IS NO MORE: ON GUSTAV METZGER

Abstract

Is No More is a title of the last – and one of many – unrealised projects by Gustav Metzger. It references the so-called Stroop Report, which was written by Jurgen Stroop to document the liquidation of Warsaw Ghetto. Its author titled it The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More. For the first time Metzger was conceiving a work that inscribed the artist’s personal, individual (hi)story into the larger frame of collective history. Born in a family of Polish Jews, he was taken to England in 1939 under the auspice of Refugee Children’s Movement, and was orphaned shortly after, his parents having perished in the Holocaust. Being deprived of family, home and country ushered in Gustav Metzger’s sensibility and awareness, which made him the person and artist that we know today: engaged, radical and uncompromising when it comes to the issue of the ethic in art. Today Metzger is considered a precursor and pioneer of awareness-raising movements against political violence, against destructiveness of capitalistic greed, against commercialisation of art. He has been, and still acts as “the consciousness of the world”, faithful to his initial vow to apply all of his intellectual and creative potentials to contribute to the social emancipation and wellbeing of the collective. Departing from his monumental and unrealized projects, this text will seek to analyse the cardinal points of Metzger’s oeuvre that address the phenomena of destruction, along with its opposite: creation. Through this dualistic and dialectic relation, Metzger depicts history, which for him is never a static concept. Most of all, it is never definite.