The future of the world is what we are after. We start with the young and then when the young are twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-one, they can enter politics, and if they have got this initiation/introduction to key issues … it will make an enormous difference to the future of the world.

(Gustav Metzger)

Gustav Metzger. And then came the environment is curated by Curatorial Senior Director, Kate Fowle and is presented in conjunction with the Getty Museum’s citywide PST ART initiative, ‘Art & Science Collide’.

And then came the environment presents a range of Gustav Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed Damaged nature.

Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) was born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents, fleeing Nazi Germany via the Kindertransport to England when he was 12. There, while working as a gardener, he began his art studies in Cambridge in 1945, a time and place marked by scientific experimentation as the Atomic Age dawned. By the late 1950s, Metzger was deeply involved in anti-nuclear protests and developing his manifestos on 'Auto-Destruction' and 'Auto-Creation'—which he said were aimed at “the integration of art with the advances of science and technology”—gaining recognition in Europe through exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations, and writings.

Throughout his life, Metzger had a curiosity toward new materials and tools. Experimenting with projectors, electronics, liquid crystals, and silicate minerals such as Mica, he collaborated with scientists to explore transformations from one state to another, describing this as “the art of change, of movement, of growth”. By the 1970s, Metzger was also closely involved with the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, raising awareness of increasing environmental degradation and social alienation, advocating for “old attitudes and new skills” to harmonize science, technology, society, and nature.

This exhibition presents Metzger’s early drawings alongside environmental and kinetic works from 1961 to 2014.

Exhibited for the first time in Los Angeles, works here include the earliest film documentation of Metzger’s bold chemical experiments on the South Bank in London (Auto-destructive art: the activities of G. Metzger, directed by H. Liversidge, 1963); his first mechanized sculpture with Liquid Crystals—Earth from space (1966)—and the stunning, large-scale projection, Liquid crystal environment (1966), one of the earliest public demonstrations of the material that makes Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs), now omnipresent in our computer, telephone and watch screens.

And then came the environment also presents Dancing tubes (1968), an early kinetic project Metzger developed in the Filtration Laboratory of the University College of Swansea; various iterations of his projects against car pollution including the model Earth minus environment (1992); and the Light drawing series (2014), made using fiber-optic light directed by air or hand.