First manifesto on auto-destructive art, published by Gustav Metzger on 4 November 1959, London. Metzger (1926–2017) wrote a series of manifestos on auto-destructive art between 1959 and 1966. The text below reproduces the first manifesto in its entirety, followed by key passages from the subsequent manifestos, with editorial commentary.
Gustav Metzger was born in Nuremberg in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents. He arrived in England in 1939 on the Kindertransport; most of his family perished in the Holocaust. This biographical fact is essential to understanding his work: auto-destructive art is not an aesthetic experiment but a response to industrialized annihilation. Metzger’s insistence that art should destroy itself was a direct confrontation with a civilization that had demonstrated its capacity for self-destruction on an unprecedented scale.
By the late 1950s, Metzger had become active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100, the direct-action wing of the British anti-nuclear movement led by Bertrand Russell. His manifestos on auto-destructive art emerged from this context — from the conviction that art could not continue to produce durable objects in a world that had developed the capacity to destroy all objects, all cities, all life, in a matter of hours. The manifesto was not a theoretical exercise; it was an emergency measure.
First Manifesto of Auto-Destructive Art (4 November 1959)
Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.
Self-destructive painting, sculpture, and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.
Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques, and technological techniques.
The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception.
The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.
Self-destructive art can be machine-produced and factory-assembled.
Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures, and constructions have a lifetime varying from a few moments to twenty years. When the disintegrative process is complete, the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped.
From the Second Manifesto (10 March 1960)
Each visible manifestation of the process of the disintegration of the work is a reflection of the disintegration of society.
Auto-destructive art mirrors the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture — polishing to destruction point.
Auto-destructive art is the transformation of technology into public art. The immense productive — Loss and waste in the engineering of destruction — and the psychological and social pressures of the arms race — are reflected in auto-destructive art.
Auto-destructive art demonstrates man’s power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them.
Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation.
From the Third Manifesto: Auto-Destructive Art, Machine Art, Auto-Creative Art (23 June 1961)
Auto-creative art is art of change, growth, movement. Auto-creative art is an attack on the sensibilities and form of conventional art.
Auto-destructive art and auto-creative art aim at the integration of art with the advances of science and technology. The disintegrative and creative processes can take place simultaneously. The total destruction of the work is an integral part of the total composition.
Each phase of the disintegrating process is a manifestation of a new form. A new form is born — simultaneously.
On Acid Nylon Technique
Metzger’s most iconic demonstration of auto-destructive art took place on the South Bank in London in 1961, when he sprayed hydrochloric acid onto nylon sheets stretched on a frame. The acid ate through the material in real time, producing a dissolving, collapsing surface — a painting that painted its own destruction. The demonstration was attended by, among others, members of a young band from Liverpool who would later commission Metzger to design the light show for their concerts. The connection between auto-destructive art and the emerging counterculture was not accidental: both shared an impatience with the permanence and possession demanded by bourgeois culture.
The acid nylon technique made visible what Metzger’s manifestos argued in language: that destruction is not the opposite of creation but its most honest form in a civilization organized around the preparation for its own annihilation. The nylon sheets, manufactured by the same industrial processes that produced military-grade materials, were returned to their entropic destiny — dissolved, collapsed, scrapped. The work’s refusal to persist was its most radical gesture.
Editorial Note on Significance
Metzger’s auto-destructive art manifestos occupy a unique position in the history of political art. They are simultaneously a product of the nuclear age and a prescient anticipation of ecological crisis — Metzger himself drew explicit connections between auto-destructive art and environmental collapse in his later work. His insistence that art must confront its own material conditions of production and destruction, that the artwork’s relationship to time and decay is not incidental but constitutive, anticipates much of what would later be theorized under rubrics of post-studio practice, institutional critique, and ecological art.
Metzger’s own life embodied the refusal of compromise that his manifestos demanded. He lived in near-poverty for most of his career, organized a three-year art strike (1977–1980), and continued to agitate for nuclear disarmament and environmental justice until his death in 2017 at the age of ninety. His work remains a standing challenge to any practice of political art that mistakes gallery representation for political engagement.
