Mass Media / Media Mess
Gustav Metzger was born in Nuremberg in 1926 to Polish-Jewish parents and was evacuated to England as part of the Refugee Children Movement in 1939. He lives and works in London. For 60 years, Metzger has been a vehemently political artist and activist. In 1966 he initiated the 'DIAS-Destruction in Art Symposium in London', and invited artists from all over the world - among them the Vienna Actionists. The evanescence, the self-destruction in Metzger's works is also targeted against the international art market, a rejection of the monetary exploitation of art. An illustration of this position is his spectacular and momentous demand for the art strike in 1974. Gerhard Ruhm, born in Vienna in 1930, studied piano and composition at the National Academy of Music and interpretative Arts in Vienna and later received private tuition from Josef Matthias Hauer. He lives and works in Cologne and Vienna. Ruhm co-founded the "Wiener Gruppe" (1954-60). The group's radical language experiments are among the most important literary developments of the postwar era. From the very beginning, Ruhm has employed the use of various media in an effort to search new forms of artistic expression. Ruhm's work is based on the implementation of an absolutely interdisciplinary concept of the arts, oscillating between fine arts (visual poetry, gestural drawing, photomontage, objects) and music (auditive poetry, documentative melodramas and text-sound transformations). Opening: Thursday, January 17, 2013, 6 pm.