Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) was an artist best known for proposing Auto-Destructive Art. He died in London on 1 March 2017, aged 90. He was born into a Jewish family in Nuremberg and escaped to Britain in 1939 through the Kindertransport. Much of his family, including his parents, was killed in the Holocaust. These experiences informed his postwar thinking about nuclear weapons, Cold War arms expansion, capitalism, mass production, and environmental destruction as interconnected problems.
In his 1959 manifesto, Metzger described Auto-Destructive Art as “public art for industrial societies.” this concept refers to works designed to disappear over time, with corrosion, dismantling, and disappearance built into the structure of the artwork itself. Destruction is not an accidental external event; it is part of the work’s internal process. The artwork’s own mechanism produces its undoing, and that process becomes the work.
Metzger used this approach to expose what he saw as the self-destructive tendencies of modern society. By making a work’s sustaining system also the force that destroys it, he linked artistic form to broader questions about how industrial society uses the scientific knowledge, production power, and organizational capacity it has created.