GORDON MATTA-CLARK: THE ARTIST AS FIXER-UPPER

The West Coast premiere of a retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, a highly inventive artist of the 1970s who died at 35, opens Tuesday at the University Museum, Cal State Long Beach, and runs through March 2.

Matta-Clark, son of Surrealist painter Roberto Matta Echaurren, cut through buildings (usually abandoned or condemned structures), creating openings in walls, windows in ceilings and interior shafts intersecting several floors. He allowed light to penetrate where it had not entered before and transformed buildings into monumental sculptural spaces.

The architectural fragments resulting from his work revealed layers of information, history, construction and stratification; they became material for exhibitions, alongside photo collages, visionary drawings and other documentation of the artist’s creative process. In an essay on the artist, Judith Russi Kirshner writes, “Acknowledging that even the most monumental forms are destined to be ruins, Matta-Clark’s work addresses the architecture becoming ideological container, signifying the past. Appropriately, his excavations usually occurred in abandoned buildings, marginal urban sites and ordinary houses.”

Matta-Clark’s “Conical Intersect,” 1975, twisted a cone-shaped volume at a 45-degree angle through the walls and floors of two soon-to-be destroyed 17th-Century town houses in Paris, near the site designated to become the Centre Georges Pompidou, the new cultural center of the city. To artist Dan Graham, this was Matta-Clark’s “most propagandistically effective work because of the relation of the new Centre to its visual alignment with the Tour Eiffel; one a monument of 19th-Century French progress, and the other of contemporary French national ideology.”

“Circus or the Caribbean Orange,” 1978, in a three-story town house adjacent to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, was the last of three major works organized around circular forms that Matta-Clark completed before his death, later that year. The museum invited him to temporarily transform the town house before it was renovated and used as a showcase. He removed large arcs (20 feet in diameter) from the second and third floors of the building.

This horizontal layering of semicircles suggested a series of spheres; the openings and another set of vertical cuts revealed an interplay of illumination and shadow which changed according to time of day, quality of light and weather.

Accompanying the exhibition is a monograph published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago with essays by art historian/ critic Robert Pincus Witten and exhibition curator Mary Jane Jacob and interviews with artists and others who knew and worked with Matta-Clark.

Opening concurrently with the Matta-Clark retrospective is a solo show of work by New York sculptor Steve Wood, part 17 of the museum’s “Centric” series. Wood’s work, which explores the territory between visual and sensory perception, will remain on view through Feb. 23.

Two new survey exhibitions open at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park on Tuesday and continue through March 3. The exhibition space is evenly divided between “Karl Benjamin: Selected Works 1979-1985” and “D.J. Hall: Selected Works 1974-1985.”

Benjamin was defined by critic Jules Langsner as one of the practitioners of “West Coast Hard-Edge” painting in the mid-’50s, when he first exhibited his geometric abstractions. He has continued to explore relationships between colors and shapes, undaunted by stylistic fluctuations of the art scene.

Similarly steadfast in her focus, D.J. Hall has developed a personal brand of realism. Her imagery has centered predominantly on golden California Girls, in or by their pools, trying to defeat the passage of time with sheer tenacity and will power. Luscious landscapes contain sybaritic females with seductive bodies and dazzling smiles in the brilliant sun, as if to deny the existence of other realities.

Both exhibitions are accompanied by separate, color-illustrated catalogues; Benjamin’s with an essay by historian/critic Merle Schipper and D.J. Hall’s with an essay by curator/critic Robert MacDonald.

Weekly screenings of short, documentary art films have started in the Crocker Center Auditorium at 330 S. Hope St. Sponsored by the California/International Arts Foundation, the screenings (Wednesdays, 12:10-1 p.m., through March 12) provide an unusual lunchtime activity for area residents and workers.

The film series, designed to inform as well as entertain, focuses on artists and art, music and musicians, dance and dancers.

The California/International Arts Foundation is a nonprofit organization which initiates arts programs such as exhibitions, films and publications.