Man In Regent Street
is auto-destructive.
Rockets, nuclear weapons,
are auto-destructive.
Auto-destructive art.

The drop
drop
dropping

of HH bombs.

Not interested in ruins, (the picturesque)

Auto-destructive art
re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummeling to which individuals and masses are subjected.
Auto-destructive art
demonstrates man’s power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them.
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 capacity, the chaos of
capitalism and of
Soviet communism,
the co-existence of surplus and starvation;

the increasing stock-piling of nuclear weapons – more than enough to destroy technological societies;

the d i s i n t e g r a t i v e effect of machinery and of life in vast built-up areas on the
person,…

Auto-destructive art
is art
which contains within itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction
within a period of time not to exceed twenty years.

Other forms of
auto-destructive art
involve manual manipulation.

There are forms of auto-destructive art where
the artist
has a tight control over the nature and timing of
the
disintegrative
process,

and there are other forms where the artist’s control is slight.

Materials and techniques used in creating
auto-destructive art
include:

Acid, Adhesives,
Ballistics,
Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics,
Drop,
Elasticity, Electricity, Electrolysis,
Feed-Back,
Glass,
Heat, Human Energy,
Ice,
Jet,
Light, Load,
Mass-production, Metal, Motion Picture,
Natural Forces, Nuclear Energy,
Paint, Paper, Photography, Plaster, Plastics, Pressure,
Radiation,
Sand, Solar Energy, Sound, Steam, Stress,
Terra-cotta,
Vibration,
Water, Welding, Wire, Wood.

(From Gustav Metzler selections. Submitted by David Verghese)