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Pawel_Althamer | Michael_Asher | Nairy_Baghramian | Guy_Ben-Ner | Guillaume_Bijl | Martin_Boyce | Jeremy Deller | Michael_Elmgreen und Ingar_Dragset | Hans-Peter_Feldmann | Dora_Garcia | Isa_Genzken | Dominique_Gonzalez-Foerster | Tue_Greenfort | David_Hammons | Valérie_Jouve | Mike_Kelley | Suchan Kinoshita | Marko_Lehanka | Gustav_Metzger | Eva_Meyer und Eran_Schaerf | Deimantas_Narkevicius | Bruce_Nauman | Maria_Pask | Manfred_Pernice | Susan_Philipsz | Martha_Rosler | Thomas_Schütte | Andreas_Siekmann | Rosemarie_Trockel | Silke_Wagner | Mark_Wallinger | Clemens von Wedemeyer | Annette_Wehrmann | Pae_White

 


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Gustav Metzger

* 1926 in Nuremberg, lives and works in London



Project: Aequivalenz- Shattered Stones (Aequivalenz- Zerschmetterte Steine)

Forty years ago, Gustav Metzger already had such a radical view of art that he even demanded that people boycott his own creations – and for the next four decades he was entirely ignored by the art establishment. However, Metzger influenced people nonetheless. His auto-destructive art, for instance, inspired Pete Townshend from The Who to destroy his guitars, and his liquid crystals set on wafer-thin glass, which illustrate Metzger’s notion of auto-creative art, became an important feature in The Cream’s psychedelic stage shows. For skulptur projekte münster 07, the London-based artist has created a work that manifests itself fleetingly in the form of transient actions. By presenting the spectator with a machine and adding the factor of randomness, Gustav Metzger is promoting a radical extension of accepted unproductive notions of art. Every day during skulptur projekte münster 07 – that is on 107 occasions – a man will drive a forklift to the Westfälischer Kunstverein, step off the vehicle, go inside the building, and use a password to activate a computer program that will inform him, by means of a random generator, how many stones he has to take to a certain location in the city. The man will find his payload in the courtyard of the LWL-Landesmuseum, use the forklift to take it to the allotted place, and then make a photograph of the pile of stones. When he returns to the Kunstverein, he will post the image online for all to see.
www.aequivalenz.com


Biography

Gustav Metzger was born in 1926 into a family of Orthodox Jews in Nuremberg. After most of his family had been arrested and deported to Poland, he and his elder brother were able to flee the Nazi regime and escape to England with the help of the Refugee Children Movement. Later, Metzger studied art at the Cambridge School of Art in London. Since the late 1950s, he has been an important representative of action art. His works are closely associated with the concept of autodestructive art, and between 1959 and 1964 he published five manifestos on the subject. A reaction both to the nuclear threat and the degradation of art to a mere commodity, autodestructive art seizes upon existing destructive potential and transforms it into creativity. Dedicated to the aesthetics of the ephemeral, this creative process rarely leads to art objects that can be put on display.

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