Beauty and Revolution: Gustav Metzger’s Dialectical Aesthetics

Abstract

This article explores the political artist Gustav Metzger’s engagement with aesthetics and dialectical form. It locates aesthetics at the centre of his ethical endeavour, as the locus of what he saw as art’s revolutionary potential, and dialectics as its structure or operating principle. It posits a new framework for understanding Metzger’s approach to science through this lens, and highlights resonances between Metzger’s thinking and that of the Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse, a key proponent of dialectical thinking and influential member of the New Left and countercultural movement of the 1960s. Tracing the evolution of his aesthetic theories through a career of almost sixty years, from a period of intense experimentation with materials, technology, and scientific processes in the 1960s to his Remember Nature project in 2015, this article draws attention to the ways in which Metzger’s expansive understanding of aesthetics might be applied to the urgent contemporary task of negotiating an ethical, ecological art practice today.