Source: The Telegraph

Metzger launched the auto destructive art movement in protest at rising consumerism, proliferation of capitalism, and building of nuclear weapons.

Gustav Metzger, Historic Photograph No.1: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto 1943

One of Metzger’s best known works involved throwing acid over nylon sheets in central London, causing them to disintegrate within 20 minutes. “The important thing about burning a hole in that sheet,” Metzger later said, “was that it opened up a new view across the Thames of St Paul’s cathedral. Auto-destructive art was never merely destructive. Destroy a canvas and you create shapes.”

In his 1959 manifesto on auto-destructive art, Metzger wrote: “Self-destructive painting, sculpture, and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.”

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who studied with Metzger, was an advocate of the movement and believed his trashing of guitars on stage was an act of auto-destructive art. During the Sixties, some of Metzger’s projections were featured at The Who concerts.

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who studied with Metzger, believed his trashing of guitars on stage was an act of auto-destructive art.

In 1966, Metzger organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. During the event, one artist, John Latham, set fire to a stack of books in front of the British Museum.

Metzger was born in 1926 in Germany to Polish-Jewish parents. He arrived as a refugee in Britain in 1939 via the Kindertransport, which helped 10,000 children flee the Nazis. His parents were killed in Germany in 1943. “Facing up to the Nazis and the powers of the Nazi state coloured my life as an artist,” he said in an interview in 2012.

“When I saw the Nazis march, I saw machine-like people and the power of the Nazi state,” Metzger once said. “Auto-destructive art is to do with rejecting power.”

Metzger, who studied art in Cambridge, London, Antwerp, and Oxford, spent his life doing just that and was once arrested for civil disobedience during a protest against the building of nuclear weapons. Between 1977 and 1980, Metzger went on strike and refused to create any work at all.

Gustav Metzger practicing for a public demonstration of Auto-destructive art using acid on nylon

Even much later in life, Metzger continued to attack what he perceived as the negative impact of capitalism and consumerism. In 2007, he founded the Reduce Air Flights initiative, in response to the globalisation of the art market. Artists were encouraged not to fly to art fairs in order to promote and sell their work.

One of Metzger’s most famous works is Flailing Trees, which was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 2009. It consists of 15 upturned willow trees embedded in concrete and is meant to illustrate the devastating effect of global warming. “Artists have a special part to play in opposing extinction,” he said, “if only on a theoretical, intellectual basis.”

In 2004, a cleaner at Tate Britain mistakenly threw out one of Metzger’s artworks, mistaking it for a bag of rubbish. It was later retrieved but Metzger felt that the work was ruined and replaced it with a fresh bag of rubbish.

A spokesperson for Tate Britain said at the time: “An artwork by Gustav Metzger in Tate Britain’s Art and the Sixties exhibition is made up of several elements, one of which is a rubbish bag included by the artist as an integral part of the installation. The bag was accidentally removed and damaged but was subsequently replaced. ”

Gustav Metzger: Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art (1960)

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 pummeling 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 the 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 auto-destructive art include: Acid, Adhesives, Ballistics, Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics, Drop, Elasticity, Electricity, Electrolysis, 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.

Gustav Metzger: Auto-Destructive Art Machine Art Auto-Creative Art (1961)

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, growth movement.
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.

Another such slogan reads: “With the State there is no freedom, freedom exists when there is no State.” This is the Utopian Lenin, who dared the Party to “DREAM”. The Lenin who saw those democratic organisations originating in workplaces and districts – i.e the Soviets  –  as abolishing the State and the Party!

Yet there is no doubt that for the Left, Lenin poses a problem, a century after that moment when he and the Bolsheviks unleashed the process of revolution. For many that first slogan was to be re-formulated as Party hacks + forced industrialisation = totalitarianism. That this latter form is one we associate with Stalinism leads one to ask-  was it already inherent in bolshevism?” That question I leave hanging.

But there is no doubt that Bolshevism in power under Lenin was the – perhaps inadvertent- midwife for some fifteen years of a culture that can be called revolutionary. This was revolutionary not in the sense of a Heartfield attacking  capitalism and fascism, i.e. a critical revolutionary art, but a celebratory art form.

Here I want to celebrate some of those achievements, and in so doing offer for thought the notion of a culture which rethought that very notion as it existed in the West, i.e. a practise both high and autonomous. This will reveal an idea closer to the anthropological reading, i.e. one that contains- dialectically- the idea of the ‘high,’ and also embraces forms of the’ low’. Let us say a culture that can embrace abstract art and the newspaper, or even a sweet wrapper. Not only that, but a culture which has at its centre a commitment to a certain politics: the politics of socialism.

Such simplification of course hides some problematic facts. The Left, then as now, loves factionalism. So alongside those who enthused about the newspaper were those convinced that the future of literature lay in the remodelled 19th century novel. Alongside those embracing the multi-reproducible image of the photograph, were those advocating a19th century realism in paint. This might be further reduced to a tussle between those believing (as did Lenin) that the culture appropriate to the USSR was to draw its lessons from that of the bourgeoisie, albeit with a ‘social’ slant. And those on the other hand who were  committed to a wholesale dislodgement of the Academy and its bourgeois support. It is basically with the latter that I am concerned.

My first object is a drawing by Yuri Annenkov for a mass festival of 1920 (1). It celebrates the moment three years earlier when troops and Bolshevik supporters “ Stormed the Winter Palace.” That moment “(iconic” is the right word here) when the Bolsheviks deposed Karensky and the Provisional Government.

1. Annenkov “Design for a mass pageant”

1a. Storming the Winter Palace

The photograph 1a shows the actual re-enactment, sometimes published as the real thing.

Annenkov was one of those who found the new order to be not as sympathetic as he would have liked, and left the USSR for Paris.

02 El Lissitsky: New Man

My second illustration is by El Lissitsky: it’s the figure of the “New Man” (2), one of the characters in an electro-spectacular production of a theatrical piece called “Victory Over the Sun’ This is dated 1923. The first production of the play seems to have been rather makeshift. On stage in 1913 characters moved around in geometrical outfits designed by Kasimir Malevich.  Makeshift or not, it’s known to art history as the first manifestation of the elements of Malevich’s Suprematism, i.e. a non-figurative art based on geometric forms. Such abstract art was soon to become prolific in Russia. Its relevance to Lissitzky is twofold. Firstly he saw the need to project this theatrical piece into the mechanolatric world seemingly envisioned with the advent of the new post 1917 situation. Secondly it records his new position in the role of educator.

After the revolution many academicians, previously scandalised by Malevich and a host of other non-figurative artiists, left for the West. In their wake the avant-garde moved in. Malevich established an art school in Vitebsk, and Lissitsky became one of its staff. The institute was called Unovis, i.e. project for a new art. Soon one was to see their abstract art adding a dynamic character to the streets of Vitebsk and its buses. We hear of students walking half way across Russia to join the community.

Lissitsky’s figure has become emblematic: here is the New Man of the Revolution. Mechanised, electrified, the red star in his eyes, his pace taking him into the future. As a project of course it could not be realised, Russian technology famously ”lagged behind that of the West”, not that the West could have fulfilled Lissitsky’s plan.

Like so much it remains a wonderful image of the Utopian.(Though some might find such a Utopia scary).  Lissitsky’s move from this rarefied zone was to turn to the photgraph, a new means of production first taken up by “artists” in the USSR.

03 Kozlinsky: Poster

My third object is a poster by Kozlinsky, (3) celebrating the Paris Commune. The text reads “The dead of the Paris Commune have risen up under the Red Banner of the Soviets.” Such posters produced for the Russian Telegraph Agency were known as Rosta windows.

They were produced using stencils – aiming for some kind of mass distribution. We refer to that whole phenomenon as Agit-Prop. If some of this lacked sophistication, it certainly did not lack a powerful charge. Many pieces remain inspiring.

The way the figure fills the space, the flag bursting out of the frame ( like Delacroix’s famous Revolution) is one tie to history.

But what we might also note is this appeal to history; an appeal, and vindication of the role of the Communards of 1871, their retribution. It is also an indication of the new State calling up its ancestry, celebrating its intellectual heritage.  Naturally there were to be monuments to Marx and Engels, but also to Rosa Luxemburg. Invoked too were the visionaries and poets from Goethe, Schiller and Heine, to anarchists – Bakunin, Kropotkin and Fourier. All found their way on to new or detourned monuments. Even famous assassins were invoked. I find this extraordinary. It is to the credit of the Soviets that this happened. And that it took place in the time of Civil War and Foreign intervention.

04. Adolf Strakov poster

My next object is a poster by Adolf Strakov (4). Its message reads 8^th March. Women’s Emancipation Day. 8^th March 1917 saw a strike by Russian women, a strike of four days, for Bread and Peace. It initiated the fall of the Tsar and the inauguration of the (short-lived) Provisional Government. It has since been internationalised. The USSR was definitely in the forefront of this move.

As Lewin writes –“Mironov is right to insist that ‘no other country in the world has experienced such a high level of female participation in the world of work and culture.’ (Though as he also writes ‘this was not the case with regard to the Party hierarchy.’)

This image, which prefigures that of Kozlinsky, has the same diagonals, (here chimneys – many women entered factories at this time) and the same red flag. The woman depicted also looks ahead to the future. She is both strong and beautiful, her working clothes somehow having an air of  the future called up by sci-fi images. Again, simplicity equals dynamism and power, and the poster equals mass distribution.

05. Gustav Klucis lino-cut

The fifth object is a lino-cut by Gustav Klucis;  (5). This is a project (unbuilt) for a street kiosk. Again the concern is the mass media as it existed then. There is a screen at the top for projected images, and below we have racks for newspapers. Lenin had foreseen the need for the new media – particularly radio and film; and Klucis was an undoubted Leninist. We have a collage from him of Lenin striding across the world with an electricity pylon tucked under his arm. In fact Klucis left us a whole portfolio of Marxist/Lenininst works. As for electricity that too was high on Lenin;s priorities, witness my opening sentence.

Although the kiosk was a wooden structure it has all the hallmarks of Modernism, a geometric foundation laid bare, the whole being energised by diagonals and its simplicity making for rapid reproduction.

Klucis was a true believer. In the 1930s he moved to photomontage – some of his most famous images showing Stalin. It did him no good; in 1935 we are in the counter-revolution and Klucis is one of the many – the millions – to disappear.

06. Rodchenko poster

My next item is a poster by Rodchenko. (6) These things I have chosen might seem to have something repetitive about them, But we are dealing with a country that recognises itself as ‘backward’ in relation to the West; a country with 60% illiteracy, and a group of artists anxious to serve the State, and communicate with the masses.

Whether Rodchenko’s poster did that, we do not know. What we do know is that it has become an icon of graphic design, reproduced endlessly, appropriated, altered and enjoying an afterlife he could never have considered.

The woman is Lily Brik, mistress of the great poet of the Revolution – Mayakovsky  He of the slogan  ‘The squares are our palettes, the street our brushes’

What Rodchenko ( co worker with Mayakovsky on hundreds of Rosta posters) has Lily declare, in that wonderful image of abstract design become megaphone, is ‘Books on all kinds of knowledge’; published by Lengiz – a State publishing house.

This dream of a mass, a people, that is both literate and educated is one we still live and struggle with. The failure of that dream in the West being all too obvious. ”The ruling ideas of the time are those of the ruling class” as Marx only too clearly put it.

07 Shaiket photograph

Next up is a photograph by Shaiket (7) It shows peasants welcoming – almost as believers at communion  -the coming of electricity. As mentioned, Lenin envisioned  this modern wonder throughout the country . And he had tapped into a great reservoir of hope. With the advent of such moments as that shown in Shaiket’s photograph we have to note a profusion of names entering the Soviet style of nomenclature – Electrifikatsia, Dinamo, Industriya  Others names  included Barrikada, Octyabrina- and  Avantgarda.

In this penetration into the Russian ‘byt’, everyday life, we have further evidence that this was an extraordinary period.

08 Dziga Vertov film

Next we have a still from ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, (8) a film made by Dziga Vertov in 1929. To me this has always seemed the greatest cultural artefact of the Russian revolution. Ostensibly the film is a documentary, following everyday life in the USSR, from getting up to going to bed. One has to say “ostensibly” because this is also a movie celebrating movie making. And it has been voted the greatest documentary ever.

We see people going to work, milling through the streets but we also see Kaufmann – the cameraman filming them. He is then montaged on top of his camera, shown chasing his subject on a motor cycle, turning the camera’s crank. We see him capture episodes, and follow these to the editing room where we see the shots being cut, spliced together or discarded. We also see an audience come to view the film, with us watching them…. In the final five minutes the whole thing is repeated at vertiginous speed. It’s an assault on our senses. We need those earlier moments, at the beach, in the club as periods of calm to remember

In the first account I read of it in 1965 Jay Leyda spoke of ‘reeling out of the cinema.’ I saw it with Richard Hamilton – his comment ‘Everyone should see that movie – once.’ But in its desire to record ‘life slap up’ and to subject that to the potentialities of the cinematic apparatus it gives us a definite sense of what the Soviet utopia might have been.

09 Varvara Stepanova poster

At (9) we have a poster by Varvara Stepanova. As Lewin mentioned, women definitely moved into some positions of power. She married Rodchenko, and like him became a ‘designer’: of stage sets, books, clothing, and, as here, posters. She should be here in her own right as one of the Russian ‘Amazons ‘ of the avant-garde’. But she features here, not only as a photo-montagiste, but as one documenting a specific moment; the fulfilment of the first five year plan.

These plans, inaugurated by Stalin, under the rubric ‘keeping up with the West’, mark a seismic change in the cultural life of the USSR, though this is not yet evident in Stepanova’s rather jolly image.

By the date of its production we are entering the’ counter-revolution’. Soon those Bolsheviks responsible for the literacy project, the light hand and willingness to contemplate and practise various cultural styles are being rounded up, tried, and disappeared.

‘Socialism in one country’ might sound pragmatic; in practise it was another horrific variant of totalitarianism. Stalin ruined the very notion of socialism; whether he was later denounced or not , that stain remains.

In 1919 the (yet again) one-time abstract artist Vladimir Tatlin designed a ‘Monument to the Third International’. This monument was to be a building – one to house the delegates coming to the Third International, while they pondered how to spread the revolution. Higher than the Eiffel Tower, and straddling the Neva, it became for many years THE symbol of the new cultural ambitions of those who supported the Socialist regime. Gigantic and electronically and technologically astounding, its internal buildings revolving within a great spiral, it was perhaps the iconic image of the revolution.

10. Vladimir Tatlin glider

Twelve years later he gives us a glider or ornithopter (10), a flying machine taking its inspiration from nature, from his study of birds – cranes in particular.  This is no longer part of the mechanolatry of the early years of the Revolution. It has no motor, it’s a piece of craftsmanship. It is difficult to see it as serving the State. But, what it does have is beauty, a word Tatlin uses very emphatically, a word not usually bandied  about by the avant-garde of the twenties. I’ve always seen it as a symbol of the desire to escape, as well as part of the wonderful dream of flying, and as such its poignancy is not easily forgotten. My illustration is of a reconstruction from 1969 for a five year old child

It, with the other objects mentioned here, leads me to cherish these few years of fervour, of sheer inventiveness, commitment, and energy.

This is the centenary of the revolution, vilified and now buried in all but a few outposts. One of which, paradoxically, is the Royal Academy, right next to Burlington Arcade. Making  good now by showing us some of these artefacts. It’s just a pity we can’t relive the atmosphere on the streets of Leningrad or Vitebsk from one hundred years ago.

Still, in these baleful days we must be grateful for small mercies.

They usually confined their activities to “dilapidated buildings, walls made of corrugated iron, smashed-up cars, and nothing on people’s property”. But, he admits, they didn’t always stick to their own rules. Once, they sprayed their names on a garage door. “And a few weeks later, George Melly wrote a piece in the Guardian or the Times saying, ‘I came out of my garage recently to find that people had sprayed graffiti on it. If I ever catch that Mr B, Kix and Columbo, I’m going to kick their arses.’

“So that was our claim to fame,” says Thompson today, his graffiti career long ended, his real claim to fame being his subsequent career as the frequently airbound saxophonist in Madness, formed by his pseudonymous friend Mr B, the band’s keyboard player, Mike Barson. That would have been the end of the story, save for the fact that, not long afterwards, Thompson discovered that photographs of his nickname, daubed on a wrecked car and a wall in Kentish Town, had appeared in a book called The Writing on the Wall.

The work of Time Out photographer Roger Perry (who died in 1991) and designer Pearce Marchbank, the book documented the graffiti of mid-70s London and came with an introduction proudly claiming the slogans it contained were “a protest on the part of the individual against the mass and its masters” and “proof that human beings still exist in a world of supermarkets, office blocks, processed chickens, VAT forms, computers, ECT”. It also decried those who objected to graffiti as “offended to the bottom of their 19th-century souls by the messiness of the individual”. To Thompson’s considerable surprise, the introduction’s author was George Melly. “How about that?” he laughs. “One minute he wants to kick my arse, next he’s praising me!”

Melly’s volte-face is not the only remarkable thing about The Writing on the Wall, about to be republished after being out of print for decades. Perry’s photos offer a vivid snapshot of British culture in the mid-70s, between the final curdling of the hippy counterculture and the arrival of punk.

“In 1975, graffiti was a shorthand way of accessing the mood of the time,” says writer Jon Savage, who mentioned The Writing on the Wall in his 1992 history of punk, England’s Dreaming. “In the 60s and even the early 70s, music had reflected the environment and how people felt, how people thought about things – and that was almost gone. Pop wasn’t doing its job, it wasn’t the teenage news. Graffiti was like a secret code, the voice of the underdog. It was people telling you things you couldn’t read in mainstream media and wouldn’t necessarily think about. You’d get jokes, stoner and outcast humour, with serious points. It was another kind of language.”

There are political slogans relating to dimly remembered campaigns: the trials of the Angry Brigade members, known as the Stoke Newington 8, and of the Shrewsbury pickets, imprisoned in the wake of the 1972 building worker’s strike, whose number included actor Ricky Tomlinson. There are quotations from Shelley and Blake, and slogans from members of King Mob, a British splinter group from the Situationist International, whose associates included Malcolm McLaren and designer Jamie Reid. King Mob were responsible for perhaps the best-known graffiti in the book, sprayed along the tube line between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park so that passengers could see it: “SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY – TUBE – WORK – DINNER – WORK – TUBE – ARMCHAIR – TV – SLEEP – TUBE – WORK – HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE – ONE IN TEN GO MAD – ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP.” Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters subsequently claimed this inspired the lyrics of Time, from Dark Side of the Moon.

Some of the graffiti in the book is absurdly funny or strangely wistful: “Remember The Truth Dentist”, “Cats Like Plain Crisps”, “We Teach All Hearts To Break” on the wall of a school. Some isn’t: “Go And See Stardust With David Essex It’s Really Great”. Exactly who was responsible for what is unclear; Thompson aside, the authors usually chose to remain anonymous. But a lot of the slogans  were the work of poet and dramatist Heathcote Williams, then involved with an anarchist group called The Albion Free State. “Why graffiti?” he says. “A lark. The anonymity is appealing. It’s not signature art. It’s just a thought, which can either be the view of a lone crank or be the view of thousands. It’s up to the reader to decide. They bubble up in an engagingly mysterious way. You think, ‘What’s that doing there? Who on earth wrote that?’”

The first graffiti Williams ever saw was as a child in Reading Museum. “A builder had written on a Roman tile with his finger in the unfired clay, ‘Satis’ – ie, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough, eff this for a game of soldiers.’ And then he’d presumably quit work. But there’s something vulgar about taking any credit for them. They appeared anonymously and perhaps should remain so.”

There were other, more prosaic reasons for the proliferation of political graffiti in early-70s London. “It’s such a bloody cheap thrill,” says activist Mike Lesser, who worked alongside Williams. “You just buy a spraycan for almost nothing, you write something, you choose a good position, and it takes a bit of time for it to get washed off. You could put up posters, but that takes four or five crews, two or three weeks, and you have to have a very heavy-duty, well-organised outfit.”

Perry’s camera also captured a now lost London. “The photographs are absolutely beautiful and the way things looked back then seems incredible,” says Paris 1974, a latterday graffiti artist whose designs adorned the cover of Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto album. He’s long been a fan of Perry’s book. “It wasn’t even that long ago, but everything still looks so postwar and battered.”

Most of the graffiti in the book was found in and around a strikingly ungentrified Notting Hill. “I used to go down to Basing Street a lot because Island Records had their studios there,” says Pearce Marchbank. “It was really rough around there at night. You’d come out of the studio at 4am and it felt like people were sharpening their knives on the corners of buildings, that kind of thing. Now it’s David Cameron, isn’t it? Shops that sell scented candles.”

Savage, who took his own photos of the area in January 1977 for his punk fanzine England’s Outrage, says: “It was the gap between slum clearance and new build. People had cleared all these Victorian houses, thought of as slum housing, but they didn’t have the money to actually build new houses, so there was a gap. There were a lot of squats, which was a way in which young people who didn’t have much money – beatniks and bohemians – could live near the centre of town. It sounds really wanky, but it was almost as if those forgotten and decrepit areas held a kind of truth.”

Looking at the new edition of The Writing on the Wall – the original book augmented by further photos and with new introductions by Bill Drummond and George Stewart-Lockhart, an art student and graffiti fan who led the Kickstarter campaign to get it republished – it’s hard not to feel that the kind of graffiti it documents has largely died out. Forty years on, there’s plenty out there, but it tends to be more straightforward. Interested largely in writing his nickname, Thompson turned out to be an unwitting pioneer of the “tags” that now proliferate, imported from New York hip-hop culture (ironically, as Paris 1974 notes, the first large piece of New York-style hip hop graffiti in Britain appeared in Notting Hill in 1981, the work of American artist Futura 2000, who was touring the UK with The Clash).

Although you don’t see the same profusion of surreal political slogans today, perhaps the stencil works of Banksy et al are their descendants. One theory is that The Writing on the Wall captured a more politically engaged era when, as Marchbank puts it, “politics was fashionable”. Savage thinks the shift from slogans to names may reflect a shift in British society: “The 70s was the end of the collective era. You then had 30 years of almost unrestrained individualism, which was the Thatcherite, New Right revolution really – there’s no such thing as society, there isn’t a collective, there’s only an individual.”

Another theory is that methods of communication have changed. If you had a political slogan you wanted to get across in 2015, you’d probably stick it on social media or try to turn it into a hashtag campaign rather than spray it on a wall. Your potential audience is vastly increased but, as Paris 1974 points out, whether people would take as much notice is a moot point.

“Your phone or your computer – you can turn it off, can’t you?” he says. “But something that’s actually in the physical world is more lasting. It becomes part of the tapestry of the city. Thousands of people have no choice but to see it – it gets engrained in collective psyches. I’m really pleased this book’s coming out again because this type of graffiti is important. The other type, which I’ve been part of for a long time, gets good press and bad press – and I don’t really know, as an artform, where it’s going any more. A lot of walls don’t really make any sense. They’ve just become a commodity, under Perspex. But this, this is back to the real business.”

• The Writing On The Wall, published by Plain Crisp Books,price £25. Details: rogerperrybook.com

Briefly noted: Avant Garde magazine had a relatively short run. It produced only 16 issues between January 1968 and July 1971. But it left its mark, influencing tastemakers within the arts world, and it’s now been properly digitized for posterity.

A collaboration between Ralph Ginzburg (editor) and Herb Lubalin (art director), Avant Garde is partly remembered for its radical politics and embrace of erotic content. (Issue #5 launched a “No More War” poster competition; Issue #11 featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s erotic lithographs; Issue #2 presented phantasmagoric versions of Bert Stern’s semi-nude photos of Marilyn Monroe.)

But probably the greatest legacy of the magazine is the logo Lubalin designed, which gave birth to the Avant Garde typeface that still lives today. (Get more on that here.)

All 16 issues were scanned by the Internet Archive, and put online by Mindy Seu. You can read Avant Garde in all of its digital glory here.

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2,200 Radical Political Posters Digitized: A New Archive