[originally posted on my Facebook time line 6. October 2018]
BANKSY RIGHTFUL PLAGIARISM
in 2018 of the idea of
Auto-Destructive Art
by Gustav Metzger (1959/1961)
Banksy artwork self-destructs after selling at auction for £1m 1,883 – Guardian News Published on Oct 6, 2018: Girl With Balloon, a well-known Banksy artwork, is the final item in an auction at Sotheby’s in London. Shortly after selling for £1.04m, the canvas passes through a shredder installed in the bottom of the frame…
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Good overview on Gustav Metzger at this website/page: https://monoskop.org/Gustav_Metzger
[added contextual comment]
I did participate as a young man in the 1966 DIAS (Destruction In Art) symposium in London… so it struck me immediately that this was also a hommage to Gustav Metzger (as well as market-conspiracy (including Sotheby’s) with a double meaning re-valuation of a neatly (half threaded) work; mind you there have been many who started of with shifted around cut-ups of their work… the Czech poet/writer/artist Jiří Kolář being a famous one = http://www.tresbohemes.com/2017/08/the-striking-collages-of-jiri-kolar/) it also fits in the situ ‘détournement’ tradition a product from post WWII surrealist Lettrist actions & theory predating the Gustav Metzger first Auto-Destruction Manifesto of 1958)…
My visual lecture from the year 2000 traces back this idea of temporarity and the act itself as the artistic moment: http://imaginarymuseum.org/PTA/index.html (sroll number III tackles the ‘reification’ of the artistic gesture…)
What is misunderstood in most comments is that the art work is realised only at the moment of its self-destruction. Auto-destructive art is momentary art, whereby the act is the work and not the reification.
Postscript
On 17. October this video with the full story was published on YouTube
“Shredding Banksy’s the Girl and Balloon – The Director’s Cut”
https://youtu.be/9MezgOU9vRg?t=6
the limping messenger 