Gustav Metzger Begins Creating Auto-Destructive Art

To protest nuclear war and showcase his values of spontaneity and randomness, Metzger creates his first acid paintings. This form of material generative art is created by spraying acid onto sheets of nylon. This produces rapidly changing shapes as the nylon dissolves. The work is thus auto-creative as well as auto-destructive. Metzger along with Max Bense was instrumental in the development of generative art. He and Bense “envisioned art as a laboratory for imagining how computers could defy their militaristic origins and be structured according to alternative logics—the eruptive spontaneity of the creative act, for example, or the mutually beneficial, horizontal processes of communication and collaborative action.”