by Joseph Masheck, curator

(Bibi.: Alexandr Nikolaevitch  Lavrentiev. 'The Facture of Graphics and Words,' trans. John E. Bowlt. in From Painting to Design: Russian Constructivist Art of the Twenties [Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1981].)

Mike Metz and I probably belong to the only generation that, confronted by the famous exemplar of imagic ambiguity, can answer the question of what one is looking at by saying. "The duck-rabbit illusion." Before us, people were too unsteady with images to be more than fascinated or flustered by something's one moment seeming to represent a duck and the next a rabbit: today. I have to wonder if most kids could even discuss actual ducks and rabbits. While Metz has a diverse arti stic practice. making objects with ambivalent or multivalent concept-identities is typical of his work. and telling. It is easy enough to call him linguistic and class him as conceptual; but what wi ll it mean to say so 7

In 'Mike Metz as a Brand of Sculpture' (Arts Magazine. January 1991) I entertained the notion that  his work does not consist of a merely representational play of concretized nouns (e. g., ·duck,' 'rabbit'), like three-dimensional puns. but that extending over the play of nominal or noun-like object identities comprised an artistic identity not marked logo typically, like mere churned-out products, but more like a styled brand. I shall draw an art-historical parallel, after making an unfashionable point: that art, qua art, is not communication. Why complicate matters just when it would be so easy to reintroduce Mike as a computer hotshot who studied and taught graphic design, which everybody seems happy to consider communication? Because something important is at stake: the answer to Nelson Goodman's question. in Languages of Art (1968), of what artistic "symbolization" is really up to if not communication. namely: "cognition in and for itself."

The most objective-sculptural pieces, along, ironically, with the more  discursively textual rather than rebus-like works, show that Metz knows that puns aren 't poetry. Having two or more 'things' cancel one another by coexistence in material extent and space makes at once for abstraction and linguistic concreteness (something similar happens where texts snap in and out of black-on-white and white-on-black). One such piece, the big Rabbit I Candle-flame I Spoon. 1992, of sheet copper. has sufficient formal identity to resemble a certain lost wooden Construction from 1920 by Aleksander Rodchenko. with paired bars that. in rising, broadened, then narrowed and crossed. To it Rodchenko attached letters to serve as a caption-title in a Dziga Vertov newsreel of 1922 - which wasn't just doing communications either: it made for more cognitive play, in Goodman's sense. than the newsreel required as documentary communication. For another Vertov newsreel title Rodchenko used noodly whiteagainst- black letters. askew, quite like Metz's similarly bent-pipe lettering; for example: Double Portrait (for Dorothy Day). II.

Only lately have I seen even Metz's longtime play with object-shapes adumbrated in Rodchenko's  early modernist compositional "atoms,'' in his word. with nicknames of sorts, such as "sc isso rs" for an 'X'-form or "accordion" for a zigzag. More than the Minimalists in their general relation to Russian constructivism, the linguistic Metz can also be seen to share the heft and bolted stiffness of Rodchenko, with the art-historical connection in turn underwriting "cognition in and for itself."

© Mike Metz 2014