What Occurs When Creation Is Destruction?

LOS ANGELES — A big piece of white nylon stretches between two poles. Artist Gustav Metzger, donning a fuel masks, sprays acid on the makeshift canvas. Over the course of his 10-minute movie, “Auto-Damaging Artwork: The Actions of Gustav Metzger” (1965), on view in Gustav Metzger: And Then Got here the Setting at Hauser & Wirth, the nylon’s beforehand taut, painterly floor is torn to shreds, revealing London’s River Thames past. Metzger’s utilization of acid calls to thoughts each the “acid rain” produced by the combination of poisonous particles and rainfall, and the “black rain” that fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima after the US detonated two atomic bombs in 1945; in a single 2009 interview, the artist referred to as the paintings an assault on “the programs of capitalism, but in addition inevitably the programs of warfare, the warmongers.” 

Artwork and warfare, abstractly, can also be the topic of Cai Guo-Qiang: A Materials Odyssey on the USC Pacific Asia Museum. The 2 artists can simply seem like opposites: Cai, born in 1957 in Quanzhou, China, produces work at a fast tempo, and his artwork is thought for its spectacular, explosive shows, which usually use gunpowder as their major materials. Metzger, who died in 2017, was an outspoken pacifist who fled his Nuremberg house in 1939 on Kindertransport along with his older brother; the remainder of his household was killed within the Holocaust. Each artists, although, toe the tremendous line between creation and destruction, generally with real-life penalties: Cai’s current efficiency, “WE ARE: Explosion Occasion” at USC’s Memorial Coliseum, which launched the Getty Basis’s PST: Artwork and Science Collide initiative, drew criticism for its loud fireworks, smoke, and shrapnel, requiring a couple of guests to obtain minor first-aid therapy. Seen collectively in LA this fall, Cai and Metzger illuminate a central drawback in art-making right this moment: What occurs when inventive pursuits, in actual fact, destroy?

And Then Got here the Setting is Metzger’s first present at Hauser & Wirth for the reason that gallery acquired his property and basis in 2020. The title is excerpted from his 1992 essay “Nature Demised,” which condemned company and governmental environmentalism for his or her a priori funding in mass manufacturing and capitalism. Metzger’s strategy to the problems addressed in his writing is delicate and prescient, attuned to the methods scientific invention can concurrently awe and hurt. In a single darkened gallery, the hypnotic “Liquid Crystal Setting” (1966/2024) shows a semicircle of seven floor-to-ceiling Kodak slide projections onto liquid crystal shows (LCDs). The work comes throughout like an allegory of worldwide warming: the LCDs, composed from the identical materials in cellphone, laptop, and radar screens, present oozing rainbows of coloration that morph based mostly on the warmth of the projector and the our bodies within the room. 

Metzger noticed an intimate connection between artwork, society, and the surroundings: every was and is created and destroyed by poisonous applied sciences and supplies utilized in warfare, mass manufacturing, and gasoline-powered transportation. Cai takes a narrower view, however his work alights on the identical connection between artwork and violence. In a sequence of work commissioned by the Guggenheim, on show at USC Pacific Asia Museum, he evokes the works of canonical Western artists utilizing his typical explosive technique. “Non-Model 非品牌 2” (2019) exhibits Rothko-esque rectangles of purple and orange gunpowder bifurcated by a thick black line, and “Non-Model 非品牌 5” (2019) appropriates Yves Klein’s traditional blue, now streaked with ash. These work render American and European artists inextricable from legacies of violence, whereas additionally connecting them to Chinese language historical past — gunpowder was invented in ninth-century China. 

However the place Metzger’s auto-destructive work usually resulted within the lack of artwork — spraying a nylon canvas with acid till it disintegrates, for instance — Cai is prolific, and his artworks are the results of rigorously engineered explosions that he himself has orchestrated. In his work, this destruction can reap celebration-worthy outcomes: “Gunpowder Research for October Revolution Centennial” (2017) shows a sequence of spherical, swirling bulbs of coloration, bleeding collectively to type an summary, painterly canvas. The paintings’s cautious, vibrant composition reveals an consideration to the inventive potential — and even aesthetic magnificence — of violent revolution, like that of the Bolshevik’s overthrow of Russia’s Tsarist monarchy referenced within the title. Different works, although, painting lethal occasions in a extra visceral, somber gentle: “Shadow: Pray for Safety” (1985–86), as an illustration, is a monumental canvas produced utilizing gunpowder, wax, and acid, that includes ghostly, laser-cut stencils of human figures, their flesh singed by golden sulfuric gunpowder; the impact emulates the burned pores and skin of Hiroshima victims.

It may be troublesome to discern a legible ethical place in Cai’s follow, however his work is commonly higher for it, as his ambivalence efficiently forces encounters with ugly, uncomfortable truths concerning the connection between creation and destruction. He may do nicely, although, to take a web page out of Metzger’s e book. With solely 18 works in his exhibition, together with one movie and two unrealized tasks, offered as scale fashions, Metzger’s comparatively restricted oeuvre displays an consciousness of the artwork world’s unwitting contribution to “the demise of nature,” from the fast, accelerating charge of creative output to emission-intensive artwork gala’s and worldwide exhibitions. Once I left Hauser & Wirth, the picture of Metzger’s acid-drenched, torn-to-shreds nylon canvas hovered in my head — unsalable, un-transportable, unassailable. If Cai exhibits us what artwork really is, then Metzger demonstrates what artwork will be. 

Gustav Metzger: And Then Got here the Setting continues at Hauser & Wirth (901 East third Road, Arts District, Los Angeles) by January 12, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Kate Fowle.

Cai Guo-Qiang: A Materials Odyssey continues at USC Pacific Asia Museum (46 North Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena, California) by June 15, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Rachel Rivenc, head of Conservation and Preservation on the Getty Analysis Institute.