FULCRUM

Arising out of the Pop bravado of British art, and with strong affiliations to the music scene that surrounded him, living on the same streets as many emerging British rock groups such as Pete Brown's Battered Ornaments, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Third Ear Band, Led Zeppelin, Georgie Fame, The Incredible String Band and Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Graham Metson the artist, emerged at the fulcrum of the 1960s creative London scene. Like many of that generation, he danced at clubs like  Middle Earth  and UFO. He played the role of artist / dandy, a "dedicated follower of fashion" as the Kinks would call it, and he drove a Rolls Royce to openings acting out the role of the star artist. These early trajectories into art required the artist develop a strong persona and public image. We see this in publicity photos of Metson astride a Rolls Royce, or dressed like some mythological knight/elf seemingly riding, but actually standing, in front of one of his unicorn renditions.

Cheryl Lean's captivating image of Metson was in the David Bailey or Lord Snowdon genre of atmospheric portraiture. And so role playing linked Graham Metson's art to performance art, even as he was developing an interest in the art of drawing and painting. Metson actually put on Happenings at the Crypt on Lancaster Road at the time.

The early London paintings were atmospheric to the extreme, rife with collage, multimedia, and portrait innuendo…"the world caught in an image" as Metson comments while visiting him at his present home in Prince Edward County, Ontario. "Real it is not, not unreal either " he continues, and I reflect on the era that generated his Cyclists series, a post-War working man's era, rebuilding the West, and these paintings have something of the atmosphere of the London Transport and propaganda era works, as if we were all in it together, so far from the present digital screen bred destiny we are all now living with.  And Feliks Topolski for one was an admirer and friend of the young artist who would visit his studio on the South Bank near Waterloo Bridge. Another renowned British illustrator, Paul Hogarth. likewise selected Metson's art out of many and John Berger, author of many titles, including The Success and Failure of Picasso, was the first who chose to exhibit Metson's art. Another friend Gustav Metzger recently celebrated at Munster as well ahead of his time with his auto-destructive artworks. 

Metson grew up in East Walthamstow, in working class East London during the Blitz. A sign of the times, his family had a bomb shelter at the bottom of their garden.  To witness the Battle of Britain, see the airplane bombers cover the skies, to see parachutes descending is to experience a world where the door is always ajar, and your expectations are continuously upset, unsettled. This has pervaded Metson;s approach to artmaking, and the process of art ever since. But Graham Metson was an artist who came to terms with the wartime experience. He exploited it through the language of his art "blasting and bombardiering" with a visceral, but equally sensitive to the surreal nature of war life. The war was something Henry Moore, whom encouraged the young artist, likewise captured in his wartime sketchbooks, of people and families sleeping and living in the London underground tubes. As documents of the war these are ephemeral yet monumental artworks about survival. Metson recounts his unreal experiences as, for instance when he saw a lorry accident and blood flowing in a stream down the street. And with Metson's art the world is likewise a place where one's terms of reference are continuously upturned. As Peter Burger has commented, "Surrealism already knew the (Postmodern) sabotage of meaning"⁵and so did the many artists who witnessed and lived through the war, like Metson's contemporary the East German painter A. R. Penck, who  played as a youth amid bomb sites. 

In the 1950s Graham moved to Harlow Essex, a New Town  development developed Sir Frederick Gibberd.  As Metson comments, "Harlow  was a dream come true. I had heard of Harlow, a modern garden city. It was an amazing social experiment and attracted a great number of creative go-ahead people. They came together to form a new community. Cultural activities there exploded. It was the perfect platform for the artist" 

Living close by in Much Hadham, a neighbour and mentor, Henry Moore would ask Metson "How is the painting going? ". That, in and of itself, was a considerable compliment for any young artist at that time. He was being recognized for who he was, and that made him part of a dialogue with one of modern art's great masters.  Harlow was a progressive and cultural support structure for many who lived there at the time, and this new town eventually evolved it own Arts Festival. The first, held in July 1965, was organized by Graham Metson along with Sheldon Williams, Denis Bowen and Ken Coutts Smith. It was actually the largest arts festival of its kind ever held outside London at the time.

What one has to understand with Graham Metson is this fusion of mythology (the auto-mythology of the artist) and this broader inter-cultural exchange that has the artist orchestrating it all between the parentheses of a real world humanism.  

As a student at Frensham Heights in Rowledge, Surrey in the early 1970s, I had the remarkable chance to witness the artist as myth in person as Graham Metson presented some of his art, events and actions to an amazed Free school audience that included his own son Mark, a fellow student.  We heard Metson explain one of his then recent projects in the United States that involved launching seven arrows of varying lengths in the colours of the rainbow. Metson launched these "Art Activation Rods". Seen in situ in the artist's studio lined up against a wall they could have been a minimalist installation, but launched into a stream they became an encounter within the broader parameters of nature, environment, and an exchange with culture. Each arrow followed its particular course, as chance would have it, and end up at various sites down that river. The destinations and the journey they activated were a symbolic, and intensely experimental art action for the era. 

Another such event/happening occurred when Metson organized a blood donation event in 1969 at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. This "Life Drawing" led to Bloodnetworks (1970 -1974), an ongoing international project that required elaborate co-ordination with galleries around the world. At various venues in 15 countries around the world at the same time on the same day blood collections were organized. Eventually the International Blood Networks project was abandoned due to the extensive bureaucracy involved in correspondence and networking. This was l'art pour l'art if ever there was such a thing. And an art that presaged much of what we are now seeing resurface, art without objects, performative and with audience participation but forty years earlier. 

One of Metson's actions found him crouched in a fetal position in an ancient sacred site. This performative "event" moved art in the direction of meaningful ritual, as Ana Mendieta's early earthworks did.  Rebirth, as it was called, was enacted in Colorado in 1969. It was a liberating event that the artist readily admits transformed his view of the world forever. Metson states he envisioned the "aleph" during his rebirth enactment. This event was to appear in Jack Burnham's Great Western Salt Works; Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (1974) and subsequently Lucy Lippard's Overlay; Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory.

And this may be a key to this sense of the sacred, and the metaphysical that connects Metson the artist / performer to the painter. Indeed, whether painting, or a happening, Metson's art revolves around a basic precept of auto-mythology, a myth-making generated by the artist, and while the sources may seem ancient at times, they are likewise linked to the McLuhan-esque era of the global village and mass media. Metson's projects, his drawings, photomontages and paintings are like topographies of the technological era he lives in. They do not seek to build a context, and indeed it is the multiplicity of inputs that directs us to understand this out of place identity that is the hybrid, neo-mythical, digitized and dystopic human we recognize and identify with. As McLuhan once wrote in an essay titled Money in Comics, "The great artist necessarily has his roots very deep in his own time - - roots which embrace the most vulgar and commonplace fantasies and aspirations."¹

The Pop art influence we see in Metson's Kali Komics (1968-1972) produced subsequent to his arrival in the United States in 1968 aboard the Queen Elizabeth (he hung out with Andy Warhol at the Factory while staying with friends in New York) was very much a part of the "media circus" that could be found in British Pop's more sardonic and critical tendency. This could be found in works by Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake or even David Hockney early on.  Metson envisioned Kali Komics to be a "satirical fictional vision of the United States.", a comic strip view of a land where comic book heroes had inspired Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein. The comic book image merged with the artist's own fictional and narrative discourse and the experiences he encountered travelling in  this new found continent. Metson actually produced cartoons for Peace News illustrations for the New Reasoner early on. This was a great experience for a young artist at the time. And indeed the Kockney Kutz, produced in England already explored aspects of popular comic genre as collage, painting and photomontage effects fused together by the artist's consciousness into a multi-media social commentary on the age of mass media. 

In 1972 while revisiting London  to attend his solo show at the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Art. I.C.A.on London’s Pall Mall, Metson was invited to teach at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. NASCAD, an influential arts school in the 1970s  Metson was swayed by his childhood fascination with Nova Scotian and Commonwealth stamps as much as anything to go and teach there. Halifax was not only a city with an art school, but the city where convoys would gather to run the gauntlet during the two world wars. The largest man-made explosion preceding Hiroshima that occurred in Halifax in 1917 became a well researched book authored by Graham Metson. Kanadian Kapers (1976-88), produced by Metson when he had made the move into a 100 year old farmhouse in the Annapolis Valley with his wife Cheryl Lean. As brilliant photomontages, Kanadian Kapers document media culture in the tradition of the Kockney Kutz (UK) and Kali Komics (USA) series.  Situations (1976-79) took the Sex Pistols a step further. As Metson says,  "When Johnny Rotten sang, he sang to change the world. This is a bloke, with a brain on his shoulders, who is actually saying something he sincerely believes is happening in the world, saying it with real venom and with real passion. It touches you, and it scares you and it makes you feel uncomfortable."² Whether Kockney Kutz (UK), Kali Komics (USA) or Kanadian Kapers, these series reveal a remarkable imagistic confluence, like multi-media notes from post-Paradise, or intense ricochets from the mediatic era, these works are visions born and bred out of Metson;s wartime upbringing and subsequent big city consciousness, now and forever questioning the substance of life today, which inadvertently presages the future.

Metson's art already had a strong affiliation with another East German, John Heartfield, a propaganda artist supreme whom, he encountered early on while travelling with a five man delegation organized by WFDY (World Federation of Democratic Youth  & British League of Soviet Friendship. to the German Democratic Republic. Heartfield, the aging genius. advised Metson to keep away from politics when making art. Early photomontage works such as Outspan (1955), I Believe in Fiction (1955-57), and Simulation (1956-57) 

reflect something of Heartfield's socio-political critical aesthetic and these early works quite naturally link to later Metson productions like Silent Scream (1983) a filmic play on words, and  Fibre-Optic (1985-86) produced in the 1980s, works that were included in Metson's Speculative Fictions show at Carleton University Art Gallery (1996). 

There is this paradoxical sense that out of place is place. Metson's approach to his subjects include, on the surface an allusion to the figurative, but  beyond this there is  a spiritual quality in the "conflict between colour and paint" that Metson once identified in a 1985 interview for Arts Atlantic magazine. "All great art relates to its culture" Metson stated at the time, and so the art evolves as the culture does, and these uncertain times, involve new approaches to the contrasts of static world wide web-bound culture. The "aleph" for Borges is not really a place as it is the embodiment of what presence is or could be, a point where everything is, but one that cannot be truly represented, only alluded to. The allusions are as enigmatic as Metson's paintings can be, and just as difficult to seize upon in terms of subject, time and space. Borges' protagonist describes how he,

"(…) saw a small iridescent sphere, of almost intolerable brilliance. At first I thought it rotary; then I understood that this movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous sights it enclosed. The Aleph's diameter must have been about two or three centimeters, but Cosmic Space was in it, without diminution of size. Each object (the mirror's glass, for instance) was infinite objects, for I clearly saw it from all points in the universe. I saw the heavy laden sea; I saw the dawn and the dusk; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London)…"³

Metson investigates n-Dimensional space, space with no centre, a periphery where there are no dimensions. This is a space linked to chaos. "We think with matter, not at all as if the world were virtual." A series titled 81… the elements of the Faerie  produced over four years consisted of 81 three foot equilateral triangles painted in groups of nine, that became a potential mosaic of painterly styles were Metson's answer to minimalism, but his language is never reductive, or scaled down, but instead becomes operatic and colourful, bombastic even, something so contrary to minimalism's orthodoxy that they introduce a kind of virtual and mimetic stream of imagery as if from the unconscious, evoking links to a potential mythology through painting. 

Moving to Montreal  in the late 1980s provided a rich tapestry and cultural context for the artist to work in and with. The period marked a return to self in the city, to urban environments full of people, literally a landscape of people. Like another Montrealer the late Betty Goodwin, Metson explored the dynamics of the human figure in space. The backdrops were neither neutral nor immolated, but instead a fulcrum (apotheosis of the human condition?) Metson's figures swirl, they descend, they can be inverted. They are analogous, evasive, as if a figuration reborn amid contexts that can never be nailed down, and are constantly shifting. These paintings speak directly through the very visual devices they exploit to achieve their effects – painterly surface, the use of light and colour, and the reinvention of what are really not contexts but non-spaces. This use of an indefinable space carries some register of what Marshall McLuhan refers to as the inversion of the private self in an age of new mass media technology. The density and atmospheres conjured up in paint or pencil in his paintings from the Montreal era recall the social contexts of the war, and reflect a nostalgia for the sublimity of the historical moment. The "here and now" of Metson's Montreal paintings, and his recent works as well, is one that always carries a social commitment with it, and so the absence of context becomes the very axis of Metson's critique of the contemporary and humanity's place therein.  These works provide a fulcrum for reflections on the long journey of the soul. This is a poetic painterly netherworld that shares common approaches with George Baselitz and the Montreal painter Tom Hopkins. There is a sublime and unspoken violence, that contains within it aspects of the daily universal media dirge and of the unspoken memories Metson carries of the war. Cause and effect are seldom directly connected and this is how we see it though the media's lens as well. Who is the victim and who the protagonist? We are never entirely sure. Each painting is thus a scenario that carries this tension we all live with in a world where cause and effect have been disguised, hidden from us, and we have to decode the meaning of things to see our place etherein.  And it has to be said that Metson never entirely abandons the human figure. It is a tradition in painting that is endlessly reinvented, and Metson is no exception. He reinvents it too with a multi-media sensibility. We sense these painting fragment a narrative. They spit it around, and make the readable, and the visual into something greater than what we see in the picture. Many of the figurative works exist in a field that is indefinable - it exists as a continuum but rifles the language of graphics. There is an uncanny sense that signs and symbols are extracted and re-placed in these painterly situations, a metaphor if you will for an era that manufactures its contexts, only to then deconstruct and recompose them endlessly. Hence the Borges-like cosmological constructivist sensation in looking at much of Metson's art over the decades, for which this show is a reminiscene and reminder.

 

 The compass here is the artist's conscious sense of the act of art, and of the event of painting.  This links Metson's art whether painting or another medium,  to the role playing of performance art,  for the artist conceives the viewer/audience as co-participants in the appreciating the art, or in Kaprow's words, "a participant rather than a passive observer."⁴

And Graham Metson's belief that artist play a role in society is ongoing…. After serious lower back and hip problems and subsequent rehabilitation, Metson underwent a period of readjustment that involved six surgeries in 20 months, finding himself on crutches or in a wheelchair most of the time. He emerged at the end of it very much himself, to "deal with the experience" and the resulting series of drawings, the Wheelchair works, recalls the dynamism of the earlier studies of Cyclists, Hurdlers, Athletes and Footballers.  The earlier works were inspired in part by the photographs of Marey and Muybridge. These figural sketches of the body in motion were produced in England in the 1950s. These forms move through an ambiguous space recalling Umberto Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), and the Vorticist experiments from the early 20th century. 

Indeed Metson helped organize a retrospective for the Vorticist painter David Bomberg after his death. During the mid-1950s when Metson produced his dynamic sketches he began teaching, and used the art room at school as his studio.

The ambiguity and paradox we see in Graham Metson's art is wholly intentional. And it could even lead to Joseph Beuys' alchemy of lead, honey, felt, material allusions but with a sense of the lived.⁵ And hence like Beuys, Metson is an artist who embraces the times he lives in. His art is likewise a reflection of the spirit of its era. A sense of community, of a place in nature, albeit a nature that is distorted, turned inside out by the mediatized jingoism of our times, (and Metson exploits these mindless metaphors with great personal aplomb)  but a nature that likewise is a perrennial source for mythology, and hence the auto-mythologies Metson builds seemingly out of thin air. This is a auto-mythology, a painterly, multi-media, photomontaged, or performative one. It enables Metson as the artist to move outside history, to play with the condition of history, moving through the pan-historical juggernaut with the magic and alchemy of art. Art mimics the commodity, and uses illusion and juxtaposition to build personal allegorical even phantasmic scenarios that we read as caricatures. they move parabolically around the canvas, spherically generating colour, forms, atmospheres, with a sense of the moment and of  invention. The forms move around like whirligigs and seemingly exist in a perpetuity, never at a point of definition, but instead there is a dissolve. A distortion is built into this figuration. It's about the times we live in. 

John Grande

Footnotes

1. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride; Folklore of Industrial Man, Vanguard Press, New York, 1951, p. 152 (back)
2. Graham Metson cited in Speculative Fictions, Carleton University Art Gallery, 1996, p. 19 (back)
3. Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, Castle Books/Grove Press, 1967, p. 150 (back)
4. Allan Kaprow cited in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Judith F. Rodenbeck, eds., Experiments in the Everyday; Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts - Events, Objects, Documents, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, 1999, p. 39 (back)
5. Peter Burger in Joseph Beuys; The Readers, Claudia Mesch & Viola Michely, eds., MIT Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 256 (back)
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Writer and art critic John Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Espace Sculpture, Public Art
Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Landscape Architecture and Adbusters. The author of Balance: Art and Nature (Black Rose Books, 1994 & 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur
engagé (Montreal: Lanctot, 2001) John Grande has taught art history at Bishops University. He co-authored Nils-Udo: Art with Nature (Wienand Verlag, Koln, Germany 2000), Nature the End of Art: Alan Sonfist Landscapes (Thames & Hudson, 2004) and Le Mouvement Intuitif; Patrick Dougherty & Adrian Maryniak (Atelier 340, Bruxelles,
2004).

Mr. Grande’s Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists was published by SUNY Press, New York in in 2004. John Grande is a Contributing Editor to Sculpture (USA). Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream was published by Pari Publishing in Italy (www.paripubishing.com) in 2007 and Art Allsorts ; Writings on Art & Artists in 2008 (www.lulu.com). Mr. Grande curated Earth Art, an international exhibition of nature sculpture at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Canada in the summer of 2008. (www.rbg.ca)
www.grandescritique.com