Acid actíon painting. Height 7 ft. Length 121 ft. Depth 6 ft. Materials: nylon, hydrochloric acid, metal. Technique: 3 nylon canvases coloured white black red are arranged behind each other, in this order. Acid is painted, flung and sprayed on to the nylon which corrodes at point of contact within 15 seconds.

Construction with glass. Height 13 ft. Width 91 ft. Materials. Glass, metal, adhesive tape. Technique. The glass sheets suspended by adhesive tape fall on to the concrete ground in a pre-arranged sequence.

Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.

Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method and timing of the disintegrative process.

Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological techniques.

The amplifìed sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception.

The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.

Self-destructivc art can be machine produced and factory assembled.

Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a life time varying trom a few moments to twenty years. When the disintegrative process is complete the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped.

Man in Regent Street is auto-destructive.

Rockets, nuclear weapons, are auto-destructive. Auto-destructive art.

The drop drop dropping of HH bombs.

Not interested in ruins, (the picturesque).

Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling to which individuals and masses are subjected.

Auto-destructive art demonstrates man's power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them.

Auto-destructive art mirrors tbc compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture-polishing to destruction point.

Auto-destructive art is the transformation of technology into public art. The immense productive capacity, the chaos of capitalism and of Soviet communism, the co-existence of surplus and starvation; the increasing stock-piling of nuclear weapons - more than enough to destroy technological societies; the disintegrative effect of machinery and of life in vast built-up areas on the person...

Auto-destructive art is art which contains within itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction within a period of time not to exceed twenty years.

Other forms of auto-destructive art involve manual manipulation. There are forms of auto-destructive art where the artist has a tight control over the nature and timing of the disintegrative process, and there are other forms where the artist's control is slight.

Materials and techniques used in creating autodestructive art include: Acid, Adhesives, Ballistics, Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics, Drop, Elasticitv, Electricity, Electrolysis, Electronics, Explosives, Feed-back, Glass, Heat, Human Energy, Ice, Jet, Light, Load, Mass-production, Metal, Motion Picture, Natural Forces, Nuclear energy, Paint, Paper, Photography, Plaster, Plastics, Pressure, Radiation, Sand, Solar energy, Sound, Steam, Stress, Terra-cotta, Vibration, Water, Welding, Wire, Wood.

London, 10 March 1960

Each visible fact absolutely expresses its reality.

Certain machine produced forms are the most perfect forms of our period.

In the evenings some of the finest works of art produced now are dumped on the streets of Soho.

Auto creative art is art of change, movement, growth.

Auto-destructive art and auto-creative art aim at the integration of art with the advances of science and technology. The immediate objective is the creation, with the aid of computers, of works of art whose movements are programmed and include 'self-regulation'. The spectator, by means of electronic devices can have a direct bearing on the action of these works.

Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation.

23 June 1961

Auto-destructive art is a comprehensive theory for action in the field of the plastic arts in the post-second world war period. The action is not limited to theory of art and the production of art works. It includes social action. Auto-destructive art is committed to a left-wing revolutionary position in politics, and to struggles against future wars.

Auto-destructive art has its roots in the Dada movement, in Russian Revolutionary art 1910-20, and in a direction which is best represented by Moholy-Nagy.

Auto-destructive art is acutely concerned with changes in various sciences and technologies in the course of the century. I would like to stress that auto-destructive art is a theory of art that is more advanced, at least ten years more advanced, than practice.

I will try to show you in the course of this talk that auto-destructive art is not simply the therapeutic instrument of a frustrated iconoclast - but a coherent, a necessary phase in the development of modern art. If auto-destructive art did not exist it would have to be invented. Indeed it is remarkable that the idea emerged so late in the century.

lf you look at the literature on some of the major art movements of the century one theme runs through them - and that is destruction: Cubism, Futurism, Dada. These movements contained tremendous explosive, destructive, force. The artists were not only concerned to destroy, deform and transform previous styles, they wanted to destroy and bend to their wilIs entire social systems. The latter point applies less to the Cubists than to the other movements. An artist apparently aloof from the theme, Mondrian, states that the importance of destruction in art is underestimated.

This interest in destruction by artists in the first twenty years of the century does not surprise us. In those years the theories of relativity and quantum theory were developed. These caused a revolution in physics, led to a study of matter which led to the construction of the most powerful force in the history of man. We will return to this in more detail later. In that period, society had built up and was using greater destructive powers than had ever been known.

Since so very little is known about auto-destructive art, it is not surprising that most criticism is based on a very incomplete understanding of the subject. However, precisely because criticism is necessarily based on an almost entirely subjective version of the theory, it usually reveals a great deal about the psychology of the critic. It is quite irrational, but there are people who claim that auto-destructuve art is the last straw that may tip the balance of violence in society.

People, and there are so many, with unresolved or suppressed aggressive impulses, tend to condemn auto-destructive art outright. It reminds them of their problems, it is felt as a threat to their precarious balance which, unsatisfactory as it is, does permit a continuance of social life. People who may want to kill someone, smash up a house, and may not even be conscious of having these desires, are likely to reject an art that speaks of the pleasure, the liberation in destruction.

In giving an account of auto-destructive art I must do the following. I must define the theory and work as I see it, and as other practitioners may see it. I must try to describe the theory as it is 'objectively seen' in relation to society and to intellectual and artistic activity. I must describe how the theory and work may strike observers. lf, as no doubt you will, you notice obvious gaps in my account, or a blurring of these divisions, you can guess that i have too subjective an approach, that my knowledge is incomplete, or that I had to leave out observations to save time.

The theory was first stated in a manifesto consisting of seven short paragraphs published with the help of the sculptor Brian Robins in November 1959. I am very indebted to Brian Robins, who, at his premises at 14 Monmouth Street, WC1, in the summer of 1959, with a small group of artists achieved some very advanced work comparable to some work by the French New Realists - who, at that time, had not organised themselves into a group.

The manifesto states that auto-destructive art is in the first place a form of public art. That it is a unity of idea, site, form, colour, time, and disintegrative process. That the work may last a few moments or as long as twenty years. The style of the manifesto is deliberately flat - there is no enthusiasm, no typographical extreme.

From the time of preparing the first manifesto I saw autodestructive art as a movement. I wrote not only for myself but bearing in mind others who might join in this direction.

There have occured many changes since Futurist and Dada manifestos screamed their message across the world.

Auto-destructive art tries to link up and give expression to this new situation. It is an attempt to deal rationally with a society that appears to be lunatic. It is concerned with values of art but is conscious of the fact that to save society men must act beyond their professional disciplines, in fact, must use their professions to change society. To go on limiting oneself to achievement strictly within the rules of a profession laid down by a society that is on the point of collapse, is, to me, a betrayal.

Auto-destructive art seeks to be an instrument for transforming peoples' thoughts and feelings, not only about art, but wants to use art to change peoples' relation to themselves and society. But even in aesthetics wc see the need to extend the existing situation. One result is the aesthetic of revulsion. At the core of auto-destructive art is the knowledge that a rapidly changing and on the whole deteriorating social situation, screams out for radical, unprecedented forms of art.

Let us briefly glance at society. Our view is dominated by the knowledge that the two great powers can not merely destroy each other, but have the power to do so between ten to fifty times. You have heard the term 'overkill'. That is the meaning of 'overkill'. In the past men killed their enemy. They may have mutilated his corpse, they may on occasion have eaten his corpse. Today, one not only burns up ones enemy and his family and his entire country but prepares to do so many times over.

Chemical, biological and radiological weapons have been perfected and are stockpiled by governments that can kill or mentally derange entire populations in a short period of time.

These plans for genocide are not only pursued publicly - Dean Rusk stated last year, that in the first hours of a nuclear war one hundred million people would be killed; John F. Kennedy, at the time a Senator, said in 1960, 'The world's nuclear stockpile contains, it is estimated, the equivalent of 30 billion tons of TNT - about ten tons of TNT for every human being on the globe' - by the governments of the USA and USSR, but by this country and others.

But this is potential-probable destruction. Look at the destruction taking place around you. If we go into the streets we are attacked by the exhaust - lethal in concentration - of motor vehicles. The vibration we experience whether we are in vehicles or subjected to their vibration elsewhere, is damaging. You know that vibration damages buildings. The air in cities is polluted by hundreds of chemicals from differing sources. Add to this disease engendering atmosphere, pollution by smoking, carbon dioxide through human activity, the incessant physical and psychic pressure of millions of people in confined, ill-ventilated spaces.

Our food is encapsulated and infiltrated by chemical fertilizers and sprays, constantly damaging bodies and minds. Radio-active fallout adds extra hazard. We are subjected to the pressure of continuous noise. We are processed in educational machines guaranteed to fit us unrebelling, deformed, into a self-destroying society. This is a mere sketch. I leave you to fill out the details.

And bear this in mind. In the next twenty years this situation will continue to deteriorate. The chance of war, by design or accident will increase. There will be even more lethal weapons of mass-destruction. There will be more than twice the present number of motor vehicles. The vibration and noise from which we suffer will be heightened by sonic-boom.

There will be more demolition of fine buildings so that valuable city centre sites may be 're-developed' and let at much higher rents. More and more fine land will be covered by low quality housing estates and motorways - to increase the turnover of the building and engineering industries. To survive - capitalism must continue to expand production. It is boom or bust! At the centre of the most powerful industries in this country and the USA is the motor vehicle industry, closely allied to the steel industry. We shall see the choking of cities so that these industries can go on turning out their obsolete, elephantine products at high profits. With similar motives, though with far more dangerous consequences, the aero-space industries, and aligned electronic industries will continue to proliferate. For the connections between expanding industries, the profit motive and governments - see the editorials in Electronics over the past few years. [91

Dada was the purge that heals. lt is said that Dada was destructive. Think of the Dadaists operating during and immediately after the first world war. They completely opposed the war. (...)