by Harry Weil

  

Marcel Duchamp explained that in the throes of creation "the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions." Once the artist is done, it is the spectator who brings it in "contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." That is, the viewer completes the work of art, makes it whole and becomes, along with the artist, responsible for its success. Duchamp's words reverberated through a generation of conceptual artists, coming of age in the late '60s and '70s, whose work investigated how the viewer's interaction with the art object could alter its meaning and context.

Mike  Metz is one of those artists. In 1979 he produced "end products," which, according to the art historian and critic Joseph Masheck, are best understood as a series of "visual analogues." Each work offers "a single thingly shape that can stand for several things precisely as a shape." The sculptures, crudely constructed of cement, plywood, and metal lathe, are made of angular shapes fused into ambiguous forms. The titles such as rocking horse/watering can/helmet or barge/truck/cash register-hint at what the shapes might represent. However, the terms in each triumvirate vie against each other, outwitting the viewer's attempts at simple decipherment. These "visual-verbal puzzles ," as Metz explained, "emphasize the mechanisms of meaning in everyday life," whereby language allows them to elude definitive form.

An iconographic study of rocking horse/watering can/helmet would attempt to  compare an actual rocking horse and Metz's rocking horse. Metz prefers a constructivist approach, choosing to derive meaning through language. By placing a likeness of something before us and questioning whether it actually resembles that thing or something else, he demonstrates that the words "rocking horse" belong to a separate order of meaning distinct from the object they signified. The conflict of identifying what is seen is a visual-verbal game. one that has precedent in Duchamp's LHOOQ or Fresh Window. Metz himself. however. points to the influence of Jacques Lacan's theory of the real and the symbolic. The analyst famously established the dichotomy between existence and meaning, where the real is defined as that which is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there." The symbolic. on the other hands, introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." In this context, rocking horse/watering can/helmet is concerned with discovering the creative potential of language, where viewers are invited to think about language not as a static object, but as something in a continuous state of flux.

The retrospective format for this exhibition at CUE Art Foundation allows visitors to see the many forms of Metz's investigation into language since "end products." Especially remarkable is his constant experimentation with materials as varied as bronze, steel, and wood. However. the real outliers in terms of material and process are his computer paintings from 1987. In a studio installation at the Mercer Street Gallery, he applied acrylic paint to images of abstract shapes created on a consumer grade Apple computer. The complex layering of neon blues, yellows. and reds is reminiscent of nonobjective painting from early in the century. However, unlike Kandinsky or Malevich, Metz is very much invested in the work of art's ability to build on a leve l of association with commonplace objects. By choosing to include paint in the process, he is striking a balance between the traditional reliance on the artist's hand and the use of digitally generated images. Like "end products," the titles of the computer paintings-ow// bowl and gun/boat-do little to help in identification of subject matter but continue to indicate his interest in language, despite this shift in media.

In another digital series. Metz designed 53 PVC banners to surround a Renaissance style building on the island of San Servolo for the 2007 Venice Biennale. Each banner featured lines of translated text from Etel Adnan 's essay "To be in a Time of War" in her book In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. In the text, Adnan juxtaposes the mundane details of privileged American life that is occasionally pierced by the consciousness of war with the suffering of Iraqis. The banners were part of "Strategic Questions ," a project organized by artist-curator Gavin Wade in which 40 art works were developed in response to 40 questions written by

R. Buckminster Fuller. Each work in the series was related to a different publication scenario. Some were placed into magazines, journals, or other existing vehicles, while for others a new mode of distribution was created in response to a specific site and context. For Metz, responding to Fuller's "impossible" question, "What is intelligence?", became another opportunity to consider the nature of communication. In a sheer coincidence, a short distance away on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Joseph Kosuth, another conceptual artist inspired by Duchamp, lined the exterior walls of a monastery with neon words in a mix of languages. Both Kosuth and Metz raised questions about the nature of language's meaning across myriad cultures using an existing architecture and linguistic structures.

When I first visited Metz's studio in Red Hook he beamed with delight when he told me the "two tents" joke. The joke, like his work, relies on multiple meanings or associations, but it also helped me to locate the importance of play in his work. The title of this exhibition, "referrals ," is a theme that runs through Metz's nearly four decade- long career. The objects he creates are overflowing with referents. Whether we understand them to be one thing or another, or something entirely different from what Metz referred to in the title is of no consequence. Viewers should not feel disheartened because they don't see a rocking horse or a cash register. What is important is that we recognize playfulness of decipherment. This is a game Metz plays with the viewers, so as to engage them with the work. With every new viewer, each of these works becomes something different.

© Mike Metz 2014

A guy goes to a psychiatrist. 'Doc, I keeping having these two dreams.

First, I'm a  teepee; then I'm a wigwam; then I'm a teepee; then I'm a wigwam;

then I'm  a teepee; then I'm a wigwam. It's driving me crazy.

What's wrong with me?' The doctor replied:

'You gotta relax. You're two tents.'