by Thomas Zummer, Rhinebeck/Moscow/New York 2011

        A poet removes all signs from their places. An artist always incites insurrections among things.

        Things are always in a state of revolt with poets, casting off their old names and adopting new

         names and new faces.                                                                                  -Viktor Schklovsky 1

-Viktor Schklovsky 1

When they first met, some thirty years ago, Mike Metz and Steven Holl reportedly said to each other something like: "your work is just like mine!" While they might have framed their appreciation of a common interest in spatiality, light, disposition and intensity, that has been a conceptual ground for both Metz and Holl. The installation of Metz's works within Hall's structure constitutes in itself a deep and complex series of interlocutions, far too many to be traced in a short text such as this. Suffice to say that the spatiality that is teased open between these two 'workings' brings to light each other's works in familiar not only certain similarities, but certain differences - terms, the similarities may profound, in both instances- in the description of space, elude the cursory viewer - place, and cognition. Holl is a renowned architect, • Metz a consistently brilliant and un(der)known artist- the current exhibition at"T"Space, the variable-purpose structure designed and built by Holl in Rhinebeck, NY, draws out their deep affinities.  Metz's installation, entitled snared trapped and concealed, consists of a series of irregular cast aluminum shapes, each having a linear pattern, consonant with the outer form, inscribed on its surface. The inscribed lines are continuous, and describe a complex shape. Within these lines appear a series of sentences, each-like the formal constraints in poetic metre2- playing upon patterns of repetition and resonance. Each of the cast forms bearing these texts is suspended within an expanded octahedron tensegrity structure comprised of wooden struts and steel cables. As one reads each text, one's eye follows a complex linear shape that reforms according to one's visual orientation, parsed in time, and in relation to certain strategically placed key words, into different schematic objects and references. Form, description and cognition are coextensive, and Metz exploits this collusion to produce what one might call a poetic uncanny. While its first appearance is as a dazzling play of surfaces, it is also an effect that operates at a deep somatic level, concerning the orientation of the body in space, the visual sensorium, the cognitive gestalt of pattern-recognition, and a variable and consequential range of literary, artistic, and poetic allusions. Here one begins to catch a glimpse, to discern

It is perhaps most appropriate, in a consideration of Mike Metz, to begin somewhere between the notion of a 'play of words,' and a 'play on words: Metz's three-dimensional figures are suspended within a complicated frame; they are positioned, posited, only to be dis-positioned, displaced, caught for a moment, only to evade the eye that catches them, the tongue -metaphorically-upon which they momentarily alight. Dis-position: to negate or defer position or place, to 'put/take/grasp,' to 'pose; to 'propose; 'suppose; or 'presuppose; or 'present'; Metz's paratactic contours introduce us to the possibility of narrative through a constant succession of forms, linked to a contingent language of allusion. But what is there, between these incommensurate registers of sense? Nothing but light, one might say, a medium of transition, a configuration of a certain illumination, an illuminating frame.

        Let's not forget, either, that there is no such thing as

        'fixed sight,' or that the physiology of sight depends

        on the eye's movements, which are simultaneously

        incessant and unconscious (motility) and constant and

        conscious (mobility).

                            -Paul Virilio3

A disposition, one might recall, is also an attitude, a term-like inclination, or tendency-that has both a psychological and a physical, material, denotation. An aircraft in flight, for example, has an attitude, a particular orientation in space and time, which, in conjunction with its given shape, may be recognized -by human eyes, or technical systems-as benevolent, neutral, or dangerous, which may be identified, interpreted, accepted or dispatched; its visible surfaces may be marked, encoded, and deciphered, and its appearance assigned to a record, trace, narration or history. Even ufo's have their categories.

Disposition (and here the sort of unruly 'play' that Metz's work induces appears again) also has a theoretical currency, a deployment (as certain translators maintain) It is a term, inscribed throughout this text, implicated, alluded to, and even hidden, if you will, which might now be brought to light: dispositif. Deriving from the Latin dispositum, it is a cognate with the Ita lian and Spanish dispositio, and the German term gestell. In German the noun Stelle means 'place'; in combination with the negating prefix ent- it indicates a displacement. The term gestell (enframe) translates dispositif (deployment, apparatus, vehicle), and evokes a relation with the term gestalt (figure, configuration), and alludes to the rhetorical, as well as to Walter Benjamin's conception of constellation. Curiously, it does not necessarily enter into a relation with the German word Apparat. Other terms -darstellung, representation; vorstellung, to set before, in proximate relation, to arrest or capture- are related, as is the term Bestellebarkeit, to be subject or susceptible to being placed, replaced or displaced at the will of another. Or taking place, via seizure or capture (cogliere) of the referential real, and the conditions -often enough political- of its occupation. A disposition; to be disposed, or to be disposed towards, is again an inclination, an attitude, or a tendency, all of which designate a physical and material as well as a cognitive or behavioral state. In fact the material and the organic are inseparable, though distinct. What is it that is brought to light, indicated or indexed through the term dispositif or apparatus, device, contraption, or mechanism?5

Mike Metz plays, or rather, works the frame (here work and play, the work accomplished by play and vice versa, are the same thing), pushing and teasing at the boundaries of extent and containment. Can words be contained thus, affixed to a shape, some strange incantatory epigraphy of form? Well, yes and no, or at least-apparently-only for a moment. And what sort of frame is "an expanded octahedron tensegrity structure comprised of wooden struts and steel cables" anyway? What sort of frame is architecture? A museum? A text? A thing?

By his own admission, Mike Metz is "indifferent to language;' an unexpected turn of phrase from one so deeply invested in the precarious relations between words and things. Is it a poet's rhetorical stance, an articulate authorial disavowal that redirects the viewers attention to the primordiality of (such) words and things (as appear)? Perhaps they are just patterns, runes, the cracks in charred bones, or the remnants of tea leaves, residues that invite interpretation or prognostication? Perhaps the prognostication is of a very limited and contingent sort, a proleptic shudder that merely gets you to the next apprehension (of sense) the next arrestment (of vision) the next fixation (of language)? Perhaps, like the best puzzles, they are there before us all of the time, and we need only be reminded of their wonder.

•

Snared by the Fedora on the tip of my tongue, yet trapped by a bird's flight in the back of my mind

-Mike Metz

" .. . how to understand abstraction: to draw away

(at first, like its Latin original, a participle and adjective) :

drawn, derived, extracted; withdrawn, drawn away, removed, separated - even secretly, therefore: to 'secret' - sometimes to purloin ...

[withdrawn from: contemplation, matter, embodiment, practice, or particular exemplars]

... and so, subtility, as a withdrawing from the actual, the concrete, the commonplace.. . or, in a more common sense, not knowing what (one) they (might)\ say I after the appearance of . .. or (as) with numbers, those which have no denomination annexed into them; a compendium, one thing "drawn from others" a smaller quantity containing the virtue or power of a greater [that is to say: the virtual or the potential of a greater/exterior/other]

An image, of cast shadows, captured in a trace, cast on a wall, an image whose arrestment secures the index of capture as a claim to truth or to the verisimilitude of what has (after all) passed away, of what we might say (with some risk) continues to pass away (as if what is gone persists in that negative interval, as if the presumed continuity of its passage grounds such absence as the very promise of recall, the return of a glance, the memory of the gaze).

Look back, let your eye relax back into the famiIiar accomplishments of recognition. If only for a moment, one sees a rabbit, then perhaps a duck; an interior and then an exterior. . . A state of being withdrawn: in this sense, as Mike Metz knows, all images are abstract."7

•

Mike Metz's artifacts also draw (away) from narrative. That is to say that they circulate around the evacuated space of narration ('who' after all, would, or could, speak here, to consume something like a narrative silently, or even through subvocalization?) while inscribing into that abyssal place the replica of narration, a reply or echo, which - inasmuch as it 'returns' - is another production entirely, a negative impression of the sound shape of an embodied voice, one which cannot claim the body that it returns to

as its addressor/addressee, let alone its unequivocal and univocal source. Like the song of a mockingbird, it returns without reciprocity, a mimology whose responsibility cannot be located, but only surmised. The language-like patterns of repetition and dissonance set the struggle in motion: the viewer's reflex toward sense is engaged, even as it is resisted.

This is the poetic conceit that Metz so relentlessly deconstructs: the sleight of hand that enables the consumption of evidentiary traces as indexical, narrative, and therefore substantively real even as they repress the very conditions of their (re)production as artifacts. This habitual conceit has made 'media' -language and matter, sound and shape-invisible as such. Metz returns the viewer to this problematic indexical borderland. In the tacit economy between the visible and the legible, Metz's works take up their de-formational task: to undo the place of the illusory, to invert in appropriately formal terms, the relations between the invisible armature of images and the acculturated reflex of consumption of their manifest content. The self-referential disposition of the works in snared-trapped and concealed enables a sustained critique of contemporary complacencies by reinscribing questions of artistic and social practice as practices of perception, by destabilizing their presumed relationships of primacy and subordination, consequence and finitude. By opening a space within a space, a frame within a frame, to release the unruly, and even unprincipled, play of multiplicities and pluralities of (non)sense and (non)place. Deictic markers, anaphoric continuities, an arsenal of rhetorical  figures and traps 8

Steven Holl's architecture opens anew the space of the museum; Mike Metz's works open new spaces in the world; Holl and Metz open an unexpected space in their

interrelationship; and for us, their interlocutions open a rare invitation to see and perceive, think and play, be and change.

notes

1. Viktor Schklovsky, Theory of Prose, Dalkey Archive Press, Elmwood  Park 1990, p. 62. In Russian Formalism the principle of de-familiarization (ostranenie) is closely linked with the poetics of Russian Futurism, in that both employed processes of disjunction to demarcate the dialectical complicities and oppositions between artistic perception (de-familiarization) and everyday, common, life (automatization). Viktor Schklovsky coined the term ostranenie as an active principle of artistic production, a machinic metaphor set in opposition to the stultifying and flattening processes of automatic perception and consumption. Schklovsky's revolutionary mechanistic model was developed in contradistinction to the existential frame of reference (naturalism) in order to differentiate and render salient the economy between automatized and de-familiarizing modes of  perception, with an emphasis placed on the productive, artisti c, necessity of the latter. The notion of' automization' may be read in light of the discussions concerning the conception of apparatus, dispositif, frame or device, cited in the text. See also: Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1984; Lad islav Matejka, Krystyna Pomorska, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views Michigan Slavic Studies, Ann Arbor 1978; Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, Yale University Press, New Haven 19SS; Victor Erlich, Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, Yale University Press, New Haven 1975.

2. See: Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses [Chicago: University of Chicago Press] 2002

3. See: Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, [London/Bloomington: BFl/lndiana

University Press] 1994.

4. Michel Fouca ult used various forms of this term-positivite, dispositifin  his analyses, which certain of his translators render as 'deployment'- an unusual, but not incorrect, translation. Dispositif is usually translated into English as apparatus,

5. Text modified from Thomas Zummer, "Within and Without Recourse:  On Les lie Thornton;' unpublished manuscript, paper read at an evening of screenings and conversations with Leslie Thornton, curated by Brian

McCarthy, 16 Beaver, New York, April 2010.

6. Mike Metz, inscribed text on cast aluminum artifact, exhibited in snaredtrapped  and concealed: an installation by mike metz

"T"Space, Rhinebeck, NY.

7. Zummer, Thomas, "Within and Without Recourse: On Leslie Thornton;•  unpublished manuscript. All of the definitions of'abstraction' are from the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1.

8. Both anaphora and deixis are forms of indexicality. Deixis, in linguistic  terms, is a form of 'pointing' and consists in the 'location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatio-temporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance, and participation in it; of an addressor and addressee. For Buhler anaphora is a subcategory of deixis; deixis is primary and anaphora is secondary, both are reflexive. (Karl Buhler, Sprachtheorie Fischer Verlag, Jena 1934). See also: Francis Cornish, Anaphora, Discourse and Understanding. Evidence from French and English Clarendon Press, Oxford 1999; Gillian Brown, Speakers, Listeners and Communication: Explorations in Discourse Analysis Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995. Anaphora has to do with the manner within which what 'appears' -in a narrative, or a mise-en-scene, for example-secures itself to what has preceded it. as if naturalized. It is precisely this reflex towards the naturalization of alterity that Metz's works interrupt and displace. Mike Metz's work respatializes perception; Steven Holl's architecture similarly re-spatializes habituation.

© Mike Metz 2014