ART REVIEWS : Gordon Matta-Clark: Wild Works by a Moody Maverick

In 1976, Gordon Matta-Clark was asked to participate in an exhibit showcasing work by several young architects; his response was to shoot out the windows of the exhibition space with a BB gun.

That gesture was typical of Matta-Clark, a subversive maverick whose wildly original work of the ‘70s challenged conventional ideas about permanence and entropy, sculpture, architecture, and the American home. Using abandoned buildings as the raw materials for his work, he sculpted them as if they were lumps of marble, incising them with huge geometric cuts, slicing them in half, removing entire exterior walls to reveal gnarly sub-structure. Describing what he did as “anarchitecture,” Matta-Clark usually worked without permits and loved the idea of high risk. He once took a shower and shave at the top of a clock tower.

Before his death of cancer in 1978 at the age of 35, Matta-Clark blazed through the art world like a comet, leaving a small body of work most of which exists today only in the form of photographs. The subject of an exhibition at the Burnett Miller Gallery in Hollywood, Matta-Clark’s pieces were usually demolished shortly after he completed them and all that’s left to us today is photographic documentation. As was the style among Conceptualists of that era, Matta-Clark’s photos are pretty lousy--they tend to be grainy, often a bit out of focus, pointedly drab and unostentatious, and all seem to have been shot on gray days. It’s unlikely that anyone unfamiliar with Matta-Clark’s legend would be moved by these photos. For those who know his story, however, they’re alive with emotion and complex meaning.

One of two sons born to Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta (Matta-Clark’s twin leaped to his death from the artist’s studio window in 1976), Matta-Clark had a short life but a full one. Trained as an architect, he involved himself with drawing, sculpture, performance art, photography, film, political action and business (he was one of the original developers of Manhattan’s SoHo district).

A second-generation Minimalist/Conceptualist chiefly influenced by Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, he combined the Minimalist drive to pare a work down to the bare bones of its central idea with Conceptualism’s relentless questioning of received beliefs about art. Perhaps most importantly, he represented a break from the then-reigning Formalist sculptural style of artists like Donald Judd and Carl Andre in that his work incorporated elements of disruptive Dadaism, populism, and a flamboyant theatricality. Matta-Clark was a sucker for the grand gesture.

Matta-Clark never exhibited in Los Angeles during his lifetime and his work has been infrequently shown ever since, so that makes this show of particular interest. On view are fragments from “Bingo,” a 1974 work composed of a suburban house in Niagara Falls that the artist cut into eight sections (the house was demolished before he finished with it). Five sections were dumped off a cliff in Artpark (Matta-Clark considered the dumping an artwork), and the remaining three were cobbled together to make the large sculpture on view here. Long and flat in the manner of a stage set, the piece combines sections of two windows, exterior shingles, and a portion of a stairway.

Also on view are photographs of a 1975 piece executed at a warehouse on a Manhattan pier that led to an arrest warrant being issued for the artist (he fled the country), a shot of a piece in Paris, and images of “Splitting,” the work widely regarded as his masterpiece. Existing for just three months before being leveled, “Splitting” was a house in New Jersey that the artist neatly sliced down the middle. Matta-Clark described this piece--and all his work--as “an effort to convert a place into a state of mind.” He’d no doubt be gratified to know that though the places where he worked have vanished, the spirit and the ideas he brought to bear on them burn on brightly.

Burnett Miller Gallery: 964 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood , to July 26. (213) 874-4757. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

More Comrade Popova: Russian artist Liubov Popova was born 54 years before Matta-Clark and into an entirely different world, but there are notable similarities between the two. The careers of both were cut short at a time when their talent was just reaching full bloom (both died at the age of 35), and both were important innovators who struggled to liberate art from the bonds of history. The subject of an exhibition opening Sunday at LACMA (see review, F1), Popova can also be seen in a show of small works at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Hollywood. Including 20 pieces dating from 1911-22, the exhibition centers on Popova’s “Spatial Force Constructions,” a ground-breaking body of work she was involved with shortly before her death in 1924.

Representing the culmination of her experiments with Constructivism, Popova’s “Spatial Force Constructions” function as a textbook illustration of this ideology. In this series of analytic paintings we see her struggling to eliminate superficial elements in an effort to achieve maximum tension and volumetric space.

Consisting of tilted webs of crisp, intersecting black lines of varying width, the works attempt to merge art and technology and illuminate the interplay between forms and space. At once elegant and rigorously scholarly, they’re very musical drawings assembled with an internal structural perfection evocative of a symphony.

Margo Leavin Gallery: 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, to July 27. (213) 273-0603. Closed Saturday and Sundays and Mondays .