METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER [is] simply a short clip of the roaring lion of the MGM studio logo on a red background looped perhaps a dozen times. Though serially re-presented, it is in essence one reified action that appropriates the nimbus of the industry while refusing all its narrative forms. The film proper that the logo exists to introduce and validate is entirely absent, while what in the Hollywood original is only the exergue here entirely preoccupies the work, in fact constitutes the work. Truncating its usual activity, the logo performs the activity of a signifier without a referent, an advertisement without a commodity, validating signification and advertising as their own end.

[Source: David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde, 2005]