The structure of a relationship

LIKE father, like son? That’s the inevitable question that animates the sharply focused new exhibition “Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark,” which opened last week at the San Diego Museum of Art.

Roberto Matta Echaurren (1912-2002) was the Chilean-expatriate painter who went to Paris in the 1930s, joined the Surrealists, followed the first wave of artists fleeing Nazism and, in New York, emerged as a critical influence in the 1940s. Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78), his American-born son with artist Anne Clark, was a student in Paris during the 1968 riots, worked the following year as an assistant to several artists involved with the landmark “Earth Art” show in upstate New York, and emerged as a sculptor in the Post-Minimalist generation of the 1970s. For their respective generations in New York, both father and son were pivotal figures.

Did Roberto’s ideas about painting influence Gordon’s ideas about sculpture? If so, how? Was the artistic relationship between father and son in any way reciprocal? Was the child at all the father of the man?

At the San Diego Museum, the answer to the last part seems a somewhat equivocal no. Or at the very least, the issue of what the father might have gleaned from the son is beside the point. Matta-Clark, the artist who famously took a chain saw to architecture in 1974, transforming it into a distinctive brand of environmental sculpture, is the show’s de facto subject. The aim of curator Betti-Sue Hertz is to locate a relationship between his Conceptual art and Surrealism.

Although Matta’s career lasted six decades, while his son’s lasted just six years, the exhibition checklist cites 50 objects for Matta-Clark and 33 for his father. Partly that’s because of the dramatic change in art’s nature between their generations -- from discrete objects like paintings and sculptures to transient events in the landscape that mostly leave an ephemeral paper trail. Matta-Clark is represented in “Transmission” by one major piece, along with other unrelated drawings, an ambiguous film and a few early, minor assemblage works. The show feels designed to puzzle out how that representative sculpture -- a knockout -- is connected to Matta’s earlier and more conventional oil paintings and bronze sculptures.

The Matta-Clark piece is “Office Baroque,” a 1977 environmental sculpture in the once-prominent port city of Antwerp, Belgium, executed in an abandoned, otherwise undistinguished Modernist building scheduled for demolition. It was among his last works. (Matta-Clark died from pancreatic cancer and liver failure the following year, at 35.) The original plan was simply to slice into one corner of the five-story building. A derelict shipping office, it stood by the docks across from medieval Steen Castle, the city’s oldest building and now a maritime museum. Matta-Clark’s cut would take the form of a portion of a sphere, whose imaginary center point was located in a nearby plaza. Where the fanciful globe intersected the building, the cut would reveal the layered interior and expose it to the street.

Antwerp’s building department said no. Opening up the structure to possible vagrants was too dangerous. Permit denied.

So Matta-Clark, ever resourceful, went indoors. He developed a second design for the building’s interior, which would not be so visible to casual passers-by. The building’s owner agreed to look the other way.

Working without a permit but with the genial complicity of a local museum curator, who had commissioned the piece, the artist spent weeks sawing interlocking circular cuts into the interior. He began with a pencil drawing on a blueprint. Matta-Clark then transferred the drawing directly onto the building’s floors, walls and ceilings with a makeshift drafting-compass assembled from a grease-stick tethered to a rope. Beginning on the first floor and continuing up through the roof, circular cuts of different sizes were stacked one atop the other. Eccentric vertical sections were revealed.

Sometime the circles intersected -- not unlike rings left by a teacup on a countertop, in the artist’s casually poetic turn of phrase. Those intersections formed lozenge shapes, which Matta-Clark cut out and removed from the building.

These chunks of wood have been likened to a rowboat’s form. Certainly a dinghy changes the global social reach represented by an industrial shipping firm into something more individual and personalized. It nicely signifies one person’s intervention into the vast sea of international operations undertaken by a faceless corporation -- a subject implied in Matta-Clark’s original plan to crosscut the building with a globe.

Still, the more potent image that all those cuts together generate is abstract and formal -- a delirious concatenation of curved lines, edges and elaborate spaces, which offer layered glimpses into hidden spaces and allow Piranesian shafts of light to stream through otherwise darkened interiors. Matta-Clark made pointed reference to the notion in the sculpture’s title. “Office Baroque,” with its grand, spatially elastic, effervescent arabesques, excavates the 17th and 18th century from the modern world.

Antwerp is ancient, but only in the Baroque era did the former Gallo-Roman outpost became a true powerhouse. The city’s enormous wealth and pan-European influence as a maritime center was represented in the unprecedented fusion of art and politics embodied by Peter Paul Rubens. The court painter who marshaled a veritable army of studio assistants to paint vast acreage of canvas famously doubled as an effective international ambassador, executing assorted negotiations with the governments of Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands. “Office Baroque,” looking out over the waterfront and the mighty Steen, neatly fused art and geopolitics in a contemporary idiom.

Three years after “Office Baroque” was finished, and despite a posthumous campaign to save it, the building was torn down. Today the sculpture exists as a collection of photo-collages, architectural fragments, preparatory drawings, sketchbooks, a poster, correspondence and other ephemera, together with a first-rate documentary directed by Eric Convents and Roger Steylaerts. The show effectively brings them together.

The photo-collages are printed from photographic negatives that Matta-Clark enlarged, cut up and taped together. Each is an irregular polygon. The eccentric shape was determined by the internal “drawing” suggested by the linear cuts into the building. Rather than psychologically charged or self-expressive, the photo-drawing is structural.

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SOCIAL STRUCTURES

THE design-logic of this process derives from the Minimalist painting of artists like Frank Stella and Robert Mangold. While their work is abstract, the images in Matta-Clark’s photo-collages yield a marvelously elastic sense of spatial torque. By the time you’ve perused them all, together with the documentation, a substantive visual and intellectual picture of “Office Baroque” forms in your mind.

What does not form -- what cannot form -- is a kinesthetic perceptual understanding, which would arise when walking through the building. That prospect was foreclosed when it was torn down, and the architectural fragment in the museum’s gallery does nothing to bring it back.

What the fragment does do is elicit a playful grin. The lozenge of parquet flooring and severed lumber is paired with a photograph that may or may not show the lozenge-shaped hole in the building from whence it came. The crude chunk is like a moon rock -- another artifact of Matta-Clark’s era -- extraterrestrial evidence of an improbable event.

The scrap is a talisman, exuding the phenomenal artistic power of a secular relic. Welcome to Surrealism, land of the charmed, fetishistic object.

The show gives considerable elbowroom to the importance of drawing for Matta’s paintings and Matta-Clark’s sculptures. The Surrealist technique of automatic drawing, which allowed the hand to move at random across the paper, was a method for tapping an individual’s subconscious mind. Matta-Clark’s building cuts might also be seen as coaxing out a social version of this hidden realm -- the collective unconscious locked within society’s vernacular architecture. He took the established artistic idea of using industrial materials to “draw in space” and expanded it to the monumental scale of architecture.

There are biographical similarities between father and son, such as the fact that both trained originally to be architects, not artists. The show includes 19 Matta paintings from 1939 to 1977, the year his son worked in Antwerp, and their Surrealist attempt to give physical structure to psychic space often takes architectonic form. In 1973 Matta-Clark helped found Anarchitecture -- a group of guerrilla artists appalled by the bloodless urban renewal schemes devastating Manhattan, such as downtown’s then-spanking-new World Trade Center, and a word that neatly blends anarchy with architecture.

If the show stumbles it’s in the psycho-biography it unfolds -- a drama of divorce, daily life, personal estrangements, celebrity godparents (Marcel and Teeny Duchamp), sibling suicide and other family events, both happy and traumatic. The first room is a display of family photographs, letters, address books and other biographical ephemera, together with sketches, notebooks and exhibition catalogs. It demonstrates intersections between art and family life.

The angle is psychoanalytical, which weights all three successive galleries toward Surrealism. A Matta frame is made for Matta-Clark’s art. There’s certainly truth in this, but it also undermines the political dimension, which gives the younger artist’s sculpture its deepest public resonance.

When Matta-Clark split in half a rundown house in suburban New Jersey -- still his most celebrated chain-saw intervention -- the precarious cut from roof to foundation did indeed create a powerful metaphor for the concealed cracks and hidden fissures that riddle domestic life. The split house teetered on collapse.

But the incisive division was also made at a critical moment in American history. The year was 1974 -- a time of devastating crescendo for the Vietnam War and Watergate. During the nation’s most profound social and political crisis in a century, since the splitting of the Civil War, the wheels were coming off the wagon of republican democracy.

A house divided against itself cannot stand, Matta-Clark’s architectural sculpture reasserted. Even now, it’s hard to find the Surrealism in that.