Landon Metz by SeanKellyNY_LandonMetz

Landon Metz

Introduction 5 Author Author Landon Metz Within and Beyond History 9 Alex Bacon Towards Ecological Thought 101 Christopher Schreck Biography / Bibliography 150

Landon Metz

Introduction

Landon Metz is recognized for his intuitive ability to imbue a spare language of abstraction with visual dynamism and a palpable sense of movement. His paintings have the capacity to expand and address space serially, while being site-responsive, rather than site-specific. Metz’s practice revolves around the activity of painting, yet incorporates the vocabulary of sculpture, installation, and aspects of performance. A self-educated artist, highly attuned to aesthetics and the poetics of space, Metz channels a self-reflexive and meditative practice into exuberant abstractions that are infused with feeling and open to interpretation. Metz’s practice is marked by great sensitivity to site and scale: his works from 2014 to 2020 have often been presented as diptychs, triptychs—even pentaptychs—abutting one another; reaching into or around corners; even lying on the floor. More recently, Metz’s paintings tend to function as autonomous objects: single and paired panels infused with sophisticated color and playful vibrancy. The exceptional essays by Alex Bacon and Christopher Schreck in this volume illuminate Metz’s work with perception, situating it within the relevant art-historical, social, and philosophic contexts that inform his methodology. Both of these writers enjoys a dialogue with the artist that developed over many years, and their deep understanding of his art and unique insight yielded texts that will stand as essential documents. Sean Kelly, New York; Francesca Minini, Milan; and von Bartha, Basel, are delighted to partner in producing this important monograph. Countless individuals played a crucial role in bringing this book to fruition and we are thankful to them all. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of Alessia Milano, Francesca Minini; Daniela Tauber, von Bartha; John Haenle, registrar, and Debra Vilen, head registrar, and Robert Spring, archivist at Sean Kelly, all of whom were steadfast and vigilant in their commitment to making this an especially beautiful publication. Serving as editor, Jeffrey Grove, Director, Museums and Publications, Sean Kelly, guided this project with diligence, diplomacy, and precision, working closely with numerous individuals to perfect the essays, hone numerous details, textually and visually, and ensure that Landon and his work were represented with accuracy and care. Finally, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to the many institutions and collections that have supported Landon and his practice. We are deeply grateful to you all. Sean Kelly Alessandra Minini Stefan von Barth Introduction

pages 6–7

Installation view of Fourth Wall at von Bartha S-chanf, Switzerland, 2017 Image courtesy of von Bartha

Alex Bacon

Metz has since verified these responses through further research and encounters with actual works as well as—of course— through experimentation in the studio and exhibitions. 2 Since Metz’s emergence, these art-historical episodes have been reexamined by several younger artists, curators, and writers, suggesting their broader relevance to our contemporary moment and aligning Metz with the concerns of his generation. 3 Incidentally, this is not unlike Robert Ryman when he began painting in the mid-1950s. See Suzanne Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge, MA, 2009). 4 This effectively confuses the distinction between the self-taught, “outsider,” or “folk” artist and the academically trained one. Now that more and more artists are forgoing a professional art education, but nonetheless encountering the history of modernism, among other things, and making work that enters those spaces, discursive, institutional, and commercial, access to which traditionally required formal training, the role of arts education must necessarily change.

Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

Landon Metz did not have a formal art education. He discovered art and art history through books and, significantly, the lens of the Internet, amalgamating an incredible diversity of art from different times and places via the digital realm’s endless, non-hierarchical scroll of images. In such a context, visual art is presented as just another element in a vast aesthetic continuum, one to be taken up alongside design, fashion, film, and myriad facets of popular culture. Such a surfeit is difficult territory to navigate in a meaningful way under any circumstance, but in Metz’s case, such a broad introduction to art had the advantage of implicitly removing prejudice from his aesthetic decisions when, in 2010, he ceased dabbling in art making and started painting in earnest. Metz did not have to react to art-historical or theoretical positions; he had only to intuitively respond to what he was seeing.1 This established for Metz a fundamental openness to what had come before, attracting him to diverse elements of global art history, including American Color Field painting, Japanese Mono-ha, and the work of the French collective Supports/Surfaces, all movements that had fallen out of favor or were under appreciated at the time.2 When Metz started his career, he was executing densely impastoed works consisting of linear skeins of paint applied straight from the tube, with results that suggest both the density of Jean Dubuffet and the lyrical pictorial language of Joan Miró. He began working with a staining technique in 2011. At first, he used enamel paints, before moving on to acrylics, which he uses to this day. This led Metz to make paintings using expressive, Helen Frankenthaler-esque swathes of stained color. In Grand XI for example—a characteristic work from this period—softly brushed passages of pink, white, and blue pigment collide and intersect like spreading bursts of steam. The pleasure of experimentation here is palpable. One senses the pragmatic yet purposeful manner in which Metz is exploring the different ways his materials might interact with each other, through the nexus of paint, brush, and canvas.3 For Metz, it was significant to discover an art-historical precedent in Color Field painting that he felt gave him permission to freely investigate the expressive potential of his materials.4 As such, it is likely he had something of the same intuition that Morris Louis had in the early 1950s, with regard to Frankenthaler’s stained canvases like Mountains and Sea (1952), realizing that rather than an endpoint to Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

emulate, she was instead, in Louis’s words, a “bridge [to] . . . what was possible.”5 [FIG. 2] For Louis, Frankenthaler was a bridge through her novel reinterpretation of Jackson Pollock’s practice of staining paint directly into raw canvas. In the 1950s, Pollock’s breakthrough achievement was something that had to be wrestled with and overcome: an inescapable bottleneck in the history of art. When Metz started making art nearly sixty years later, Pollock’s legacy had long been superseded, along with standard, formalist ways of understanding art history as a progression driven by “fundamental” aesthetic problems and their solutions. A child of the digital age, Metz was instead confronted through the Internet not only with Pollock’s paintings, but also with the diverse range of work produced out of his example—from Louis’s stains, through to Richard Serra’s splashes of molten lead, Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings, and Cy Twombly’s elegant scrawls—each with its own way of interpreting the role of the artistic gesture, the space of display, and the viewer.6 This led Metz, while refining staining techniques that can be understood to derive from Color Field painting, to embrace phenomenological aesthetic goals—such as an engagement with actual space and the viewer—that were far removed from the optical orientation associated with that mode of painting in the 1950s and ’60s. This methodology aligns him with other artists, many of them active outside of the United States, who, starting in the late 1960s, took the process-based approach of staining pigment into raw canvas in directions beyond the strict 10

Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

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Helen Frankenthaler Mountains and Sea, 1952 Oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas 86 3/8 x 117 ¼ in. (219.4 x 297.8 cm) Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, NY on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Helen Frankenthaler © 2021 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York right

Landon Metz Grand XI, 2011 Enamel on canvas 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm) Image courtesy the artist

Richard Serra Splashing, 1968 Lead Area occupied by work, approximately: 18 x 312 in. (45.7 cm x 792.5 cm) Temporary site-specific installation for the exhibition Nine at Castelli: Anselmo, Bollinger, Hesse, Kaltenbach, Nauman, Saret, Serra, Sonnier, Zorio at Castelli Warehouse (108th Street), New York, 1968. Photo: Peter Moore/VAGA. © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Morris Louis, as quoted in Gerald Nordland, The Washington Color Painters (Washington, DC, 1965), p. 12. 6 For the classic discussion of the field of art made from Pollock’s expansive example, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA, 1993). 7 Smaller paintings start on a table.

dictates of late modernism, as articulated by influential American critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Regarding technique, for the past eight or so years Metz has begun every large painting in the same way—on the floor.7 He first unrolls a bolt of canvas and demarcates the dimensions of his picture. He then takes a pencil and sketches the boundaries of the forms he will dye into the raw cotton duck, using a foam brush as a tool to flatten ever so slightly those segments of the fabric he has delineated, much as a vacuum cleaner does when it passes across a carpet. This subtle indentation allows Metz to establish the general area in which the pigment will pool. Thus, when he begins to pour heavily thinned acrylic paint and move it around with brushes, sponges, rags, broom handles, and even his hands, it soaks into the canvas in a contained and controlled way. Once the paint is applied, the majority of Metz’s energy and attention is spent evening out the puddle of pigment as it is steadily, but rapidly absorbed into the weave of the canvas, since he only has a few minutes before the paint sets irreversibly. As such, each work must be completed in a single session. The results are expressive, biomorphic fields of color that vary from light and airy to dark and saturated. Yet the singular painted canvas is not the end point of Metz’s work. Taking a nod from Post-Minimalist artists like Serra, he carefully considers the question of how his work is displayed. Indeed, this is of central importance to how the paintings are received by the viewer. Metz refuses an excessive emphasis on either the individual painting, or the Alex Bacon

Landon Metz Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101.6 x 162.6 cm) overall Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Alex Bacon

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Franz Erhard Walther Collectors, 1967 Sturdy canvas, reddish brown 177 1/8 x 15 3/8 in. (450 cm x 39 cm), nine pockets, each handle 7 7/8 in. (20 cm) high. Courtesy Franz Erhard Walther Foundation and Peter Freeman, Inc. right

Yvonne Rainer (left) performing ‘Corridor Solo’ and ‘Crawling Through’ from Parts of Some Sextets at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1965 Peter Moore © 2021 Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

8 Dan Flavin, “Letter of April 27, 1967, to Miss Elizabeth C. Baker, Managing editor of Art News,” in Dan Flavin: Three Installations in Fluorescent Light (Cologne, 1973) p. 94.

space in which it is installed. Indeed, he would perhaps follow Dan Flavin in preferring the term “situation” to “installation.”8 He wants to allow a position for the viewer as the necessary triangulating factor between a painting and the site of its display, in the process creating a dynamic relationship between them. It is this relationship that the viewer is invited to consider, more so than what is happening, formally speaking, within any individual canvas. This is likely the reason why Metz’s shapes often hover on the brink of being legible as recognizable forms. Some are almost like a mountain, while others come close to resembling a pool of water, and others still suggest an aquatic being. This suggestive neutrality attracts our gaze, but also deflects it into the larger situation that the artist has established in a given installation. Given his concern with the site of display, Metz has unsurprisingly been interested not only in abstract painting, or even in painting per se, but perhaps even more so in other forms of process-based art, such as the body activated sculptures of Franz Erhard Walther, the choreography of Yvonne Rainer, and the music of John Cage. [FIG. 5 Franz Erhard Walther, Collectors, 1967] [FIG. 6 Yvonne Rainer, Parts of Some Sextets, 1965] These diverse touchstones have given Metz permission to investigate the potential of how materials submitted to certain procedures can generate a serial progression of lyrical forms, which in turn elicit a sensorial response from the viewer. While attending to the formal possibilities of the stretched canvas (a support that the artist has sometimes inventively pushed to its limits, but always retained), Metz has always been equally concerned with how a given canvas or, more often, a series of panels, might interact with the viewer and the space they share. Blurring the lines between painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, while always retaining the familiar stretched canvas format, Metz has used painting in radically different ways than many of his predecessors, especially the Color Field artists he at first seems closest Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

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Installation view of Morris Louis/Landon Metz at Kasmin Gallery, New York, 2016 Image courtesy of Kasmin Gallery

to and has occasionally been exhibited alongside, as in a 2016 pairing with Morris Louis at Kasmin Gallery. [FIG. 7] Individual works by Metz, if divorced from how they are installed, seem to bear the visually oriented language of high modernist painting, but in most of Metz’s installations, we find them multiplying, destabilizing any attempt to take in a single canvas on its own. [FIG. 8 & ] The fragmenting of form, a key formal strategy of Metz’s, reveals each individual panel to be open ended and perennially unfinished, very much unlike the supposedly autonomous high modernist icons that they might at first suggest. They direct themselves instead to the space they are installed in so as to activate it and the viewer that moves within it. This effect is on display, for example, in his elaborate wrapping in 2017 of both the exterior and interior of the Von Bartha Gallery in S-chanf, Switzerland with a procession of different green toned “U” forms. [FIGS. 9 & 10,] It does not feel as if they stop inside the gallery. It is instead easy to imagine that the paintings continue through the wall, emerging on the other side and winding through the streets of this quaint Swiss village. Metz’s approach to space is thus often one that creates a resonance with the architecture of the exhibition space. He first deployed this strategy for an installation in a small house in Hudson, New York in 2014, where groups of canvases abutting one another marched boldly throughout the domestic space, without regard for the boundaries posed by doorways, staircases, and windows, upon which they gleefully impinged and, in some cases, overtook. [FIG. 11] This approach quickly expanded onto an epic scale in the work shown later that same year at 14

Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

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Installation view of Fourth Wall at von Bartha S-chanf, Switzerland, 2017 Image courtesy of von Bartha

Alex Bacon

pages 134–135

Installation view of Michael Jackson Penthouse at Retrospective, Hudson, NY, 2014 Image courtesy the artist

the ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy. Here, to give one example, a series of twenty-one canvases spanned a large arch along the exhibition space’s curved ceiling. [FIG. 12] The effect was of a repeated semi-circular form progressing across a large space in an almost filmic manner. The fragmented shape flickered from canvas to canvas and could not be grasped in its entirety from any one static vantage point, drawing the viewer’s eyes up and along the distinctive architecture of the space. This approach was further developed in the works Metz exhibited in 2018 at Sean Kelly in New York, where the architectural geometry of the white

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Installation view of Plose, ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy, 2014 Image courtesy the artist right

Installation view of Asymmetrical Symmetry at Sean Kelly, New York, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Alex Bacon

Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

IMAGE MISSING

cube space played a key part. [FIGS. 13 & 14, ] In fact, the dimensions of the panels in the multipartite works were dictated by measurements taken in the space. The ninety-degree angle that Metz underscored shifted the viewer’s experience from a filmic one to a structural examination of how lyrical shape and color can reconfigure and enliven our perception of a supposedly neutral container. Such dynamic installations suggest a materialist reading of Color Field painting and its potential on Metz’s part. This is not necessarily one an artist like Morris Louis would have endorsed, but it is nonetheless a logical extension of his way of working, which was deeply involved with the terms and possibilities dictated by his materials and process. [FIG. 15, Morris Louis] Occupying a small studio—a converted twelve by fourteen-foot dining room in his home in Washington, DC—Louis only rarely saw the physical entirety or finalized presentation of his works as stretched paintings, either in the act of making them, or afterward. He was only able to see a handful of them stretched and installed in his lifetime. The implications of this way of working, far beyond the artist’s own intentions, were not lost on subsequent generations. For example, Sam Gilliam, a generation younger than Louis and also from Washington, DC, had the idea to take lengths of stained canvas and display them sculpturally, suspended from the wall or ceiling. [FIG. 16] One could also consider Howardena Pindell, with her meticulously organized arrangements of common materials, such as paper dots, beads, and sequins on unstretched canvas and paper. We are familiar with the narrative of the artist who—pushing painting as a medium toward a putative conclusion 18

Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

Morris Louis Gamma Sigma, 1960 Acrylic resin (Magna) on canvas 102 1/4 x 238 in. (259,7 x 604,5 cm) DU368 Morris Louis © 2021 Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Rights Administered by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, All Rights Reserved

Sam Gilliam Leaf, 1970 Acrylic on canvas 121 ¾ x 186 x 12 ½ in. (309,3 cm x 472,4 cm x 31,8 cm) Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Timothy C. Headington, 2016.45. Sam Gilliam © 2021 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio Senza titolo or Industrial Painting Roll, 1958 Mixed media on canvas Overall display dimensions variable Tate Modern collection, London © Estate of Pinot Gallizio, Turin.

by emphasizing its materiality through various devices, including the monochrome, collage, et cetera—“inevitably” comes to take on actual materials and place them in actual space. We are less familiar, however, with artists, such as Gilliam and Pindell, who interpreted the modernist precedent quite literally, turning the act of staining canvas or collaging materials toward their implicit prosaic referents: the length of fabric. Gilliam’s stain technique approximates a bolt of dyed fabric in its closeness to commercial coloring processes, while Pindell’s collage technique alludes to embroidery. This literalist interpretation of Louis’s “high” formal painting suggests yet other, more conceptually oriented precedents. This lineage begins with Italian Situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s industrial paintings of the 1950s, which the artist fabricated with assistants in makeshift assembly lines, displayed draped around the gallery (not unlike Gilliam), and sold by the meter. [FIG. 17] He even turned them into dresses worn by models at the opening of his exhibition at Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1959. Following this, we can consider the politicized painting interventions of nearly a decade later by the French and Swiss artists Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni, who briefly Alex Bacon

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Daniel Buren Within and beyond the frame, work in situ, John Weber Gallery, New York, 1973. Detail. © DB-ADAGP Paris right

Niele Toroni Imprints of a No. 50 Paint brush Repeated at Regular Intervals of 30 cm, 1969. Alkyd on vinyl-impregnated fabric. 398 x 55 1/8 in. (1011 x 140 cm). Partial gift of the Daled Collection and partial purchase through the generosity of Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Agnes Gund, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, and Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. © Niele Toroni Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Niele Toroni, © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

formed the collective known as BMPT (a moniker coined by the art critic Otto Hahn). The BMPT artists, in their focus on the repeatable mark, incorporate into their work the concept of extension and potential extendibility introduced by Pinot-Gallizio’s pseudo mechanized practice of paintingby-the-meter.9 Of the four artists, Buren and Toroni exercise it most explicitly. Both artists take their motifs—stripes for Buren and evenly spaced brush marks for Toroni—and push it through and across spaces, both those of arts institutions, and those outside of them.10 For example, in his exhibition at the John Weber Gallery in 1973 Buren hung his signature stripes in a line extending from the gallery out across New York City’s bustling West Broadway. [FIG. 18, Daniel Buren, Within and beyond the frame, John Weber Gallery installation] While in a 1977 show at the D’Alessandro-Ferranti Gallery in Rome, Toroni placed his brush marks on the floor as well as on canvas. In the process, Buren and Toroni demonstrated how painting, and more precisely the painted mark, can change and draw attention to spaces and institutions as it migrates across and through them.11 [FIG. NieleToroni, installation image] Emerging in a very different moment, Metz’s work has evolved quickly and radically over the past decade. Metz takes the concept of extendibility equally from BMPT as he does from Color Field figures like Frankenthaler and Louis. While his marks have a serial, repetitive quality, 20

Alex Bacon

9 See, for example, my “Niele Toroni’s Extendability,” Niele Toroni (New York, 2017). 10 Buren adds yet another factor to his work, the use of a readymade support— awning fabric. 11 The French artists of the loose association Supports/Surfaces—such as Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, and Claude Viallat—were inspired by BMPT’s actions in the wake of the tumult around May 1968. They have further questioned the painting support, exploring the possibilities of different materials, such as Dezeuze’s engagement with gauze and wood caning, and modes of display, including architectonic activations of nontraditional architectural elements, such as Cane’s investigation of the meeting place of wall and floor in his Sol-murs.

they are also individual and expressive, as were Louis’s. One could compare the variegation in Metz’s painted passages with the different traces of touch in Toroni’s work, where his act of executing the brush mark leaves an impression, the varied and imperfect quality of which belies the human hand that made it. However, Metz wants us to have an optical experience of color in addition to the material one we have of how it was executed, which is the primary lens through which we observe the repeated strokes of Toroni’s standardized number fifty brush. In this way, Metz can be seen as aligned with the notion of extendibility that someone like Gilliam saw in Louis’s precedent, and with the rigor of the manner in which Buren and Toroni applied this idea to fashion a dialogue with architecture. Like his predecessors, Metz has not felt the need to abandon painting for supposedly more “radical” modes of expression. As opposed to Gilliam, Metz’s forays into three dimensions are structured (the stretcher is made to morph and extend as much as, if not more than, the canvas) which brings him closer again to Buren and Toroni, both of whom retain the literal notion of the support, even as they move off of the traditional stretcher, embracing the wall, the floor, the ceiling, etc. Further, Metz’s forms are regularized in their spacing, breaking the literal borders of the singular canvas as they trail off into a potential infinity that implies their additional extendibility beyond what Metz has literally placed before us. As such, even as he has embraced three dimensions in certain of his recent work, Metz does not translate his painting practice into sculpture, but rather extends the pigmented canvas into creative new modes of presentation and display. While experimenting with other forms of expression, including film, sculpture, and drawing, Metz’s work within his primary medium, painting, has remained resolutely consistent in a moment characterized by rapid stylistic change. This is not to say that his work has been repetitive or narrowly focused. Akin to Minimalists such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, Metz has found that isolating a certain way of working—the staining of pigment into raw canvas to generate lyrical, colorful forms— allows for greater play and variation within his practice. Indeed, today Metz is in a period of focus, retaining the rectangular canvas support so as to experiment with shape and color. After a period spent exploring the viability of his forms in elaborately shaped canvases from 2015 to 2017, Metz returned to the familiarity of the painterly rectangle to give these forms a greater range of play and movement, which has long been a hallmark of his work. The neutrality of the rectangular format allowed for more diversity within it, relieving Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

the work of the spatial demands architecture makes on shaped canvas works. Both the forms and their spacing have contributed to a feeling that those forms are in motion. Another longstanding element in his work has been the fragmentation of form in Metz’s paintings, such that each work is only completed by the next canvas. [FIG. Metz installation image TK] This suggests an ongoing chain of forms, giving Metz’s work, whether a single canvas or a multipart painting, a sense of potentially infinite extendability as well as an aspect of interchangeability, each the same but different at the same time, the artist’s hand evident in the subtle differentiations that occur from canvas to canvas. Refusing to close off or complete a given painting, Metz elevates his approach from a formalist play with color and form. By always insisting on this open-endedness, which he underscores in the installations of his work, Metz establishes his work as a philosophical statement regarding the essential incompletion of form and the primary role of the viewer, who he renders the final judge of the work and its effects. While the reference in Metz’s earlier works often came from nature, such as mountains and bodies of water, his more recent paintings have flirted with animalistic forms. For example, one body of work features a form with a split appendage for its lower portion, suggesting legs or, perhaps more accurately, flippers. [FIG. Metz image TK] This gives the form an aquatic energy and contributes to a sense of movement. It is

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Installation view of Three Eleven, Andersen’s Copenhagen, 2019

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Installation view of & at Galleria Francesca Minini, Milan, Italy, 2016 Image courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

Alex Bacon

Landon Metz, Untitled, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 inches (127 x 101,6 cm) each 50 x 80 inches (127 x 203,2 cm) overall Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Alex Bacon

12 For a discussion of this phenomenon, see David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, 2013). 13 The classic analysis is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43. See also, Yve-Alain Bois’ contribution on noncomposition in Leah Dickerman, ed., “Abstraction, 1910–1925: Eight Statements,” October 143 (Winter 2013): 7–17. 14 Today, with the advent of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), we see a further development in how qualities traditionally understood as tied to human expression, like identity and authenticity, can now be ascribed to digital phenomena.

as if the repeated form we see when encountering a bank of canvases was the same one, captured skating across a pond, frozen in different moments of its progress like stills in a film strip. Metz realizes that he must both maintain and open up these boundaries in order to let the viewer in, while continuing to guide them through the structure and consistency of his approach. His merger of a serial program with an array of decidedly painterly effects perhaps speaks to our present moment, where emotion is born out of its affirmation via repetition, such as we witness in social media and the explosive potential of virality. If something gains meaning and signification through circulation—downloads, uploads, posts, and reposts—and the more the better, then it risks seeming anemic if it doesn’t circulate.12 Accordingly, the number and frequency of new forms and colors in Metz’s work has accelerated in recent years. By being practiced by anyone with an internet connection, today seriality and repetition takes on new meaning, rather than just being the province of fine art. In the 1960s one would—pace Benjamin H. D. Buchloh—associate these strategies with an aesthetics of administration, whereby such non-compositional ways of working could be aligned with deskilling. That is to say, with ways by which the artist sought to remove his or her hand, and by extension, his or her personality from the work of art, often by aping bureaucratic operations.13 Seriality and repetition was something seen as having been borrowed from non-artistic arenas, that of industry, for example, a logic drawn more from that of commercial graphic design than that of art history. Today, however, it is not only that such strategies have become acceptable and recognizable forms of artistic expression, but as already indicated, that these strategies are now aligned, even in mainstream culture, with exactly the thing they originally sought to expunge: subjectivity.14 This is not to say that a regularized grid doesn’t still suggest an architectonic logic more than a painterly one, but that gesture itself has become an effect of seriality. We identify with those things and images that we share with others, even down to the supposed individuality of the handmade gesture. It is in this matrix between gesture and impersonality that Metz’s forms lie, both in their overall shape—which allude to forms almost, but not quite known—and in the intuitively brushed gradations and flecks of pigment that fill them. The curious, lyrical pleasures they elicit, even as they challenge and extend our perception of the world around us, is the result of this timely conjunction of optical and material terms. Landon Metz Within and Beyond History

Untitled, 2014 dye on canvas in two parts 96 x 240 in. (243,8 x 609,6 cm) Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2015 dye on shaped canvas in two parts 72 x 33 5/16 x 7/8 in. (182,9 x 84,6 x 2,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

Untitled, 2016 dye on canvas in three parts 32 x 40 in. (81,3 x 101,6 cm) each 32 x 120 in. (81,3 x 304,8 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

Untitled, 2017 dye on canvas in two parts 80 x 64 in. (203 x 162,6 cm) each 80 x 128 in. (203 x 325,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2017 dye on canvas in five parts 60 x 48 in. (152,4 x 121,9 cm) each 60 x 240 in. (152,4 x 609,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

Untitled, 2017 dye on canvas in three parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 96 in. (101,6 x 243,8 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

Untitled, 2017 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Collection of Caroline + Robin Brinckerhoff

Untitled, 2017 dye on canvas in two parts 80 x 64 in. (203,2 x 162,6 cm) each 80 x 128 in. (203,2 x 325,1 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Private Collection

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 132,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts

40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in three parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101,6 cm) each 50 x 120 in. (127 x 304,8 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Private Collection

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101,6 cm) each 50 x 80 in. (127 x 203,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Private Collection

Untitled, 2018 Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101,6 cm) each 100 x 40 in. (254 x 101,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Collection of Megan Sheetz and Trevor Price

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 50 in. (101,6 x 127 cm) each 40 x 100 in. (101,6 x 254 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 50 in. (101,6 x 127 cm) each 40 x 100 in. (101,6 x 254 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Private Collection

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 76 x 95 in. (193 x 241,3 cm) each 76 x 190 in. (193 x 482,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in two parts 32 x 40 in. (81,3 x 101,6 cm) each 32 x 80 in. (81,3 x 203,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas 76 x 95 in. (193 x 241,3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2018 dye on canvas in three parts 94 x 75 3/16 in. (238,8 x 191 cm) each 94 x 225 5/8 in. (238,8 x 573,1 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Installation views of Landon Metz at Patrick de Brock Gallery, KnokkeHeist, Belgium 2019 Images courtesy of Patrick de Brock Gallery

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas 80 x 64 in. (203 x 162,6 cm) Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas 80 x 64 in. (203 x 162,6 cm) Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in three parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 96 in. (101,6 x 243,8 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101,6 cm) each 50 x 80 in. (127 x 203,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Maria Jose Terroba Collection

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101,6 cm) each 50 x 80 in. (127 x 203,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Collection of Santiago Sepulveda & Gloria Cortina

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Collection of Amanda and Craig Napoliello

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm) each 50 x 80 inches (127 x 203.2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Untitled, 2019

dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 80 x 32 in. (203,2 x 81,3 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 132,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

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Installation view of Clarity at Francesca Minini, Milan, 2020 Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm) each 50 x 80 inches (127 x 203.2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Untitled, 2019 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 80 x 32 in. (203,2 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in three parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 96 in. (101,6 x 243,8 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm) each 50 x 80 inches (127 x 203.2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in two parts 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101,6 cm) each 50 x 80 in. (127 x 203,2 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in two parts 32 x 40 in. (81,3 x 101,6 cm) each 64 x 40 in. (162,6 x 101,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2020 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

MMXXI XLVI, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

MMXXI XLVII, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

MMXXI XLVIII, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

Installation views of It snowed and a half sphere accumulated on a post outside the window at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, 2021

Untitled, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York Private Collection

Untitled, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

Untitled, 2021

dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 80 x 32 in. (203,2 x 81,3 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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Installation view of Nineteen Eighty-Five (with Eva LeWitt) at VI, VII, Oslo, 2021

Untitled, 2021 dye on canvas 40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

MMXXI XLII, 2021 dye on canvas 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

Untitled, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

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Installation view of Euphoria at von Bartha, 2021

Untitled, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

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MMXXI XXXVIII, 2021 dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha

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Towards Ecological Thought The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”1 —James Baldwin

1 James Baldwin, “The Creative Process” (1962), in Creative America, ed. John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, et al. (New York, 1962), p. 18. 2 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2010), p. 3. 3 Ibid., p. 8. 4 Originally coined by David Abram in his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World, the term “more than human” has since been widely adopted by scholars, theorists, and activists as a means of describing earthly life as a single collective entity that includes but exceeds humankind, thereby challenging prescribed distinctions between man and his environment.

In his 2010 treatise The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton suggests that for human society to adopt more environmentally conscious behaviors, we must first do away with our very conception of nature itself. Whether our attitudes toward the environment entail presumed entitlement (i.e., nature-as-resource, there to be wielded as needed) or appeals for conservation (i.e., nature-as-pristine-wilderness, unduly blemished by manmade disruptions), he writes, they share an underlying premise of separation between humanity and its perceived surroundings. For Morton, our conventional notion of “nature” is one of “a reified thing in the distance,” a monolithic abstraction fostering narratives not only of anthropocentrism—views grounded in hierarchy, authority, and control— but also its inverse, with humans’ very presence at odds with idealized images of ecosystemic parity, purity, and neutrality.2 “Nature,” he insists, is a myth, an illusory set of expectations which obscure a richer, more complicated reality—and which, in its resulting sense of alienation, impedes the curbing of our more destructive practices. In place of these prescribed notions of separation, Morton offers a viewpoint centered in notions of collectivity, hybridity, and coalescence. He proposes that life exists as a “vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection,” an open system in which all elements in a given environment are joined in active, reciprocal exchange.3 From this vantage, the subjective (the individual, the separate) gives way to the cooperative, as we discover a more nuanced, more intimate, more peculiar world, decentered and newly strange in its flowing interactions. For Morton, a turn toward ecological thinking would necessarily bring the blurring of long-held divisions, be they between environment and occupant, human and “more than human” (to borrow from David Abram), natural and unnatural, even living and nonliving.4 It would be a perspective, in other words, termed in totalities: through the dissolution of boundaries and a broadening of our lens, we might come to recognize an underlying, all-encompassing circumstance, a world comprised not of solitary entities, but rather of contexts, of relationships, of ongoing processes. Towards Ecological Thought

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Morton’s thesis offers a useful framework for approaching the work of Landon Metz, whose practice is similarly grounded in principles of synchrony and relativity. Over the past decade, Metz has used a range of formal strategies to explore—and indeed, embody—a core set of philosophical tenets that together question how notions of “self” might be negotiated, redefined, and even rescinded in shifting our perspective from the individual to the aggregate. Like Morton, Metz centers his project on the premise of interconnectivity, holding that each component of a given composition or encounter is at once active and interrelated, even mutually dependent. On this basis, we understand our perceived experience to be a construction, shaped by a multiplicity of converging factors and unfolding in real time; even those elements we might otherwise neglect—the transient, the contingent, the apparently casual—are acknowledged as consequential, each item performing naturally, sometimes subtly, but always meaningfully. In denying boundaries between what’s operative and not, this line of thinking carries over at points to the doctrine of non-dualism, which recognizes a fundamental unity in the outwardly disparate. Here, apparent distinctions—between foreground and background, subject and object, “something” as opposed to “nothing”—are recast

Installation view of Galerie Torri, Paris booth at Artissima, Turin, 2013 108

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as complements, with prescribed hierarchies razed and replaced with a decentralized, interlacing continuum. As with the principle of interconnectivity, non-dualistic thinking is a matter not of invention or preference, but rather of perception, of awareness, of attunement. For Metz, these are ideas whose implications extend equally to how his work is produced, presented, and received. From the interaction of pigmented dyes with raw canvas to the balance of form and nonform in a framed arrangement, from the acknowledged influence of exhibition settings to the courted subjectivity of his audience’s readings, Metz’s output is born of a receptive, responsive methodology, an approach centered less in personal assertions than mutual exchange. Using his materials for their innate properties, letting them guide his decisions even to the point of unforeseen outcomes, he allows his own intentions to be mediated by others’, the work taking form as a function of collective circumstance. In such an equation, the artist stands as just one of any number of active participants in the compositional process. With presumptions of authorial privilege forgone, he might now approach his work less as an expressive medium than as a means of proposition, a device used to accommodate a range of resulting narratives.

While these precepts have informed the entirety of Metz’s mature output, the means of their influence shifts with each new offering. His work to date has unfolded in distinct phases, its conceptual framework at once refined and extended through varying strategies of formal translation—from thick oil paints to liquid dyes, from layered washes to defined shapes, from individual canvases to serial sets. Throughout, revision serves as a source of renewal: in exploring fresh methods of presentation, Metz discovers unforeseen points of entry and departure, the story taking new shape while retaining its conceptual underpinnings. Metz’s latest and, as of this writing, still-ongoing phase, comprising his exhibitions from 2014 to present day, has found the artist turning his focus to the elements at play in the reception of his work, highlighting the decisive roles of the audience and exhibition space. While he continues to refine his technical approach to painting, Metz’s newfound emphasis on strategies of presentation comes as a significant shift: for where narratives once centered on events unfolding on canvases Christopher Schreck

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Installation view of Michael Jackson Penthouse at Retrospective, Hudson, NY, 2014 Artwork shown collection of Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Gift of Zach Feuer and Alison Fox, Hudson, NY Image courtesy the artist

as they were composed in the studio, they now play out in public, with displayed works understood as being in an ongoing state of production, activated by their relationships to viewer and setting.

Though conceptually driven, this latest period would introduce several new and noteworthy formal strategies to Metz’s practice. In the dyed works he’d produced in the preceding two years, Metz had engaged in a process of continual refinement and reduction—of arrangement, of palette, of gesture and treatment—to the point where a given canvas might feature a single form whose shape, hue, and placement was retained from (and thus implicitly recalled) an earlier multi-form composition. His new paintings would similarly favor an economy of form, with the entire set sharing only two colors and four pseudo-organic shapes among them, but where he had previously built-up bodies of work one piece at a time, Metz was now thinking in terms of seriality, with sets of identical canvases mounted in self-contained groupings. Crucially, he began splintering his compositions so that no individual painting bore a complete form; only by placing multiple paintings next to one another did the arrangement become legible. This new methodology spoke as much to guiding philosophies as visual strategies: though still grounded in a core set of concepts, Metz’s work moving forward would foster a new and shifting set of narratives, among them, the perceived blurring of individuality and interdependence, the authorial potential of coincidence, and the performative nature of presenting—and responding to—works of art. This new chapter would find its footing with Michael Jackson Penthouse, Metz’s March 2014 showing at Retrospective (Hudson, New York). Beyond the serial nature of the works themselves, the exhibition diverged from Metz’s prior offerings in several other key ways, beginning with its setting: a small, unassuming house set in a residential neighborhood. Embracing the idiosyncrasies of domestic architecture, Metz’s presentation here was inventive, carefully planned, and often playful, with paintings hung not only on the walls, but also along and under the home’s staircase, embedded in corners and crevices, set directly across open windows, and in one instance, affixed to the building’s exterior. [FIG.] This last gesture, which he would go on to repeat three years later in a solo showing at von Bartha, S-chanf, neatly illustrates an idea central to all of Metz’s work from this period: by placing Towards Ecological Thought

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a painting “outside,” he calls into question the functional boundaries of the exhibition space, blurring any presumed barriers between work and setting. Responding directly to its environment, Metz’s installation reads as less an intervention than an integration, his work merging neatly into the standing structure, rearticulating its form without alteration or embellishment.

Installation view of Fourth Wall at von Bartha S-chanf, Switzerland, 2017 Image courtesy of von Bartha

“A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—whatever the artist’s personal intention—advocate anything at all.”5 —Susan Sontag

Metz’s work from this period onward reflects his conscious effort to challenge the artist’s presumed role in dictating his/her work’s content or connotations. Through his increasingly segmented compositions and newly integrative installation strategies, Metz strives here to offset his own biases by embracing circumstantial results and relative readings, his interests lying less in conveying meaning than in cultivating its potential for plurality, providing a framework that might accommodate a more expansive view of authorship, a wider range of interpretations, a broader scope of experience. Still, to create work that eschews self-reference is not the same as pursuing an ideal of “objectivity”—or denying the influence of subjectivity. It is, simply, to acknowledge artworks as entities encountered in diverse, ever-unfolding terms. In Metz’s case, this means understanding the exhibited pieces as reflecting artistic intentions without being encumbered by them, the artist presenting works that, per Dave Hickey, “embody beliefs in public while declining to plead them.”6

For an artist committed to principles of non-dualism, the staining process Metz has favored since 2012 seems a perfect embodiment: unlike other traditional painting mediums like enamel and oil, which are typically applied to surfaces primed with layers of gesso or other similar foundations, Metz’s hand-mixed liquid pigments (per Helen Frankenthaler’s discovery) merge directly with unprimed canvas while 112

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5 Susan Sontag, “On Style” (1966), in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1990), p. 26. 6 Dave Hickey, “American Cool,” in Pirates and Farmers (London, 2013), p. 103.

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keeping its textural integrity intact, achieving a literal integration of color, surface, medium, and support.7 While felicitous in concept, however, the dyes at first presented a practical challenge: they’re capricious, desultory, tough to control. Consequently, to yield desired results through his new medium, Metz would now have to consider the influence of other variables on the outcome of his composition(s): gravity, humidity, light exposure, even intricacies in the canvas’s stretching. Indeed, the skill Metz demonstrates in coaxing such delicate effects from these raw materials is considerable but often deceiving, as the ease with which one’s eye navigates his paintings belies the complexities involved in their making—but in truth, since his first experiments with the medium nearly a decade ago, it has been a dutiful and continuing process of application, observation, and response, with Metz actively studying and incorporating his materials’ natural tendencies into his process. This receptivity is borne out in the paintings themselves: even when conceived as part of a serial arrangement, each canvas tells its own story, the fluidity of Metz’s process confirmed in the surface’s varied absorptions and gradations. As much guided as governed, the resulting compositions offset the artist’s intention with material nature and in doing so, discard any number of painting’s prescribed boundaries, be they between material and ground, active and negative space, even author and instrument.

Installation view of Fourth Wall at von Bartha S-chanf, Switzerland, 2017 Image courtesy of von Bartha

“Result is a thing of the past. If you are concerned with results, no vital action exists, because the present is not known.”8 —Toshi Ichiyanagi

At the bodega on the corner they have black plums 2 for $1 and cactus pears 2 for $1 and tangerines 2 for $1, Metz’s 2017 showing at Andersen’s Contemporary in Copenhagen, was unique among his exhibitions to date for its inclusion of the moving image. A 16 mm projector set directly on the gallery’s hardwood floor cast a film directly onto the gallery wall, the picture scaled precisely to fit the rectangular moldings lining the room. The footage featured straight-on shots of a series of paintings on view elsewhere in the exhibition; while each cell captured a different individual work, the canvases’ shared forms and palette gave 114

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7 Commonly included in discussions of Color Field painting and “Post-Painterly Abstraction” alongside artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) is widely credited for devising the “soak-stain” technique, in which the artist allowed liquified pigment to be absorbed directly into untreated canvas. With works like Mountains and Sea (1952), Frankenthaler extended the formal strategies of Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists by achieving a more literal equation of image and material while purposefully eschewing those earlier artist’s reliance on overt gesture, creating luminous washes whose forms were dictated as much by material conditions as by the artist’s hand. 8 Toshi Ichiyanagi, quoted in “Nature and Music,” by Toru Takemitsu, in Confronting Silence: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Yoshiko Kakudo and Glenn Glasow (Berkeley, 1995,. p. 12.

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Installation views of At the bodega on the corner they have black plums 2 for $1 and cactus pears 2 for $1 and tangerines 2 for $1 at Andersen’s, Copenhagen, 2017 Images courtesy of Andersen’s

the impression of a single piece recorded in one prolonged take, the only hint of the movie’s true composite nature being the gentle flutter and flicker of film. [FIG.] Metz’s adoption of projected imagery is instructive, as it offers literal illustration of concepts that ground much of his work from this current period, both formally and philosophically. Cinema, after all, is a science, grounded in applied principles of human perception. Our visual systems have certain thresholds at which they can process sequential imagery: at ten to twelve images per second, the eye can still perceive a series of impressions individually—but at higher frame rates, discrete forms begin to blend, static series now registered as continual action. As employed in films, this “apparent motion” (or Beta movement) becomes a functioning optical illusion, with constructed images articulated across succeeding cells, their apparent coherence achieved only in the viewer’s observation. One finds similar ideas at play in Metz’s use of modular repetition, as here too we find elaborate configurations becoming at once linear, open-ended, and, perhaps most crucially, implied. Like film strips, Metz’s works from this period unfold in iterative sequence, with samesized canvases bearing a common form—but again, as in cinema, we find their sundered imagery rendered whole through visual processes rather than physical. In truth, these compositions are never literally realized, never truly complete; that the forms might read as intact is entirely a matter of the viewer’s perception, a mechanism of the mind. In this sense, we might understand the exhibited artwork not as mere result or Christopher Schreck

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record, offered after the fact of completion, but rather as an event, an experience being generated in real time. Just as viewers’ individual perceptions might play an active role in the process of composition, so too might they extend to notions of volume and duration: though Metz’s clustered canvases defer to their settings, measured by the particularities of the gallery space, we are free to presume that each sequence might otherwise have continued indefinitely and, in theory, infinitely. Indeed, even when single canvases are shown on their own, one can imagine their place in a boundless progression, the object always anchored in a broader narrative. Notice the balance struck here between the individual and collective: within this alliterative strategy, each element is at once singular and serial, unique and yet not; though each canvas stands on its own, its full connotation is grasped in context, as part of a larger arrangement, a greater system. In this sense, Metz’s seriality is also an impulse geared toward a kind of devaluation: through repeated form and palette, the perceived weight of authorial expression is further diminished. One thinks here of Olivier Mosset, whose work with the BMPT collective and beyond similarly employed repeated motifs, multi-panel arrangements, and a knowing self-referentiality as a means of suppressing subjectivity, rejecting metaphor, and subverting traditional notions of creative authorship.9 It is, ultimately, a gesture aimed at centering totality over the individual: though forms and palettes continue to entice, the imagery has now become systematic, with nothing separate, nothing favored.

In her 2015 review of Agnes Martin’s retrospective at the Tate, London, Anne M. Wagner writes of Martin’s paintings: “Each line is systematically planned and plotted, yet no system this dependent on its maker’s skills and concentration could entirely conceal its human origins. The exact circumstances of its making are always recorded. . . . Such making is self-evidently sequential, but the effect is of accumulated difference, as much or more than the defining similarity that brings each mark to be.”10

Outwardly, ideas like these might call to mind an artist like Donald Judd, whose work similarly curbed the presumed primacy of authorial intention by emphasizing the intrinsic qualities of his materials and replacing 118

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9 Olivier Mosset (b. 1944) is a Swiss-born, Arizona-based artist whose best-known painted works eschew subjectivity through the use of neutral patterns and serial repetition, as in his “zero degree paintings” (196–74), for which the artist produced more than 200 identical oil works featuring a small black circle at the center of a one-meter-square white canvas. In 1966, he joined artists Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni as part of the BMPT collective, whose conceptually driven exhibitions challenged prescribed notions of authorship and originality, with members claiming to have produced the exhibited works in one another’s signature styles, the resulting objects presented less as artworks than as decor or props in a performance. 10 Anne M. Wagner, “Agnes Martin,” Artforum (Summer 2015), p. 277.

Installation view of At the bodega on the corner they have black plums 2 for $1 and cactus pears 2 for $1 and tangerines 2 for $1 at Andersen’s, Copenhagen, 2017 Image courtesy of Andersen’s

the artist’s gesture with serial iterations. But where Judd’s industrial methods of production ensured exact replicas (“one thing after another”), Metz’s canvases remain resolutely, legibly handmade: upon inspection one sees pencil-drawn contours whose borders the dyes he uses regularly, if subtly, breach; even when viewed from a distance, we see chromatic variations, degrees of absorption, small pills of fabric dotting the face of the form. [FIG.] There remains in these works a connection both to continuity and to finite circumstance: within each canvas, we recognize any number of moments recorded, of decisions made. Though begun under similar circumstances—a stretched canvas laid flat, compositions vaguely anticipated in penciled outlines—every painting is a site, a staged event, a lucid document of active negotiations between artist, medium, and environment.

11 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, self-published (1975).

Repetition becomes an exercise in recognizing subtleties: presented with so much of the same, small variances begin to stand out like accents, the pattern enlivened even by minor discrepancy. (Per Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies: “Repetition is a form of change.”)11 This idea is central to Metz’s serial canvases—not because such irregularities are instructive on a connotative level, but rather because they confirm his decision to achieve repetition manually Towards Ecological Thought

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instead of mechanically. That Metz has forgone automated means—be it shaped stencils for paintings, industrial fabrication for sculptures, even pre-prepared stretchers or dyes—means he has knowingly allowed for deviation, the results never static or fixed. We might compare this approach to the works of composers like Steve Reich or Terry Riley, in which we similarly find that what might read on paper as the mere iteration of a pared vocabulary—no climaxes, no tempo changes, no contractions or swells—becomes something entirely lusher and more diverse in performance, as one gradually discovers in their syncopations a wealth of subtle and shifting detail, slow-blooming variance and counterpoint, a full range of texture and tone. One recognizes in and through works like these that rarely is reiteration as literal as might be expected; even the most austere, patterned sequences bear the potential for complexity, lyricism, and narrative.

Describing Fairfield Porter’s paintings, poet James Schuyler regarded the work’s dual impulses of concentration and immediacy (“the conscious mind” working in tangent with the “free[d] hand”) in terms that might well have served as his own credo: “Look now. It will never be more fascinating.”12 That Porter focused on and found such deep, sustaining interest in people and places with whom he was well acquainted speaks to an idea similarly at play in Metz’s engagement with the architecture of museums and gallery spaces: namely, that when afforded our bare attention, even the most familiar or seemingly neutral subjects may be recast and made suddenly patent and utterly strange—relieved of ritual, unobscured by expectation. For Metz, the aim goes beyond merely acknowledging the subtleties that demarcate these outwardly clinical settings, but seem a crucial step along the way: before his audience might consider the environment an active agent in their experience of art, they must first come to see it as active.

The myth of museums and galleries as “neutral” spaces, architecturally or otherwise, has long-since been deflated; beyond the specifics of a given building’s spatial and temporal qualities, we’ve come to recognize these institutionalized settings as social constructs, reinforcing a select set of special interests, public policies, and historical narratives. 120

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12 James Schuyler, “An Aspect of Fairfield Porter’s Paintings.” ARTNews (May 1967). Republished in Selected Art Writings: James Schuyler, ed. Simon Pettet (Santa Rosa, 1998), p. 17.

In his influential 1976 publication, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian O’Doherty illustrates the extent to which exhibition venues themselves can inform, and indeed dictate, the viewing experience. Despite its apparent impartiality— “blank” white walls, evened lighting, hushed volumes allowing for uninterrupted contemplation—O’Doherty portrays the conventional gallery space as a highly controlled and ultimately didactic environment, quietly exerting influence on both the art on view and the receiving audience. Still, there remains in these discussions a salient point: context is always content. Our experience of art is one invariably mediated by any number of controlling factors, not the least being its surrounding environment. Indeed, to appreciate the multiple agencies at play, as O’Doherty wrote, we must learn not only “to see the context as formative on the thing,” but also, importantly, “to see the context as a thing itself.”13

How might an artist shift from working in or on a given space to working with it? Between artist and environment, what in their (and our) thinking would have to change in order to find the two on equal footing?

13 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976), p. 7. 14 Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” Perspecta 20: Yale Architectural Journal (1983): 147–62.

The latter half of the twentieth century gave quiet rise to a wave of architects whose approach to design and site selection were deeply (often literally) rooted in the particularities of local landscapes. The Italian architect Alberto Ponis, for instance, often allowed indigenous topographies to inform the homes he built on the island of Sardinia: intimate, nature-embedded structures whose designs updated the traditional stazzo by responding to—and in many instances, actively incorporating—the slanting hills, cragged rocks, and rough vegetation that define the region’s coasts. Literally site-responsive, these were structures conceived in attentive dialogue with their settings, less “installed on” their given tracts of land than assimilated within them. [FIG.] Like Albert Frey’s Frey House II (1964) and other similarly integrative structures from the period, Ponis’s work was carefully designed to engage its surroundings without altering or overtaking them, his conscious merging of modernist tenets with geographical contexts neatly embodying what Kenneth Frampton once termed “critical regionalism.”14 Here, a building’s setting was recognized as being necessarily an active constituent in its form, its Christopher Schreck

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utility, and, ultimately, its meaning: for as each edifice served to articulate its surroundings, so in turn did the landscape itself become an extension of the design’s aesthetic and theoretical conceits, the extant environment now inseparable, both physically and conceptually, from the structure it hosted. Metz’s exhibitions since 2014 have demonstrated a similar investment in challenging presumed (prescribed?) distinctions between site and subject. Scaling up and across ceilings, laid over walkways, traversing multiple levels, quoting the contours of each space: Metz’s installations similarly accommodate their settings without arrogating or neutralizing them, embracing their particularities as opportunities. Working in this mode, we see Metz adapting to each space as he finds it, his methods emerging, as Ponis once said of his own designs, as “the consequence of the shape of the ground itself, something that was already there.”15 In adopting this approach, Metz invites his audiences to reconsider each gallery space as a specific—and thus, specifically influential—container for our experience of art, in terms not only of physical architecture, but also of cultural expectation. Like the on-site works of Daniel Buren, Metz’s installations engage their environs in order to draw attention to art’s situating structures, both literal and ideological.16 Buren has spoken of his works’ potential as signifiers: “The visual tool is no longer a work to be seen, or to be beheld,” he’s said, “but is [rather] the element that permits you to see or behold something else.”17 In acknowledging the surrounding environment as a participating factor rather than a passive support, Metz’s work similarly points past itself to suggest a more expansive awareness, one whose implications go beyond the particulars of his project and speak to the very nature of the formal viewing experience. That Metz’s work unfolds in dialogue with its environment is not, in the end, what’s most salient here—it is the suggestion that all exhibited artworks might function in similar terms.

If Metz’s show at Retrospective introduced this line of thinking, we see it neatly extended in Plose, the culminating exhibition of his 2014 residency at the Antonio Dalle Nogare Collection in Bolzano, Italy. Here, visitors entering on the ground floor were met by a horizontal triptych bearing his now-familiar mounded blue forms, clustered canvases stacked to the ceiling, while on the museum’s second level, a largescale diptych, rendered sparsely in slivers of forest green, stretched 122

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15 Arquitectura-G, “The Crystal and the Flame,” Apartamento, issue 22 (Autumn/ Winter 2018), p. 215. 16 Daniel Buren (b. 1938) is a French conceptual artist whose work critically examines art’s relationship to the settings and systems that frame it. Best known for his elaborate site-specific installations and his signature motif of alternating vertical stripes, Buren’s in-situ interventions aim to integrate works of art with the architectural spaces and cultural contexts in which they are produced and presented. Along with Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni, he was a member of the BMPT collective (1966–67), whose work challenged traditional modes of presenting art within the museum-gallery system. 17 Daniel Buren, quoted in the press release for “Daniel Buren: One thing to another, Situated Works,” Lisson Gallery, London, November 23, 2011 – February 14, 2012.

Installation views of Plose, ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy, 2014 Images courtesy the artist See page 16

nearly the width of an entire wall. Metz’s largest to date, these paintings translated his distilled compositions to bodily proportions. [FIG.] Looking upward, visitors found a curved line of twenty-one smaller canvases traveling serially across the length of the top floor’s arched ceiling, the sequence precisely measured to trace the length of its contour. [FIG.] Formally, the images retain the rounded forms and careful palette that had served as punctuation in earlier compositions; in their mode of presentation, however, we see Metz deferred literally, in both scale and installation, to the space’s preexisting architecture. This would prove a key point in his exhibitions moving forward, as aspects of a given setting adopted as units of measure, dictated the work’s precise dimensions and presentation.

“Thirty spokes meet in the hub, though the space between them is the essence of the wheel.18 —Laozi

18 Laozi,

Tao Te Ching, chapter 11 (English translation).

Beginning in 2015, Metz expanded his strategies of fragmentation by moving away from conventional modes of support to embrace shaped canvases and sculptural forms. He had long placed an emphasis on literal physicality, asserting the nature of paintings as objects beheld in real space, but here Metz began to invert that equation by emphasizing the roles of dimension, duration, and orientation in the reception of his work. The forms were drawn from previous paintings, and again, rendered in dyed canvas, retaining the same select palette of deep green Towards Ecological Thought

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and blue. In shifting their perceived frames from paths of raw canvas to the surrounding environment, however, Metz again activates elements that might have otherwise been presumed passive, further blurring the figure/ground dynamic by asserting the gallery space itself as an integrated and active compositional factor.

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Installation view of Landon Metz at James Fuentes, New York, 2015 Image courtesy of Object Studies

In Metz’s self-titled show at James Fuentes Gallery in 2015, a series of blue dyed canvases, each custom-shaped and wall-mounted, lined the gallery’s perimeter. [FIG.] Grandly scaled and precisely measured, the stained monochromes circled the space in a continual loop, the sequence unfolding rhythmically as the viewer’s gaze traveled the periphery. Where Metz’s painted had once been framed in raw canvas, these newly isolated figures now adopted the gallery as ground, the canvases not really items on display so much as actors in dialogue. By choosing to recast the gallery wall as the pictorial plane in a larger perceived composition, Metz invokes a lineage of post-1950s architectural painting, recalling artists from Ellsworth Kelly to Blinky Palermo. [FIG.] His approach diverges from these earlier models, however, in its knowing deference to the work’s neighboring architecture. On a practical level, Metz’s fragmentation here is grounded as much in function as concept: in order to produce a wraparound effect, particularly in navigating the room’s corners, he had to divide some of the forms into

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Installation view of Ellsworth Kelly: Signature Forms 1966 – 2009 at Mnuchin Gallery, New York, 2013 Image courtesy of Mnuchin Gallery, New York

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separate panels, once again allowing abutted segments to suggest a complete whole. This strategy is extended, however, by its accommodation of the gallery’s particular architecture, as we see forms ruptured by the room’s walkways and doors, the shapes now purposefully broken. With each step, it seems, Metz has allowed his decisions in both making and mounting the work to be guided by the space itself—but just as remarkably, he’s placed his audience in a similar position: for as much as Metz had to account for these structural elements in the exhibition’s production, the same becomes true in its reception by the audience, whose view of the work now includes the newly emphasized surroundings. This idea finds similar expression in oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh at Andersen’s, also in 2015. There, the architecture of the gallery—multiple rooms, inset walkways, series of doors—again demanded unique strategies, yielding singular effects. Metz has once again divided his repetitive forms into multiple panels; what’s notable here, however, is that in some cases, individual portions seem at first to lack partners, their unfolding shapes truncated by architectural circumstance. [FIG.] Proceeding through the galleries, one instead finds corresponding figures in neighboring rooms, furthering a sense of continuity; depending on one’s position, it became possible to connect discrete forms across multiple galleries, with portions of canvas from one room bleeding into one another, creating new visual couplings. As a result, whatever linearity that might have been implied in the work’s presentation quickly recedes, the narrative rendered relative in the act of viewing. Within each exhibition, the artistic encounter becomes a kind of walking meditation, as the viewer’s attentive movement reveals unforeseen kinships, a fresh sense of visual unity coalescing with every step. With alignments dependent on vantage and viewpoint, each installation thus contains a potentially infinite scope of readings, none more or less credible than another. Once again, the work’s content has become, literally, a matter of audience perspective.

In Japanese, ma, roughly translated to “gap” or “pause,” speaks to the intangible function of intervals between structural parts. Less a compositional element than a philosophical concept, it might be understood as a “consciousness of place”—not merely in the sense of observing a self-contained area, but rather of experiencing a range of spatial designations as mutually active, a simultaneous perception of architecture and open air, form and non-form. 128

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Installation view of Landon Metz at James Fuentes, New York, 2015 Image courtesy of Object Studies right

Installation view of oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh at Andersen’s, Copenhagen, 2015 Image courtesy of Andersen’s

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Installation view of oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh at Andersen’s, Copenhagen, 2015 Image courtesy of Andersen’s

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Beginning with 2016’s “double solo show” &, held simultaneously at Francesca Minini, Milan, and Massimo Minini, Brescia (again, two physically separate sites functioning as a single entity), Metz further blurred the line between image, object, and environment by translating painted forms into stand-alone physical structures. [FIG.] As with his shaped canvases from the prior year, Metz’s freestanding pieces derived their shapes from corresponding paintings and shared a common treatment of color and cadence; untethered from the gallery wall, however, these works added a literal new dimension, softening the distinction between sculpture-as-structure and sculpture-as-space, between items observed and events still unfolding. [FIG.] In both Minini shows, the fragmented forms emerge from the ceiling and floor like stalactites and stalagmites, nearly meeting in the middle. Moving his objects away from the wall and into the gallery space allowed the room itself to assume a role occupied in prior works by untouched canvas and white walls: that of an integrated medium, with the perceived line between foreground and background again rendered indistinguishable. As is so often the case in Metz’s practice, this new strategy would have direct implications for the viewer as well. Whereas Metz’s previous installations allowed for the viewer’s embodied observations, the Minini sculptures took this a step further, inviting them to walk around and through the composition, introducing an implied (though not insistent) choreography. This last detail is crucial: by placing his work among his audience rather than simply in front of them, Metz knowingly entered the social arena where proceedings become unpredictable and

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Installation views of & at Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy, 2016 Images courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

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Installation view of & at Francesca Minini, Milan, 2016 Image courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini left

Installation view of & at Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy, 2016

circumstance is always in flux. While his interventions may facilitate the audience’s movement through a newly activated gallery space, they do not presume to dictate that route. Once again, we see the artist embracing allowance over edict, presenting his work as less a focal point than a framework for unforeseen narratives.

Image courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini

In both writing about and discussing art exhibitions, we tend to use any number of synonyms, speaking in terms of a “show,” a “display,” a “presentation,” or an “installation.” In addressing Metz’s work, we might find a more apt analogue in the idea of an offering—which is to say, an effort extended, a notion proposed.

Turning our thoughts once more to 2017’s At the bodega . . .: beyond its incorporation of motion pictures, the exhibition was notable for signaling another purposeful shift in Metz’s formal language. From this point forward, a newfound insouciance would inform his work, with shapes growing livelier and more varied, his palette and methodology expanding in turn. Though he returned once again to conventionally formatted canvases—rectangular shapes of varying dimension—gone were the shapes of elongated dashes, hovering semicircles, and undulating bodies to which his visual vocabulary had been restricted for the three years prior. In their place, one begins to see the dyed figures becoming slinkier and stranger, curling and sinuous. [FIG.] Peter Schjeldahl once described Matisse’s use of contour as being “like the borders of wetness left by waves on a beach”: whereas Picasso’s lines read as a matter of imposed will, Matisse’s were yielding, his hand seeming, in Schjeldahl’s terms, to “accept the mysterious need of shapes and colors to seek their proper place and proportion.”19 One gains the same sense from Metz’s latest forms, which appear not so much dictated as discovered, the product of some natural process left to its own devices, allowed to grow wild. Around this same time, Metz was rediscovering his range as a colorist. The works on view in this exhibition, and those that follow, recall his earliest dyed canvases, and even his pre-dye works in oil and enamel, in their ebullience and chromatic diversity. Metz has always been gifted in his sense of color, his choices resonant even when restricted to a single hue—but in these latest sequences, we find him once again broadening Christopher Schreck

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Installation view of & at Francesca Minini, Milan, 2016 Image courtesy the artist and Francesca Minini

his palette, embracing bright, unblushing pigments to complement the work’s sprightly new forms. Exuberant in both color and design, his compositions now seem to bloom as seasonal flowers: radiant, inviting, animate but unhurried.

As Metz’s paintings have blossomed, so too have his stand-alone sculptures. While the basic logic that informed the Minini works is retained, we find noteworthy developments in his selections of material and placement. Toward the former: where Metz’s objects to date had been rendered in dyed canvas on custom stretchers, suggesting a literal transition from wall-hung painting to mounted sculpture, we now see him experimenting with unfamiliar mediums. In At the bodega . . . a cluster of deep-green dyed works is echoed in shape by soft-hued pink foam, the fragments spaced to adhere compositionally (though only legible as such when viewed from above); [FIG.] in 2018’s Feels So Right Now at von Bartha, Basel, an undulating C-shaped form borrowed from earlier offerings at von Bartha, S-chanf, and VI, VII, Oslo, is translated into large chartreuse blocks of pigmented acrylic resin and mineral aggregate. [FIG.] Later that year, in Asymmetrical Symmetry at Sean Kelly, a thickened variation of that same form (rendered on nearby canvases in a pale beige previously unseen in Metz’s palette) was lent dimension and weight through the use of white marble, resulting in a linear sequence of 138

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19 Peter Schjeldahl, “Twin Peaks,” The New Yorker (March 3, 2003).

Installation views of At the bodega on the corner they have black plums 2 for $1 and cactus pears 2 for $1 and tangerines 2 for $1 at Andersen’s, Copenhagen, 2017 Images courtesy of Andersen’s

bifurcated sculptures whose span precisely echoed the indented perimeter of the gallery space. [FIG.] Toward the latter: in all three instances, Metz designed the sculptures that hug the floor, drawing the viewer’s eyes downward to the compositions unfolding at their feet. Activating the galleries’ walkways as he had previously done their walls, Metz embraces what Rosalind Krauss might have termed “horizontality,” an upending of art historical biases that typically favor the “vertical”—which is to say the pictorial, the two-dimensional, the wall-hung.

Installation view of Asymmetrical Symmetry at Sean Kelly, New York, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

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That Metz goes so far as to complement another set of pink foam sculptures by laying a series of dyed canvases directly on the floor in his untitled 2018 installation at Rome’s Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese only reinforces this proposed spatial (and, indeed, ideational) realignment. [FIG.] Like the Minini sculptures, these floor-bound works invite a more self-aware viewing experience, as the forms carve channels through each space, guiding visitors’ movement through the venue as they navigate around and between them, “negative” space again being made a site of activity. As one’s perception of the ground turns from literal to figurative, one gains a deeper sense of immersion, physically, in a particular space; embodied participation itself now a function of critical engagement. On similar terms, one notes the manner in which Metz’s painted sequences at Sean Kelly crawl across the ceiling, completing the artist’s engagement with all sides of the White Cube. [FIG.] These presentations call for a shift in orientation, and we quickly understand that to rest plainly on the floor isn’t necessarily the same as lying inert. [FIG.]

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Installation view of Feels So Right Now at von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland, 2018 Image courtesy of von Bartha, Basel pages 142–143

Installation view of Asymmetrical Symmetry at Sean Kelly, New York, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York right

Installation view of Landon Metz at Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese, Rome, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese

“There’s an active notion of neutrality that people don’t understand,” Sontag insisted. “Transcendent neutrality isn’t an attitude of ‘I won’t take sides.’ It’s compassion.”20

In 1980’s Absorption and Theatricality, Michael Fried suggested that the best work of the era had succeeded precisely because it “treated the beholder as if he were not there.”21 Connecting such postures to approaches established a century earlier by artists like Géricault and Courbet, Fried speaks to the presumed virtues of begetting an audience’s rapt, reverential, and potentially reflexive attention, as extolled by (and in) eighteenth-century paintings and their surrounding critical discourse, particularly in the writings of Denis Diderot. For an artwork to yield such a response, Fried suggests, it must first shed self-awareness of its own role in the formal viewing experience; only through “establishing the fiction of [the viewer’s] absence or nonexistence could his placement before and enthrallment by the painting be secured.”22 By effectively pretending its audience isn’t there, in other words, a work might achieve modern art’s long-standing “ideal of silence” (per Sontag), 144

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20 Susan Sontag, Susan, in conversation with Jonathan Cott, “Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview” (1978), in Conversations with Susan Sontag, ed. Leland Poague (Jackson, 1995), p. 131. 21 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1980), p. 5. 22 Ibid., p. 103.

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Installation view of Landon Metz at Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese, Rome, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese right

John D. Schiff, Installation View of Exhibition First Papers of Surrealism Showing String Installation, 1942 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library and Archives: Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp, Leo Baeck Institute Photograph Collection.

23 Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York, 1982), p. 184. 24 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” ARTnews 56, no.4 (Summer 1957), p. 29.

becoming an object of separate standing, there to be contemplated, potentially adored, but never known intimately—physically present, but not quite available.23 It is a line of thinking which leads Fried to distinguish and ultimately dismiss the work of so-called Minimalist artists as “theatrical,” precisely for its active acknowledgment of its audience— which it was, perhaps, but which also clarifies an important distinction when approaching Metz’s work from this latest period. In drawing our attention to the embodied act of viewing artworks, Metz’s project recalls those of a varied lineage of artists, ranging from Agnes Martin and Marcel Duchamp to John Cage and Robert Morris. Like Martin, Metz’s interest in the subjective (i.e., perceptive) experience of art translates to a rigorous, resolutely non-representational approach, evocative even in formal restraint. Like Duchamp, Metz recognizes the creative act as one performed not by the artist alone, but rather in collaboration—with his materials, with his settings, and finally, with the audience, who, in “bring[ing] the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting,” ultimately confirm its viability and ensure its longevity.24 In their respective approaches to installation, both artists look beyond the physical confines of the art object to include its setting as a primary material of both production and reception; consider, for instance, Duchamp’s Mile of String (1942) and 1200 Bags of Coal (1938), which found the French artist utilizing—and purposefully Towards Ecological Thought

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confusing—the gallery’s ceiling and floor in an effort not only to “[make] us conscious of what we agree not to see (i.e., take for granted),” but also, in broader terms, to acknowledge the gallery space as an operative element, “exposing the effect of context on art, of the container on the contained.”25 [FIG.] Insofar as Metz and Duchamp are also interested in courting responses beyond their own predictions, we might recall that for Mile of String’s premiere as part of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, Duchamp invited a group of children to bounce balls and play hopscotch amid his installation, the art on view quickly receding into context, now as much an occasion for spectacle as a subject. Similarly, Metz shares with Cage a willingness—eagerness, even—to incorporate his surroundings into his compositional strategies, devising methods of production and presentation that allow for the decisive influence of local ambience and circumstantial chance. As with Morris and others associated with Minimalist strategies, Metz favors what Fried would have termed a “literalist” sensibility in his approach to both material and installation; a concern with the inherent conditions and conventions that dictate the means of his art making. Like those earlier artists, Metz endeavors to place his works (and thus his audience) in active dialogue with a broader setting, purposefully staging encounters in which the viewer might avoid passive absorption and become, as Morris said, “more aware than ever before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the [art] object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context.”26 In their respective productions, both Morris and Metz appear eager to erode traditional barriers between the object and the eye, perceiver and perceived, but where the Minimalists seemed content to identify and potentially dictate the range of variables that defined each encounter, Metz remains committed to producing work that sidesteps his own desires and expectations, not simply in terms of “removing the artist’s hand,” but rather in allowing all active constituents in the exhibition experience (the materials, the setting, and, ultimately, the viewer) to retain a sense of selfhood, each behaving and met on its own terms. It’s a crucial distinction: where the Minimalists were seen as seeking control and definition, Metz embraces presence and possibility; more importantly, rather than “assuming” or “ceding” authority over the process, he acts with the understanding that control was never his in the first place.

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Installation view of Asymmetrical Symmetry at Sean Kelly, New York, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly, New York

25 Brian O’Doherty,. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1976), pp. 66–69. 26 Minimalism, ed. James Meyer (New York, 2000), p. 30.

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Another point: Minimalist works, like many of Duchamp’s, were intellectual, retinal, and perhaps unavoidably aesthetic in their presentations, but they were rarely what most would consider sensual. In such cases, we see art function, in both means and effect, like Zen koans: simple, economical statements geared toward provocation, with new understandings achieved through cerebration. Metz’s practice is no less philosophical in its grounding—but even at its most austere, his output retains a lyricism that sets it apart from the severity that defined those earlier projects, dedicated as they were to the resistance of ornament and suspicion of personality. Given that Metz offers his work to be experienced, even enjoyed, rather than merely understood, we might instead think of his approach as being closer to certain forms of haiku poetry: metered yet melodic, it too is born of and geared toward alert observation of the present moment—but though it encourages (and rewards) a heightened self-awareness, it is also seductive, accessible, aimed not just at epiphany, but at pleasure as well.

“The response to art is the real art field.”27 —Agnes Martin

To my eyes, Metz’s work is beautiful—uniformly, unabashedly, and, perhaps, purposely so. As a viewer, what one finds beautiful is a matter not of decision, but rather of direct response. Going deeper than “taste,” our experience of beauty is immediate and visceral, even involuntary; confounding criticality and preference, beauty’s resonance is closer to compulsion, a pull that bypasses conventions, permissions, and at times our own expectations. Like the eye’s response to apparent motion, it’s an impression formed less by election than by reflex, an experience that arouses, but is ultimately removed from, the thinking mind. This is not to say, however, that the aesthetic and the intellectual must be considered in conflict. In 1967, as Conceptual Art emerged in apparent opposition to the retinal strategies of preceding generations, Lucy Lippard and John Chandler offered a qualifying point: “As visual art, a highly conceptual work still Towards Ecological Thought

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stands or falls by what it looks like.”28 The decorative and the theoretical, the cosmetic and the conceptual, connotation and form: such supposed dichotomies are not at inherent odds. Rather, when used thoughtfully, these elements can become cooperative, mutually reinforcing, strategically bound.

That an artist might succeed in making work that is beautiful (as opposed to being somehow “about” beauty or being self-consciously not beautiful) comes as a function of their willingness to open the work to readings beyond their own. Even to the extent that the artist might use beauty, employing it strategically toward a given end—and to be sure, beauty in art is always advocacy, an argument made—he or she does so knowing that the very nature of the experience, in all its relativity and capriciousness, makes its effect impossible to predict or control. Indeed, a beautiful artwork does more than provide its beholders with sensual gratification—it enfranchises them, unfetters them, allowing their private readings to arise independent of the artist’s rhetorical strategies. Beauty, in this sense, becomes a source of agency, a means of leveling hierarchies that would otherwise privilege the artist’s intentions above any (or all) others. When Metz speaks of his own approach in terms of “embrac[ing] vulnerability,” this is precisely what he means: through each step of his process, we see him go out of his way to court this shift in dynamics, abandoning notions of definitive meaning to explore instead just how much (or how little) of himself he needs to impose while still fostering a meaningful exchange.

Approached from another angle: “Beauty harmonizes consciousness from top to bottom,” Schjeldahl writes.29 To the extent that what strikes us as beautiful might come as a surprise even to ourselves, our personal encounters with beauty offer the possibility of fresh apprehensions, a clarified sense of how we relate to that which surrounds us. There is beauty that ravishes, that disorients, that urges us to wade in and lose ourselves. The beauty of Metz’s work is another kind: it welcomes, seduces knowingly, but its effect is one aimed at lucidity, not loss.

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27 Agnes Martin, “Beauty is the Mystery of Life,” in Agnes Martin: Writings (Berlin, 2005), p. 155.

Wayne Koestenbaum once characterized Roland Barthes’s project as one of “rescuing nuance,” an approach he defined, among other things, as a willingness to be enamored with detail; a denial of mythologies; an allowance for multiple views to coexist without resolution; and the embrace of ambiguity over prescription.30 I value Landon Metz’s work in similar terms. His is a mode of art centered in self-evidence, wherein elements otherwise considered peripheral or external (if considered at all) are not so much elevated as simply (finally) acknowledged, recognized for their active roles in a relational and unfolding narrative. If the point of Morton’s thesis was to implicate the reader, denying the possibility of their standing somehow apart from the functions (and, thus, fate) of their cohabiting environment, so too does Metz’s output refuse any fantasies of passive influence in the artistic encounter. In his art, there can be no distanced understanding, no experience reduced to predefined or even definitive readings; to think ecologically is rather to embrace plurality, to locate ourselves physically and philosophically in a flickering, living, utterly entwined relationship with passing circumstance. This is work about presence, about balance, about intimacy, about allowance, about reframing. With each new phase, Metz’s work coaxes further: Set aside habits and be open. Submit yourself to the moment, and notice how quickly it challenges your preconceptions. Devise finer, more unguarded ways of knowing. Something fruitful is waiting, ever available. That is the promise.

28 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36. 29 Peter Schjeldahl, “Beauty,” The New Yorker (November 1, 1999). 30 Wayne Koestenbaum, “In Defense of Nuance,” in My 1980s & Other Essays (New York, 2013), p. 51.

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Biography Bibliography

Landon Metz Born 1985 in Phoenix, Arizona Lives and works in New York, New York

Selected Solo Exhibitions Landon Metz, Waddington Custot, London, United Kingdom Euphoria, von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland It snowed and a half sphere accumulated on a post outside the window, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden 2020 Clarity, Francesca Minini, Milan, Italy 2019 Landon Metz, Patrick de Brock, Knokke-Heist, Belgium Three Eleven, Andersen’s, Copenhagen, Denmark 2018 Asymmetrical Symmetry, Sean Kelly, New York Feels So Right Now, von Bartha, Basel, Switzerland Landon Metz, Pietro Canonica Museum in Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy 2017 At the bodega on the corner they have black plums 2 for $1 and cactus pears 2 for $1 and tangerines 2 for $1, Andersen’s, Copenhagen, Denmark Fourth Wall, von Bartha, S-chanf, Switzerland Quintets, VI, VII, Oslo, Norway 2016 &, Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy &, Francesca Minini, Milan, Italy 2015 oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, Andersen’s, Copenhagen, Denmark Landon Metz, James Fuentes, New York 2014 Michael Jackson Penthouse, Retrospective, Hudson, New York Plose, ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy 2013 Free Run, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada 2012 Still, TORRI, Paris, France 2011 Something To Dance To, Preteen Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico 2021

Selected Group Exhibitions Blue., Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York Carla Accardi / Landon Metz: Fragments, Francesca Minini, Milan, Italy Reflections: Open Ended, Gana Art, Seoul, South Korea 2018 Libraryman: A Selection from a Decade, ReadingRoom, Melbourne, Australia 2017 Greffes, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto, Villa Medici, Rome, Italy Corners / In Between, curated by Eva Brioschi, Norma Mangione, Turin, Italy 2016 Morris Louis / Landon Metz, Kasmin, New York Splotch, Sperone Westwater, New York 2015 Printed Matter, New York The Essential Bruce Springsteen, Andersen’s, Copenhagen, Denmark 2014 173 E 94th St. / Chaussée de Waterloo 550, Middlemarch, Brussels, Belgium From Pre-History to Post-Everything, Sean Kelly, New York La Chose Encadrée, SWG3, Glasgow International Biennial, Glasgow, United Kingdom 2013 Xstraction, The Hole, New York F(re)e Play, Stadium, New York La Suite, TORRI, Paris, France Organix, curated by Diego Cortez, Luciano Benetton Collection, Venice, Italy Shake Shack Guggenheim, with Ethan Cook, V1, Copenhagen, Denmark Space Whole Karaoke, Middlemarch, Brussels, Belgium This Is the Story of America. Everybody’s Doing What They Think They’re Supposed ToDo. Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy 2020

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2012

Can’t Stop Rock Lobster, Shoot The Lobster, New York Caves and Laptops, Mother Neff State Park, Moody, Texas Dreamtigers (with Ethan Cook), Ed. Varie Gallery, New York Slowed & Throwed, Chinatown Arcade, New York The Love We Make (with Lauren Luloff), East Hampton Shed, East Hampton, New York TLK DRTY, Amstel 41, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2011 Historia Mysteria, Renwick Gallery, New York Post Truth, Reference Art Gallery, Richmond, Virginia Saint Lawrence Ice, Wolfe Island, Ontario, Canada 2010 Vor Gott Ist Alle Kunst Scheisse, Mike Potter Projects, Cologne, Germany Paper Awesome, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions, San Francisco, California The Company of People Group Exhibition, Space 15 Twenty, Los Angeles, California

Awards Artist-in-Residence, ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy

2014

2019

Permanent Commissions Conrad, Washington, DC

Public Collection The Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York

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Biography | Bibliography

2018 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012

Selected Publications Cederteg, Tony. A Selection from a Decade. Antwerp, Belgium: Libraryman, 2018. Club to Club. Paris, France: Libraryman, 2016. Landon Metz. Milan, Italy: Mousse, 2015. West Street Studio. Antwerp, Belgium: Libraryman, 2014. True Translation. Monograph (self-published). Rinkeby, Vimmerby. Painter Painting Surface (self-published). The Inclusivist. Monograph (self-published).

Selected Articles and Reviews Editors. “5 Artists on Our Radar This March.” Artsy, March 25, 2020. 2018 Binlot, Ann. “Landon Metz’s New Abstraction Echoes the Work of the Genre’s Masters.” Forbes (October 17, 2018). Cascone, Sarah. “Editors’ Picks: 17 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week.” Artnet News, September 3, 2018. Das, Jareh. “Autumn Exhibitions in New York: The Lowdown.” Ocula, September 14, 2018. Delistraty, Cody. “A Conversation with Landon Metz.” Blouin Artinfo, October 17, 2018. Duguid, Rosalind. “Studio Visit: Landon Metz.” Elephant, February 14, 2018. Editors. “Asymmetrical Symmetry at Sean Kelly Gallery.” Abstract Mag, September 12, 2018. Editors. “Top Art Shows in New York this Week: Sam Falls to Mark Tobey.” [Asymmetrical Symmetry]. Blouin Artinfo, October 19, 2018. Franklin, Sydney. “New Landon Metz Exhibit Uses Art to Frame Architecture.” The Architect’s Newspaper, September 11, 2018. Muriel, Françoise. “Landon Metz.” MiLK Decoration, September 2018. Tilley, John Martin. “Asymmetrical Symmetry.” Office Magazine, September 10, 2018. Wrathall, Claire. “Young Americans.” Christie’s, June – July 2018. Yerebakan, Osman Can. “Studio Visit: Landon Metz by Osman Can Yerebakan.” Bomb Magazine, February 21, 2018. 2017 Editors. “Breakfast with ARTnews: Odds/Ends.” ARTnews, Newsletter, October 12, 2017. Editors. “In The Trade.” The Art Newspaper (November 2017). Editors. “Landon Metz’s Canvas Create a Monologue of Their Own.” Thisispaper, June 6, 2017. “Interview with Sean Hotchkiss.” Cereal, April 2017. Jones, Elin. “Landon Metz’s Bushwick Studio.” ‘Thisorient, December 25, 2017. McMahon, Katherine. “Fair Thee Well.” ARTnews, March 2017. Morgan, Tiernan. “Art Movements.” Hyperallergic Newsletter, October 13,2017. 2016 “Interview with Alberto Salvadori.” Mousse Magazine (February 2016). Lambert, Tiffany. “For Brooklyn Artist Landon Metz, Painting Takes on a New Dimension.” Sight Unseen, April 1, 2016. Mason, Brooke. “In Colour: the Colour Field Movement’s Past and Present Merge at Paul Kasmin.” Wallpaper, March 4, 2016. Neuendor, Henri. “10 Emerging Artists to Keep on Your Radar.” Artnet News, November 26, 2016. Pini, Gary. “12 Must-see Art Shows Opening this Week.” Paper, April 20, 2016. 2015 Bacon, Alex. “Landon Metz’s New Paintings.” The Brooklyn Rail (September 2015). O’Reilly, Adam. “Active Space.” Interview Magazine (February 2015). 2014 Smith, Roberta. “Review.” The New York Times, July 2014. Bacon, Alex, “Landon Metz: Michael Jackson Penthouse.” The Brooklyn Rail (May 6, 2014). 2013 “Feature.” Human Being Journal, September 2013. “Feature.” Ala Champ Fest, January 2013. 2012 “Post New.” Interview (May 2012).“Landon Metz.” The White Review (March 2012). 2020

Biography | Bibliography

157

Author Biographies

Alex Bacon is an art historian, curator, author, and publisher based in New York City. He was previously curatorial associate at the Princeton University Art Museum, where he was involved with the university’s public art program and organized exhibitions at the museum’s off-site space, Art@Bainbridge. He is the cofounder of Circle Books, an imprint dedicated to research-based publications on the arts. Christopher Schreck is a writer and editor whose work has been published in Kaleidoscope, Mousse, Aperture, and elsewhere.

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Colophon

Editor: Jeffrey Grove, Director, Museums and Publications, Sean Kelly Project management: Adam Jackman, Hatje Cantz Copyediting: Aaron Bogart Graphic design: Rutger Fuchs Amsterdam Typeface: Graphik Production: Thomas Lemaître, Hatje Cantz Reproductions: DruckConcept, Berlin Printing: Livonia Print, Riga Paper: Arctic Volumes, 150 g/m2 © 2021 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, and authors © 2021 for the reproduced works by Landon Metz: the artist Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH Mommsenstraße 27 10629 Berlin www.hatjecantz.com A Ganske Publishing Group Company

and Sean Kelly 475 Tenth Avenue New York, NY 10018 www.skny.com ISBN 978-3-7757-4885-8 Printed in Europe

Cover illustration: Untitled, 2021 Dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha Frontispiece: Untitled, 2021 Dye on canvas in two parts 40 x 32 in. (101,6 x 81,3 cm) each 40 x 64 in. (101,6 x 162,6 cm) overall Courtesy the artist and von Bartha Photo Credits: Ben Koechlin: Pgs 6-7, 15, 113, 114 Shark Senesac Photography: Pgs 12, 85, 92, 93, 94, 98 Jason Wyche, New York: Pgs 17, 26-27, 32-33, 39, 40-41, 139 (bottom), 142-143, 148-149 Malle Madsen: Pgs 23, 116, 117, 119, 129, 130, 138, 139 (top) Petrò / Gilberti: Pgs 22, 29, 34-35, 36-37, 132 (both), 133, 136 Daniel Terna: Pgs 24, 45, 58-59, 62, 66, 70, 95 Andrea Rossetti: Pgs 30-31, 44, 50, 56, 76-77, 81 Matt Black: Pgs 43, 46-47, 49, 51, 52 (both), 53, 57, 68-69 Jean-Baptiste Béranger: Pgs 90, 91 Christian Tunge: Pgs 96-97 Simon Schwyzer: Pgs 100, 101, 102-103, 104, Front and back cover Agostino Osio: 134-135 Giorgio Benni: 145, 146

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