ARTFILE

When all is said and done, and the body of work engineered by Gustav Metzger during his unique career is weighed and evaluated in culture's fickle tribunal scales, either today or in the distant future, Liquid Crystal Environment 2005-9 will occupy a special place in that catalogue raisonne. Why?

The first thing to say about this piece, currently open to the public as part of the show DECADES at the Serpentine Gallery London, is that it contains a paradox. In an ultra hi-tech era its performative means of slide projectors, liquid crystal and glass plates may seem basic, but retrospectively does anyone think to challenge the austere studio techniques of Kaspar David Friedrich? Hardly. For it is the retinal bloom manufactured by the work of such artists which counts in the long run.

Means. Ends. Methods. Materials. History. Resonance. These are the key ideas consummated in the wide range of media Metzger deploys, his aim being all the while to get YOU the audience thinking, both about corrosive processes, and political catastrophe, rather than promote himself. Liquid Crystal Environment though, a so-called 'autocreative' piece, shows how natural elements can be harnessed for benign purposes too.

Discovered towards the end of the 19th century during work on the derivative compounds of cholesterol, liquid crystal was long disregarded by scientists due to molecular instability (it has two melting points for instance), and so has only become widespread in its application as a versatile interface inside watches, calculators, dashboards, laptops and playstations over the last twenty years. It is then classic Metzger material: highly temperature-sensitive, generating dendritic patterns and ever changing chromatic effects. However its use in his practice easily predates the millenial era, and the new version of LCE is in fact a remake of the original 1965 installation.

Metzger had famously broken away from his painting tutor, the Vorticist David Bomberg, in 1959, renouncing figurative art, so by 1965/66 a way had been cleared for a series of chemical experiments with liquid crystal at Cambridge University, Better Books Charing X Road, and the Lamda Theatre Club, which were to culminate at the Roundhouse in a light show for a concert by The Cream, The Who and The Move. Unlike the Boyle family though, whose psychedelic imagery was preserved in films such as Fire & Water, Metzger, in the words of Stephen Bann, upheld 'continued activity, rather than individual work, as all important.' In the manifesto The Chemical Revolution in Art he declared 'There is a limit to the potential of kinetic art while the material employed remains in a "solid" state. Art is enriched by an astronomical number of new forms, colours and textures when the rigidity of the material is loosened.'

Such a tendency places LCE within the lineage of declassed works that exemplify George Bataille's notion of 'L'Informe' or formlessness, ie art that destabilises the organising principle of form itself. So in a sense, once the equipment is installed and the conditions are in place, LCE executes itself, and will continue to do so, unsettling the fetishistic trend of a market reliant on the commodification of personal experience, particularly the narcissistic obsessions that have beset so much yBa culture.

'Decades 1959-2009', Serpentine Gallery, London; 29 Sept-8 Nov.