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ABOVE: Gustav Metzger's landmark participatory artwork Mass Media (Today and Yesterday) featured thousands of newspapers from which visitors could select articles and images to create a collage of contrasting images and ideas
“Everything I know about activism,” he later said, “I learned in King’s Lynn.” The first event was Treasures From East Anglian Churches, an exhibition he
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organised as part of the 1961 King’s Lynn Festival in the famous undercroft of Clifton House opposite his shop. He travelled throughout the area, collecting sculptures, stained glass and items such as gargoyles from Norwich Cathedral and an angel’s head in coloured glass. Many of the exhibits had been mutilated or defaced during the Reformation or by 16th-century Puritans, and for Metzger was the whole point – the act of destruction actually (re)created the art. Around the same time, and virtually on Metzger’s doorstep, the borough council decided to construct a new road to improve dock-bound transport – a plan which would involve knocking down most of the old buildings and houses of the fishing community of the North End.
Metzger started the North End Society to campaign against this, and appeared in local newspapers demanding the historic area be preserved as residential – if it was renovated, he argued, it would look less like a slum. He was fighting a losing battle, however. Seeing the destruction of the North End as something of a personal failure, Metzger moved to London shortly thereafter – developing a type of art he called “public art for industrial societies” and promoting the creative use of computers in the arts. His influence even extended into popular music, his work being projected onto screens during concerts by Cream and The Who – whose guitarist Pete Townshend credited Metzger for inspiring his famous on-stage guitar-smashing antics. But some people never really understood the concept. In 2004, a recreation of Metzger’s first example of auto-destructive art was exhibited at Tate Britain, and the work included a bag of rubbish – which was mistakenly thrown out by a cleaner one evening. It’s unknown whether Metzger appreciated the irony. Despite a lifetime’s experience of destruction in all its many guises, Metzger (who died aged 90 in 2017) didn’t want to destroy art. He genuinely believed it had a role to play in helping society improve and preventing wars. “Can art do it instead of just politics?” he asked once. “Art can do it. Art must do it. And I must be one of the artists who do it.” KLmagazine December 2019