MATTA’S “CUBE” IN MINNEAPOLIS
THE EXHIBITION OF MATTA’S RECENT WORK, arranged at the Walker Art Center to coincide with the artist’s visit to Minneapolis suggested an esthetic totally at variance with the current new-realist or minimalist viewpoint. Grimau (L’Heure de la vérité), for example, to take the single most impressive painting in the exhibition, seems to leave no doubt that it is a work of Surrealist fantasy, unorthodox to be sure, but recognizable as Surrealist in essential respects. Over thirty feet long, it suggests nothing so much as a technological nightmare, a bit too ominous in its color for a Cinerama screen, but not to an extent which would preclude the association. Into the deep recesses of a fluid space, cosmic in implication, a massed humanity is seen subject to unnameable forces let loose in the modern world. Robot types, arranged in phalanxes, themselves weapon-like in form, virtually bristling with fire power, populate a non-universe that is curiously anonymous yet physically real. To the casual viewer, who may not know very much about Surrealist fantasy, but who knows about missiles poised for launching, space craft orbiting the earth, and the surface appearance of the moon, and is familiar with Orwell, James Bond and a revived Batman, Matta’s imagery is no longer apt to occasion even a raised eyebrow.
But quite apart from these initial impressions, the point has to be made that, at the very least, Matta, along with the other important innovators of the 1940s, has earned the right to sustain a recognizable form more personal than historical. But even from the point of view of Surrealism as a style, Matta is the only one among the late-comers to rate as an equal alongside older masters such as Ernst, Masson, Tanguy and Miró. This should not be lost sight of. In the case of Matta, particularly, the issue of quality is one that cannot be ignored if we are to come to terms with his work other than superficially. It is as if it were necessary to apologize for calling attention to the fact that he is a true professional in the best sense; that he is a gifted composer; that for graphic inventiveness he is, literally, without peer among artists of his generation, and that, with respect to the oil medium, he is a natural painter. He is one of the few artists working today whose technique is up to the extraordinary demands he imposes on it. In canvas after canvas, Matta realizes passages of great technical beauty that have also the quality of painterly illumination. In other words, despite a tendency to over-richness, even pretentiousness at times, Matta’s achievement, in purely painterly terms, is in every respect classical. He parlays his advantages with tremendous authority.
He gets away with murder, so to speak, a fact not without interest today. Nevertheless the issues that are raised by his work go even beyond the problem of quality; for Matta, a die-hard Surrealist, questions the whole idea of art and esthetic value. He resists the idea that genuine Surrealist effort can ever be reduced to a phenomenon of style. In fact, he insists upon moving beyond questions of style and sensibility toward those involving the workings of the imagination. What is at issue, as Matta sees it, is not the relative merits of any specific form, but the more basic distinction between true and fake imagination. It is necessary, for example, to discriminate between the imaginative truth of the early de Chirico on the one hand and the falsifications of Dali on the other. In other words, what Matta is saying is that not all works that deal with an expanded concept of mind reflecting our technological age are necessarily science fiction. The quality of imagination, in Matta’s view, is in every case decisive. Nor may Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmare world, to take a specific example, be equated with the popular excesses of the routine psychological novel. In both de Chirico and Kafka there is a rejection of fantasy in the interests of the real. “For me science fiction is real. Man going around the world in a capsule is for me a reality. What I reject is the fake imagination, the fantasy.”
Matta’s forms are specific in the sense that they invite speculation but imaginative in that they refuse to yield to didactic description. It was much the same situation with respect to hermetic Cubism where the process of transformation undertaken by Braque and Picasso was never carried to the point where it obscured the original starting point in actual experience. The balance, then as now, is one that is extraordinarily difficult to sustain. In Matta’s work it is the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that his objects of the imagination are indeed humans, spaces, charges of energy, weapons, implements, vehicles and the like that attests to their reality. Long familiarity with abstract art has taught us to put brakes on interpretation, so that it comes as a shock to realize that precisely this—interpretation—is what is required of us. In the large mural-size painting, Grimau, Matta tried to picture a mental happening having to do with the feelings of exclusion and alienation experienced by any minority group. What we see are massed men who are also weapons, who are, collectively, both the oppressors and the oppressed simultaneously. The world which they occupy is both limitless and encased, furnished as it is with all the wizardry of an utterly rampant and menacing technology. Not only is the atmosphere charged with electrical energy made visible, but it is heavy with flying and careening vehicles. In one sense this is fantasy, but in another it is all too real. Because it stops short of expressionism, because it is a picture rather than an exclamation, it jars on our sensibilities. The vulgarity (rather than the embarrassment) becomes almost too much to bear.
As far back as 1948, Matta had begun to explore additional means of conveying his idea of mental space. Since the spaces of the mind envelop the self, are active but without measurable limit, was there not some way—even as a mental proposition—to surround the viewer with a total image? Nothing much came of these early experiments. Then, around 1959, Matta undertook to create several major works which would give form to this idea, the first of these being L’Espace de l’espace, consisting of six square panels which, when assembled, would form a perfect cube. But since the cube, if assembled, would effectively exclude the viewer, the installation of the six panels could only be approximate. The viewer, by an act of his mind, was invited “to locate the center of his consciousness at the center of the cube.” This was followed by a second such effort, L’Honni aveuglant, just recently completed, and shown first in Paris at the Iolas Gallery in July, 1966 and then in the exhibition at Walker Art Center.
Proceeding by a system of analogies, the various panels—the right, left, front, back, bottom and top—would each be assigned a respective role dictated by the very idea of mental extension. The interior surfaces of the cube would constitute no mere environment, but a mind-picture, painted and viewed ideally from its center—that is, in all directions without respect to sequence. Matta described the intended effect as a kind of “inscape crossed by waves and palpitating spaces, created by different poles, which are more or less constant.” Painted into this landscape of the mind is the mind’s eye view of alienated man, L’Honni aveuglant. The panel to the right (“right” and “left” in this connection are not without their political connotations) is called Le Ou a marée haute (Where at High Tide). From this direction, happenings in the world intrude on the mind, flowing in and crossing over to the panel on the left which is intended to be a materialization of the artist’s self, “The sensitive man, that, in me, is identified with a minority.” This panel pictures a totemic, more or less anthropomorphic figure, with something like a hand grasping at reality, but “only half-conscious, a being in parenthesis,” subject to the various forces pressing in upon him.
Although Matta’s idea of locating the viewer at the center of the picture has a Futurist ring to it, the differences are instructive. The Futurist painter intended that the viewer feel himself swept off his feet and into the whirlpool of a new technological existence. The prospect was meant to be at once militant, joyous and orgiastic. Matta’s intentions are, by contrast, agonizingly introspective. “I painted the picture around me; I tried to do it as if I were situated at the center of the cube and of the picture. Hence it was no longer possible to be a viewer of something but necessary to be in something.”
The panel which makes up the floor of the cube is meant to suggest the constant force of organic matter welling up from below: “It is like being on a volcano in a state of mind Ou loge la folie (Where Madness Is).” The panel corresponding to it above, Le Fond, is intended as the space in which abstraction takes place, where constructions of the mind such as art and mathematics, in their efforts to reach some kind of clarity, are bombarded constantly from below by all the forces of the unknown. The back panel, Interrupteur de la mémoire, (The Switch of Memory), suggests a space invaded by currents of thought and feeling coming out of the past. These pass over to the last panel, to the front of the cube, Les Grandes expertatives, “a space of expectation, of getting more civilized, of potential synthesis.” The whole, Matta explains, “is like a proposition, not fantastic, not technological, but imaginative.”
The boldness of Matta’s conception is only realized if we are prepared to follow him one step further. For once the structure of the cube is revealed, it must become apparent to us that each one of us is inside being bombarded by incessant forces and questions: we confront a construct of the human condition, so to speak, which, even as a mental proposition purely, is terrifically oppressive (as it is intended to be). It is Matta’s belief that only the imagination can be used to break out of this kind of oppression. “Then and only then do you get a feeling which is not the feeling of beauty which was the feeling of traditional art, but a feeling of emancipation. In the face of oppression, the viewer must act to liberate himself in order to regain his dignity. He discovers in himself the capacity to imagine, to create something in himself, and that act of imagining produces a kind of emancipating orgasm of the mental phenomena.”
Of all the Surrealists who yearned to change the world by individual acts of the imagination, Matta, it seems to me, is the only one who successfully confounds the charge of fantasy. He is not interested in the “marvelous”; he does not aspire to invent a sur-reality. His panoramic propositions about man alienated and oppressed are, in this sense, the legitimate offspring of Picasso’s Guernica and Charnel House, themselves landmarks of the modern revolutionary sensibility, so powerful in their time that the Fascism of the 1930s and 1940s remains forever fixed in their imagery.
Matta reasons that the viewer has too long dominated the picture, fixing it in his gaze and passing judgment on its forms. He has too long been the oppressor. Since the artist, by his own history, is an individual humiliated, provoked and misunderstood, it is time the viewer-picture relation were reversed. Only at the center of the cube can the viewer discover, if he does not already know, “what it is to be of the minority,” to no longer be in a position to dominate, to judge. It is to Matta’s credit, however, that he does not thrust his views on anyone autocratically; nor does he make of his cubes true environments where the unsuspecting viewer can just happen to find himself. His weakness is not his logic, nor his felt sense of reality, nor his artistic form, but his program, which is so Utopian as to be virtually meaningless in the ordinary world of action to which it ultimately applies. Workers of the world awake! His is the paradox of Surrealism which sought but never found an effective role for itself outside of art—ironically, a term it was always at pains to deny.
—Sidney Simon
