Abstract
June 18, 1967, Monterey, California. Behind the scenes of the first great open-air concert, a bitter argument between two rock bands breaks out over the order of the lineup. The Who do not want to go on after the Jimi Hendrix Experience, nor the other way around. The two frontmen, Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, remain intractably opposed. That neither is willing to defer to the other is by no means due only to vanity, but rather a very tangible reason. At the climax and close of their sets, both bands have outrageously dramatic displays of showmanship planned: they want to use their own instruments to destroy their equipment. Clearly, such a spectacle cannot be performed before the same audience twice in one night. In an attempt to find a solution, John Philips of The Mamas and The Papas flips a coin. Hendrix loses and defiantly declares that he will pull out all the stops. What results is one of the most bizarre and sensational performances in the history of rock music.
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Notes
From Michael Bloomfield, “Michael Bloomfield Reminisces,” in Guitar Player, September 1975,
as quoted in Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy (1990) new and improved ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), 104.
Cf. Jonathan Jones, “Schools of Thought” in The Observer March 18, 2000. In it, British art schools are referred to as “engines of our counterculture.”
Patrick Neylan-Francis, “The Who” in Rock: The Rough Guide, 2nd ed., eds. Jonathan Buckley, Orla Duane, Mark Ellingham, and Al Spicer (online) (London: The Rough Guides, 1999), 1083.
Gustav Metzger, “Auto-Destructive Art” (1959) in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 401.
Gustav Metzger, “Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art” (1960) in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, eds. Stiles and Selz, 402.
Gustav Metzger, “Auto-Destructive Art, Machine Art, Auto-Creative Art” (1961) in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, eds. Stiles and Selz, 402.
Gustav Metzger, “Manifesto World” (1962) in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, eds. Stiles and Selz, 403.
See Gustav Metzger, “On Random Activity in Material/Transforming Works of Art” (1964) in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, eds. Stiles and Selz, 404.
On Gustav Metzger’s biography, see especially Astrid Bowron, “Ein Schnitt entlang der Zeit — Versuch einer Biographie” in the catalog Gustav Metzger: Ein Schnitt entlang der Zeit eds. Kunsthalle Nürnberg (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 1999), 47–63.
Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell, eds., Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realism: Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek: Rowohlt Vlg., 1965).
George Macunias, “U.S. Surpasses all Nazi Genocide Records” in Fluxus, etc.: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection Catalog, ed. Jon Hendricks (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbook Academy of Art Museum, 1981), 390.
Justin Hoffmann, Destruktionskunst. Der Mythos der Zerstörung in der Kunst der frühen sechziger Jahre (München: Vlg. Silke Schreiber, 1995).
This often only paraphrased quote reads in full: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1951) in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 34;
the German-language version can be found in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I ed. Rolf Tidemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), 30).
Gustav Metzger, “Kunststreik” 1977–1980 in Gustav Metzger: Manifeste, Schriften, Konzepte (Munich: Schreiber, 1997), 44f.
Dorothee Müller, “Leben im Widerstand” in Süddeutsche Zeitung (München), March 25, 1999, 22.
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© 2014 Timothy Scott Brown and Andrew Lison
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Kraushaar, W. (2014). Guitar Smashing: Gustav Metzger, the Idea of Auto-destructive Works of Art, and Its Influence on Rock Music. In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_8
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