The Arches / Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow
When Gustav Metzger talks about the doomed 1937 flight of the Hindenburg
in the same terms as the jet planes which crashed into the Twin Towers on 11
September 2001, it puts his ideas of auto-destructive art into an explicitly
political context which advocates creativity beyond catastrophe. Metzger’s
quietly gnomic presence at the Self-Cancellation strand of 2008’s Instal
festival gave things a sense of historical countercultural kudos not seen in
Glasgow since he was invited to take part in a 30th anniversary discussion of
the Destruction In Art Symposium in 1996.
Also present at both events was
novelist/agitator Stewart Home, whose early 90s Art Strike took inspiration
from Metzger’s 1970s model. Home pointed to how the nihilism of punk was born
from a brief time in the mid-1970s when, with industrial unrest crippling
Britain’s industries, there was the possibility of a real revolutionary situation.
Metzger himself observed at Saturday’s round table discussion, chaired by The
Wire contributor Brian Morton, that auto-destructive art was an “isolated
phenomenon, which never got beyond the manifesto stage”, but which was a
“failed project which could be resurrected any moment”. Self-Cancellation was
an attempt at such a resurrection, itself a bittersweet irony given that its
co-producers, London Musicians’ Collective, sit poised to be cancelled out by
shamefully small minded funding bodies.
Taking their moves from 9 Principles of
Self-Cancellation in Sound, a new ‘manifesto’ by harpist Rhodri Davies, on
Friday night ten musician-artists offered a variety of interpretations of
self-cancellation. These ranged from Robin Hayward playing his tuba as sand
slowly poured into the bell, the ultimate mute, to Lee Patterson’s close-miked
burning of seeds and plopping liver salts into glass containers filled with
measures of water. John Butcher manipulated saxophone feedback via the use of
piano wire and acoustic guitar rather than his breath. Michael Colligan worked
with dry ice, while Davies involved the entire company in Palimpsest #1, in
which nine Sudoku puzzles taken from The Guardian were used as a score,
overlaid until they cancelled each other out.
One of the most familiar meldings
of sound and space in commercially recognisable terms was Archisonic, Mark and
John Bain’s performed rendering of sounds picked up from seismic sensors and
oscillators attached to the venue itself. This generated an organic dub, which
later morphed into the sort of Techno beats the Arches are more used to in its
longstanding function as a Friday night club venue. Davies’s interpretation
with Benedict Drew and Chris Weaver of Metzger’s own Acid/Nylon, in which acid
was thrown onto materials that self-destructed on impact, was made all the more
powerful amplified and enlarged on a big screen.
On Saturday, Brian Morton
mentioned The Shout, Jerzy Skolimowsky’s 1978 film of Robert Graves’s story in
which a man’s vocal wail is powerful enough to kill. Mark Bain provided an
accidental parallel to this when he pointed out that Archisonic was a smaller
version of a system which destroyed buildings with sounds generated from their
own bricks and mortar.
Much of the discussion dealt with what self-cancellation
actually meant and how it differed from auto-destruction. For artist Ross
Birrell, who had invited Metzger to Glasgow in 1996, self-cancellation was
“more personal”. As a longtime advocate of Metzger and documentarist of
transitory site-specific art, Birrell more than anyone at Self-Cancellation
recognised its minefield of contradictions. For Rhodri Davies it was “less
about the self, more about cancellation. It’s less about me.”
This was in line
with Davies’s thesis that “sound dissipates. It is transient”, which he himself
took up as he caused pieces of his instrument, already dismantled and hanging
as if awaiting execution, to come crashing floorwards. Metzger was clearly
taken with these new keepers of the flame. Even as he talked of his German
boyhood in the shadow of the bomb, out of the rubble creativity was all. “It
will be fruitful,” he said, “and will multiply.”
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