San Diego — 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.
