Politics, aesthetics and ethics? One method of answering this was to make a work, which dealt with all three with clarity. Setting up on the south bank Metzger (wearing a gas mask) stretched three colours of nylon bought last minute in Soho. The colours were black for fascist white for liberal and red for communist. He then sprayed the material with hydrochloric acid using a gentle plant sprayer. The nylon rapidly disintegrated leaving interesting patterns and revealing the urban landscape behind them. Aesthetics was apparent in the exchange or transposition of paint to destroy and destroying material. In many ways the halfway point looks much like a painting by Bomberg. Ethics became an issue when destruction attracts our attention in pleasing ways. A bomb is to many a very appealing sight in awesome shape and colour. Politics is entered through the performative stance of the work. It resists becoming a commodity as it ceases to be thus acting as a negative market economy.
2. The essentialist theory where art must consciously combine all three elements may be brought into question. Must all three elements be fused together for the artwork to be significant? A person may interact with all three with different practices. The marching against a cause, engaging with a specific aesthetic and philosophical critique in the making of an art work and voting etc. this is further problematised by the historical sources of art being saturated with political propaganda and co-opting of art styles. The artists were never essentially free of being integrated into a hierarchical power structure. One could take this further and say there were never any artists at all but rather effective and skilled adverts for the power that was dictated at that time and place.
3. A community of artists can be drawn up as Metzger did with ‘DIAS’ ( Destruction of Art Symposium) in 1966 at the Ica. Many of the artists chosen were “political artists” such as John Latham and the Viennese actionists.
4. Can a positive economy be engaged with by artists, which can enable a larger community of others? If we engage without intention to cripple a co-operate body which is doing harm to our fellow humanity may we not turn this co-operative act into example.
Libraries for the Mexican downtrodden and institutes for the disabled have been set up along these lines.
Is it not possible to reforest alternative cultural programs from aggressive commercial engagement? A kind of fair trade commerce within the gallery. It is politically ethical to make an artwork, which is permanent and can have monetary value.
The negative economic space i.e. squat gallery, non-profit making, artist run etc model is only one acceptable damage limitation proposal.


Let us consider the larger commercial celebrity galleries - are they not exclusively creating a rarefied hierarchy in order to sell works of art stars. This excludes from the market a vast amount of “positively” commodifiable culture. The joker’s queens and kings of this useless pack of cards ought to see the writing on the wall.



On 3 July 1961, Gustav Metzger gave a public demonstration of Auto-destructive Art on the South Bank in London where he sprayed and painted acid onto three red, black and white nylon 'canvases'; the disintegration of each nylon 'canvas' was the act of creation of Auto-destructive Art. In true Dadaist style, Metzger issued a series of manifestos to accompany the demonstration where he explains Auto-destructive Art as 'an attack on capitalist values and the drive towards annihilation'.
Metzger's experiences of Nazi Germany and his subsequent commitment to pacifism led him to become an active member of CND and founder member of the Committee of 100. Metzger's political commitment led inevitably into conflict with the authorities. In advance of a demonstration in 1961, Metzger (along with Bertrand Russell and thirty-five of the Committee of 100) spent one month in prison for refusing to be bound over to keep the peace. Metzger's commitment and deep-rooted sense of the destructivity at the heart of the human condition
Considered the stockpiling of nuclear weapons to overkill scale as a 'bloody farce threatening the existence of humanity itself'. This revulsion and disgust at the violence in society, was reflected in the work of disaffected post-war artists, which, in 1966, led Metzger to organise the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS).
Gustav Metzger is an extremist; or rather his methods are extreme. Metzger refers to 'damaged nature', he cannot simply ignore it; he fights fire with fire and sees it as his duty to contemplate extremes. Metzger views destructivity as integral to any act of creativity:
'Art arises from the feeling and the knowledge that the line between a generative and a destructive reality is paper thin'.



                                                            3


'The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.'(Walter Benjamin)

‘One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,’ writes Lotze, ‘is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.’ Happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils, which fall to the victor, that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations. The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image, which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.
The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers
The spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin, which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.

The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work, which was supposed to tend toward technological progress, constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form.


 ( In process of writing..)

Wolfe Lenkiewicz