Auto-destructive art

Witness History

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, History

4.5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1959 the German artist Gustav Metzger came up with a new and subversive form of art. He called it auto-destructive art. It was art as a political weapon and a challenge to the established status quo. Metzger, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, organised a series of events in London, called the Destruction in Art Symposium, DIAS, and invited radical artists from all over the world, including a relatively unknown young Japanese American, Yoko Ono. Mike Lanchin has been hearing from Welsh artist Ivor Davies, who helped Metzger launch the events and was himself an early pioneer of auto-destructive art.

Photo: Gustav Metzger demonstrates his auto-destructive art at London's South Bank, July 1961 (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC
0:35.4	Sounds.
0:36.4	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:40.9	My name's Linda Davies and I commissioned
0:43.0	podcast for BBC Sounds.
0:45.0	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality,
0:49.0	featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:54.4	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
1:00.9	poltergeist, cricket and conspiracy theories, Cricket, and Conspiracy Theories.
1:04.3	And that's just a few examples.
1:06.2	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected,
1:09.4	find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
1:25.6	Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Mike Lanchhen. Today we're going to talk about a radical art movement of the 1960s known as Autodesruptive Art.
1:30.1	It was about
1:37.2	daring shocking often involving some violence. Autodestructive art said its inventor Gustav Metzka was about art as a subversive political weapon, about the event not the object.
1:47.0	Welsh artist Ivor Davis was an early practitioner of autodestructive art.
1:54.7	I like to go to the extremes of any art form.
	...

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