zaterdag 10 juni 2017

Broke Rocks

The sculpture projects at Münster  opens today, and reminds me of a note I had made earlier this year, at the passing of Gustav Metzger

Broke rocks

Gustav Metzger, one of those artists that gets / got under your skin...
The ones you absorb by osmosis rather than name crunching... My earliest memory is of the car with its exhaust connected to a plexi box on its roof, withering plants... I think a version of a project planned for Documenta 5, not sure, but as a youngster I thought " hey, neat..." and it sort of stuck... Only much later did I learn that Townsend’s guitar-bashing and copy-cats were also to be traced to his auto-destructive ideas, and were influential in my own auto-subversive series... Again, without realizing the origins, much like Filliou, and admittedly I did sort of mix them up for ever so long, perhaps because of the misfits-gig... But I did always hark back to the DIAS and must admit indebtedness for my auto-subversive series way back when...

Anyway, like many I had sort of lost sight of his work (short exception was Explosiv,) Köln ‘81) until I got involved in a re-launching of his 'art strike' (by stewart home) in the nineties... Whence I interconnected with Ruine in Geneva and Fri Art in Fribourg -   As well as various process-projects that could be linked to origins to do with Metzger’s work... But he was not on the radar much... (himself avoiding the art-zoo)  but that something that really jolted me back to consider Metzger as artist was stumbling across his broken rocks at the Münster Skulpturprojekte in 2007... Literally...

It was a chaotic an rainy opening... We had planned to meet up with friends and participating artists but were blown off course... Downpours sent people scattering for cover at regular intervals and as it was we were perfectly happy to just let the whole show impress on us rather that scurrying to and fro following a checklist of some sort... 
Anyway, as it happened it was during one of the downpours that we were hurrying along a path trying to share an umbrella when a pile of stones made our passage difficult... In fact nearly stumbled... Yes, Stolpersteine...
(were they already in the news at the time?)
Broken rocks, chain gang material... If it had not been for a small sign stating that this was in fact the work of Gustav Metzger I would not have known... Later even saw the guy with his forklift fetching some stones... But it was only afterwards I read about the work and its computer generated chance distribution of rocks here and there... Ah equivalence! So it had been since the strike that I had encountered his work again... As it turns out he had been quite active... In my mind he was still under the radar investigating... But no, he had resurfaced and was still as vibrant & critical as ever... Even though in some ways perhaps recuperated by the establishment... But aware of that fact and making use of it.. And later work still could count on my approval... The intervention at the Haus der Kunst (former national socialist temple), the hidden photographs in full view, history winks... The flight ban for art-hoppers, and last but not least his call the head off extinction, remember nature, which we also contributed to... But alas, now a memory... Ist nicht mehr... In memoriam... And hopefully to continue in his vein.


(only just recently learnt more of his Antwerp connection... There was an interesting talk by ..... At the local university... Already planned before his death, mainly in reference to his work shown at Documenta 13 which I missed... but already during the famous fifth Documenta (or was it the first Skulpturprojekte?) his proposal for a work with car exhaust was very visionary, even if difficult to realize – now still, we’re arguing about the way we mistreat our environment... )

our cat investigating Metzgers open call / via Point d'Ironie


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