Ten questions from Karsten Lund for Matthew Metzger regarding his exhibition Figures of Speech : An/other version of Be-longing:
1.
KL
Music is a recurring touchstone in your work, whether you’re replicating a record cover or more covertly riffing on musicians—AC/DC in this show, for instance, although you also turn to saxophonist Anthony Braxton for a set of recent works that we’ll show at the MCA this summer. Either way this involves a kind of transformation, or reinterpretation, or displacement, or refraction perhaps, just based on the very different attributes of painting and music, or the different ways they engage the senses or register time. (And yet neither are these Ab Ex-style paintings that want to capture the improvisation or expressive feeling of music through action or gesture for instance–quite to the contrary.) What draws you to music as a visual artist, whether as a subject or area of exploration in your work, and what prompts these particular approaches?
MM
Music demands patience and acute attention in order to really understand what all is at work in a given piece. Visual Art on the other hand, more often than not these days, relies on the assumption that a viewer will give it their patience and acute attention. I think visual art might be too confident in itself. Music also complicates and often negates the value of it’s material counterpart, thus positioning music’s packaging as always and already ancillary, decorative, and market driven. The music I most often listen to and think about is European Free-Improvisation. I am drawn to it for inspiration because it is a place where sound, language, time, and instinct are all made present by the performative body. But to be clear about your question above…I am not sure I have ever yet in my work dealt directly with music. Most of my music related projects I have done in the past are actually focused on the nuances of language and the unconscious. I would love for that to happen one day but so far music has functioned only as a springboard for me to be able to find ways of grappling with ongoing ontological questions / doubts I have about expressivity, belonging, death, translation, and perspective.
2.
KL
And then of course these paintings are silent, which is a major difference from music. It seems notable that in recent shows you’re starting to introduce actual sonic elements—something for the ears, not just the eyes. At Regards you have these ‘sound machines’ or white noise makers that huddle in the corners of the room. They’re these beige, innocuous objects, begging to be overlooked, but they subtly add sound back into the equation. What led you to this addition here? Do you see the sound machines playing a certain role in this show?
MM
I look at the same white noise machine while I sit in the waiting room of my psychotherapist’s office. I initially began to think about the possibility of sound also functioning as a wall (in this case not allowing me to hear the conversation occurring in the other room. Real walls are made far too thin these days.). The white noise machine itself became a location for me to think about the moment a wall is erected (the machine as the screws that hold the wall in place and the sound as the wall itself) and therefore the moment a space is transformed from being an open and shared space into the public / private binary we all know so well. It was a way for me to further dimensionalize, albeit in a very subtle and abstract way, my feelings around the Be-longing project. I’ll refrain from mentioning here all the additional and more critical positions the machines take on in my use of them with AC/DC as a pop cultural icon.
3.
KL
After those sound/music questions, I want to ask a more painting-centric question, one about color in your work. In this show color seems to play a number of roles. On one hand you have the understated palette of the shadow paintings and the dull beige sound machines, and on the other, the red banner and the vivid pinkish wall upstairs. And AC/DC is back in black of course. But in your work you clearly think about both the visual impact but also a color’s cultural lineage or associations. (Here I’m also thinking of the mint green Braxton paintings, or an early work of yours that still sticks with me: just a yellow rectangle surrounding a gray field, which is instantly recognizable as part of the visual identity of National Geographic.) How do you tend to think about color in your work, and can you elaborate on the choices in this show?
MM
I don’t believe color can exist autonomously. Nor can paint exist without color. So I always begin by asking what color will something be by asking what reference, and in turn what discourse a color will bring with it once deployed. Some colors I use are in order to expand on the painting’s history and my intentions, such as the National Geographic yellow, the white noise machine cream, or the Braxton green. Other colors, I have been lucky enough to use systematically across multiple works / projects, in order to embed them with my own lineage of ideas like the scuba red and white. The more they are used the more history they retain. With the Regards exhibition, the pink that is upstairs comes from mixing exactly 50% white and 50% red of the scuba flag (which is the reference for the large banner hanging vertically in the downstairs area). That project has always been about occupancy and approaching the notion of figure / ground relationships from an ontological perspective. So in order to provide a ‘ground’ on which the AC/DC painting would hang, I wanted to conflate the ‘figure’ with the ‘ground’. So the result of that is what you see. I NEVER deploy color as an aesthetic device. EVER. Color for me always functions as an index of varying real surfaces in the world that each cites a location / object, its history, and thus a complicated set of politics usually.
4.
KL
At Regards your use of the space seems highly calibrated too: first there is an obstructed view as you enter, with a work hanging from the ceiling; and the sound machines are tucked away in corners; then all the work is installed across two levels, with a stairway in between; ultimately there is a progression crowned by the act of looking back from above over the works on the ‘ground floor’. How were you thinking about the installation here and the ways the layout affects the experience or even the meaning of the work?
MM
The space seemed unavoidably like a concert stage set. The stage where the band performs and the pit for the audience. I couldn’t resist. It was also important to amplify each viewers ‘perspective’ while in the exhibition. So upon entering the exhibition your view is blocked and from the other end of the space your view is privileged, raised up. I would prefer not to say here why that matters. But that for this context, just that it does. If the sound machines echo for me the location of erected walls, it seemed necessary that they then go in corners where two walls meet, at the site where the sound is amplified most. If the white diagonal of Zombie for me serves as an abstracted embodiment of Manet’s dead bullfighter, then in order to hoist the dead man back to his vertical, and most alive position, the painting had to be rotated and hung from the ceiling. Because the space reiterated the hierarchy of the band overlooking its audience, It was necessary to find a way for the ceiling and floor, the exhibition’s architectural limits, to sandwich the body between the roles of idol and idolizer.
5.
KL
Springing from that last question, it’s interesting that you use the phrase “vantage point” in the press release, in the context of the AC/DC anecdote. It’s a phrase that has both literal and more figurative meanings: it can mean both a spatial position (a certain grounded perspective) or it can be a way of seeing (a personal outlook, so to speak). The spatial arrangement of the show offers certain vantage points in a spatialized way, in the first sense. Were you also thinking about vantage points in the other sense?
MM
Yes absolutely. In relation to ones imagined, psychological construction of their identity, both through objects and their sociological proximity to others.
6.
KL
In the press release you use the AC/DC anecdote to introduce the twin notions of belonging and disconnection. And woven in among that rock n’ roll story are all these short brusque sentences, all of which trace forms of relationality, and maybe specifically two different kinds: proximity (e.g. aside from, left of, etc.) and causality (e.g. because of, out of, etc.) Do you see similar relational dynamics at work in your paintings, or in this exhibition at least? Are you starting from certain thoughts about belonging or disconnection, or discovering them along the way?
MM
I am starting from certain thoughts for each show. I learn a lot from each show and move on into other domains after. For the press release I wanted to use the archive of all my past press releases (two previous ones) for this project but interjected with an alphabetical use of two word prepositions (since prepositions for me always seem to speak to body / object relationships) throughout. The first press release was the basic Be-longing project statement. The second press release was a series of nouns that I felt necessarily abstracted / blurred an oppositional split. So here I felt that the preposition was the next in line, functioning like the white noise machines, only from the perspective of say Humpty Dumpty before he falls off the top of the wall, being able to see both sides but never quite telling you which side housed which, good or bad, public or private, dead or alive. Left of ______________ , Aside from ________________. Of course once plugged into the other press release, each preposition is coupled with a noun by a type of “chance operations”.
7.
KL
You’re deeply attuned to the nuances and details of each individual painting (with a highly demanding style that requires this), but at the same time your works seem to exist as constellations or groups, or at least they’re often exhibited that way. At Regards we have a series of clearly related works, the shadow paintings, but there are also more implicit ties between works that don’t share an immediate resemblance. Can you tell me more about how you see works interrelating? To what extent are you conceiving different families of works in dialogue, or does that happen later?
MM
For better or worse, all aspects of a work, a project, and an exhibition are decided upon before anything is made. I never relate anything with another based on resemblances in my practice. There are 5 paintings in the show that resemble one another but that is a condition of continuing on with a project I started 3 years ago. I consider all the work in the show to be pretty tightly tied together despite any visual differences or similarities. I like your use of the term family here, families being tied together by blood and ethics more so than appearance necessarily. I think my privileging of that which is below / beyond the surface (skin, paint, and otherwise) is where I find a contemporary location for both abstraction and expression.
Blood > < Abstraction | Ethics > < Expression
8.
KL
If we track your work over time there is a larger sense of progression, too — an unfolding, or a process of revision and augmentation perhaps. For instance, you have returned to certain subjects in multiple shows (e.g. AC/DC). In other cases you have exhibited a single work repeatedly but in different manners (e.g. the red and white ‘banner’). How do you see this aspect operating in your work? Can you talk about the long game versus the short game?
MM
Abstraction is inherently a long game. Design is a repeated short game. This of course needs to be unpacked which I am not going to do here. I think our thoughts and bodies require a lot of time to process experiences and their meanings. I also think that the culture we live in today does everything it can to refuse this requirement by us for making sense of things. So having said that, I have recently been thinking about abstract painting today more as distortion, the act of distorting, something that requires time and duration for its legibility, along with a hint of its origin always in a state of transformation. Just as things / meanings / acts become more distorted, naturally abstraction must become more nuanced and sophisticated. It’s not as easy as just a pedal anymore.
9.
KL
The title of the red and white banner is Zombie—something both dead and alive, or paradoxically alive but lifeless. This title suggests one thing when we learn that his work was created for an earlier show (and site) and is being exhibited again. At the same time, calling an abstract painting “Zombie” today also brings to mind the term “zombie formalism”, the charge being leveled by Walter Robinson and other critics at a generation of abstract painters that have become market favorites recently. I won’t ask whether this title was a direct reference to that, but I am curious as to how you see your work in relation to other currents in painting today. Do you feel like your own methods, your vantage point (to return to that phrase), or even what’s at stake for you, stand against some of these trends or their attendant discourses? Antipathy or affinity or both? (I’m kind of hoping I can get you to say something provocative.)
MM
I neither feel nor think about anything when I look at the majority of painting today, especially self-proclaimed “Abstract Painting”. When I choose to look at “Abstract” paintings they appear as though they were made in a vacuum, as though they were made without any care for the history and politics that produced such avant-gardes and even worse…doing this while assuming uniqueness! I feel neither Antipathy nor an Affinity to the work of the artists that have been labeled as “Zombie Formalists”, and perhaps that is what gets me the most disappointed…being confronted by utterly innocuous work. I can’t make a claim to whether what is at stake for me in my own practice stands against, or holds hands with, such trends as you mentioned. But I can say that perhaps my desire to find a new lexicon for my practice and to craft my intentions with other tools is why I turn to music often. If one can comfortably claim their self as an Abstract painter then they are not, and can’t possibly be, making Abstract paintings. They are illustrating an abstractionist aesthetic, re-performing the givens, the familiar. Which then puts a viewer in the position of simply deciding whether they like it or not due to having already intuited the rules of the game from design catalogues, shopping malls, and boutiques. Even having the desire to picture that which is already nameable is a problem for me (such as the intention of “making an abstract painting”). I think that often, Abstract painting today is not so much that, but is rather design work, designed objects, designed surfaces, that await client judgment. Which should then be addressed from a completely different critical lens. I think it is really crucial that painters stop deciding to make a __________ painting and instead, paint.
10.
KL
Lastly, I want to ask you about legibility and illegibility, or accessibility and “difficulty”. I get the feeling that your paintings operate in this canny, yet shifting manner in relation to these qualities, or they collapse different spots on that spectrum at times. On one hand, you offer us the instant pleasure of encountering a rich illusive rendering of something, the real satisfaction of these immaculate object-images. But there is a certain defining opaqueness as well, which is perhaps related to a certain conceptual depth, like an iceberg. Your works are often pulling from very specific sources, or they have a scaffolding of precise references, and yet these aren’t always clearly evident or explicitly conveyed. How do you think about these various terms or qualities? How easily, or not, do you want them to be parsed or ‘read’?
In some sense it also brings me back to the classic avant-garde question of whether there is value in art being “difficult.” That idea seems most embedded, historically at least, in modern music, voiced by a composer like Schoenberg (if I remember correctly), who at times took an openly antagonistic stance towards his audiences, basically challenging them to wise up or walk out. What do you think?
MM
I don’t think my work really requires it’s sources to be known in order to be understood. It is surprising to me that in most cases if ‘art’ is not utterly aesthetic then it’s assumed there is something we have to know in order to be invested in it. As though it’s a murder to be solved, a puzzle to be assembled, or a book to be read. That there is, no matter what, some dense system one has to wade through in order to ‘get’ a work of art. I don’t subscribe to that. Being confronted by art is at most simply that. We all have the agency to invest ourselves, to dig a little, to wax a little, and to ultimately give ourselves over a little. The reasons I have in place for the decisions I make are in an effort to establish some alternative criteria for making choices, and accepting with each choice that is made, that they come with a lot of baggage, sometimes productive, sometimes oppressive. I think there is certainly a reason why we use the phrase “to make meaning”. Meaning is not a static thing to acquire. It must be built, constructed, through collaboration and negotiation. So the attitude of “wising up or walking out” I can’t endorse because it proposes a kind-of hierarchy of meaning, an elitist way of knowing. Alternatively however, I do think we are slightly lazy and slightly shy viewers of Art with little to no criteria for what makes something Art or not. I’m working really hard to remedy this at least for myself.
Matthew Metzger is a visual artist, co-editor of the publication SHIFTER, and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Karsten Lund is a curator, artist, and writer in Chicago. He works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as a Curatorial Assistant.