Sometimes when encountering the work of an artist for the first time, one may try and recall a text, a poem, a piece of music, or some correlative that that feels consistent with the what one is seeing. I remember having this kind of experience more than three decades ago, upon my first encounter with Pollock’s great painting, Autumn Rhythm (1950), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While viewing the Pollock, I decided to arbitrate in my mind the sound of Vivaldi’s concerto. I could mentally hear Vivaldi’s Concerto as I experienced the brilliant flow of lines, the skeins and pours of Pollock’s paint, weaving together throughout this immense surface. It was a rather magical moment for me as I was discovering the process of becoming an artist, of finding my own voice, my own articulation through a transsensory process.

* Robert C. Morgan is a writer and art critic who holds a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and a Ph.D. in art history. He has written and published nearly 1500 articles and reviews in a vast range of international magazines and professional journals. He writes for Art News (New York) and Art Press (Paris), and is Contributing Editor for Sculpture Magazine and Tema Celeste (Milan). He has authored catalogs, and monographs on numerous international artists. His books include "Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art" (Cambridge University Press, 1996), "Between Modernism and Conceptual Art" (McFarland, 1997), "The End of the Art World" (Allworth Press, 1998), "Alain Kirili" (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), "Gary Hill and Bruce Nauman" (both Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000 and 2002), and "Clement Greenberg: Late Writings" (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and "Vasarely" (forthcoming, George Braziller, 2004). Exhibitions that he has organized and curated include Allan Kaprow (1979), Komar and Melamid (1980), Six Artists abnd The Visual Score (1985), Logo Non Logo (with Pierre Restany, 1994), Women on the Verge (1995), The Gesture (2002), Samadhi: The Contemplation of Space (2002), Art and the Cinematic Vision (2003), Clear Intentions (2003) and is a Co-Curator for the Lodz Biennial (2004). In 1999 he was given the first Arcale award in art criticism (Salamanca) and was selected as a juror for the UNESCO prize during the Venice Biennial. A frequent international traveler, poet, and artist himself – with an extensive exhibition record – Robert Morgan lives and works in New York where he teaches at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. He is currently completing a book on the interpretation of Eastern philosophy and the emergence of transcultural art.

Visionary artist Roberto Matta (1911-2002) was arguably one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His high profile association with poet Andre Breton’s group of Surrealists only initiated his own personal evolution and style, which culminated in addressing the realm of the subconscious and the invisible. Thus, Matta is the patron saint of so-called “metaphysical art,” the graphic depiction of energies beyond the physical realities of everyday life.

“Matta – The Eye of a Surrealist” is a brilliant documentary by filmmaker Jane Crawford, which shows the artist exploring and simultaneously explaining the creative process. The film is also a cinematic retrospective of Matta’s life and his work with interview commentaries by art historians, curators and fellow artists.

Trying to explain his own personal creative process, Matta says, “If you start with a white thing [referring to a canvas or piece of paper], you are going to project things you already know. Make it dirty somehow and then you will start using hallucinations.”

These “hallucinations” are simply the power of imagination as when “people see in a cloud an elephant and begin to hallucinate to suggest something [to their mind.]” We make our own realities in other words, says Matta, and art is the expression of bringing the hidden into the visible.

The forms that Matta drew kept changing, so he called them “morphologies of my psyche”. An interview with Gordon Onslow-Ford, Matta’s lifelong friend explained their mutual interest in metaphysics, explored by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky in the early 20th century.

“His mind was a constant fountain of marvelous images. He was the greatest genius I have ever known,” says Ford in admiration of his friend

Indeed Matta was a cartographer of multi-dimensional space as Elizabeth Smith, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago explains.

For example, Matta’s painting “The Earth is a Man” is “a luminous landscape that seems to be pulsating, vibrating with energy” says Smith.

Matta’s depiction of intersecting dimensions and the poetry of painting is the overpowering impression of his work. “His paintings are like a living breathing organism,” Smith explains “rather than a static scene.”

Matta’s paintings exemplify the movement of energy that implies the shift from the macroscopic to the microscopic.

“We should one day represent what we don’t see,” says Matta, grasping at words to describe his own internal creative process. He refers to the energies that connect people and events, and the invisible flow of energies that makes our world. Matta is the cartographer of energy and the passage of time, as well as the transformation of time and space into a visual art form.

In his visit to New York, at the beginning of World War II in Europe, Matta became an influence on the so-called abstract impressionists like Motherwell and Pollock encouraging them to experiment with “automatism.”

“What caught on was the populist spirit, the technique of automatism,” Ford explains, “that you could paint freely. You didn’t have to go to art school. Matta and I were both interested in going through the surface to the world beyond.”

Later Matta was expelled by the Surrealists and the New York School artists shunned him, when he began to paint figurative representations of the horrors of the 20th century, in other words, a graphic depiction of the astral subversion of society. These images were violent, primal and erotic describing the mechanization of life, or as Smith puts it so succinctly, Matta created a “new mythology that dealt with society in crisis.”

“Matta, the Eye of the Surrealist” has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

URI DOWBENKO is an artist and the author of “Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy” and “Hoodwinked: Watching Movies With Eyes Wide open. His website is UriDowbenko.com.

Interview with Jane Crawford, the producer and director of “Matta, the Eye of a Surrealist”

UD: How did you first get interested in making this film?

JC: I had been married to Roberto Matta’s son, Gordon Matta-Clark, who was also an artist. Gordon had died of cancer in 1978. I had, at that point, sort of left the art world to become a documentary film maker and met my second husband, Bob Fiore, who is a cameraman and film maker. We did the usual jobs. We did a lot of politics and for-hire stuff but then wanted to do our own projects, which, naturally went towards the art world. It was still too painful for me to consider doing anything about Gordon, but I really admired Matta’s paintings and realized that people didn’t know who he was or how important he was to the art scene in the United States.

In 1984, Bob and I arranged to go to Tarquinia in Italy, which is about an hour north of Rome where Matta had his studio. We filmed there over a period of several days. Matta was pretty famous for not granting interviews, and he did not like being filmed by anyone. But because I was his daughter-in-law, and I wouldn’t go away (I kept waylaying him) finally he relented. I had also gotten his daughter Federica Matta to help me pester him until he said yes. And then once he said yes, we had to arrange all kinds of games and surprises for him to keep his attention while we filmed.

UD: What do you think his reticence or reluctance was all about?

It had just been his way historically; he didn’t like giving interviews or doing books or cooperating, generally, with anybody. So we were very lucky in getting this material.

As I said, it was originally filmed in 1984. It was primarily self-supported. We were able to entice a few collectors to give us a little bit of money. But film was very, very expensive. And we would work on it for a few years, go way out over our credit limits and then have to stop for a few more years to pay the bills. And, you know, it is a true credit-card film. Finally, just about two years ago we were close to finished. We had, in the meantime, transferred everything to video because it was so much easier to edit and cheaper to finish. We filmed a couple more interviews with Martica Sawin and then Elizabeth Smith, who had curated the retrospective. And then Merrill-Lynch came in, heard about the project through Mario Paredes, who is head of the South American division. He’s Chilean and very much admired Matta, so Merrill-Lynch helped us finish the film.

UD: Do you know if anyone is writing a biography of Matta?

JC: He had a number of wives and a number of children. The estate has not been settled yet, so probably we won’t be done until the estate is settled. Germana, his last wife, has written a book which is very hard to get, which deals with his life through the 1940s. But a good book or catalog on his work would be wonderful. The museum retrospectives have put out catalogues, of course.

UD: Is her book in Italian or English?

JC: There are many books, but none of them are complete. Her book is in French, Italian and English. It’s trilingual. Sort of. If you know the titles of his films, he really combined words. It’s hard to deal with Matta in any single language because he played around with so many languages. He’s versatile.

UD: I want to complement you on this. I think you’ve done a wonderful job on this film. I was so impressed with the film. The only thing I’ve seen recently that’s in that category is “How to Draw a Bunny” about Ray Johnson.

JC: Ray Johnson was fabulous. You make these films in this kind of netherworld and then you send them out into the void.

We’ve made a number of different documentary films and films for artists and with artists. There are three films about Robert Smithson that are a part of the Robert Smithson retrospective, which started at the L.A. County and is now at the Dallas Museum of Art and coming to the Whitney. And the first one, Bob Fiore, my husband, made with Robert Smithson. It’s spiral jetty, which I can’t remember what the date of that was, around `71, I think.

UD: Bob is a documenatry film maker?

JC: Yes, we always joked that any artist’s film that you see late `60s, early `70s, where the camera work is done by Bob Fiore. He was the only one who was a professional cameraman. And he was friends with all the New York artists. So if anybody needed a cameraman to film something, particularly Richard Serra or Robert Morris or Keith Sonnier, Joan Jonas, they would call Bob and he would film.

UD: This is artists in action kind of films?]

JC: Yes. Or just projects by artists. There’s one up at the Museum of Modern Art right now by Joan Jonas. We’ve also made a small piece for Richard Serra, pieces on Robert Smithson. I made two: one called “Run Down” and another called “Sheds” that were about Bob Smithson’s work utilizing vintage material that his widow, Nancy Holt, shot at the time. I’ve made films about those.

We’ve also done a series of films on the wines of Burgundy and the wines of Bordeaux. Those were four hours each. They’re sort of encyclopedic and a lot of fun to do, as you can imagine. And I’m working now, after 25 years, on a film about Gordon Matta-Clark, and on another film about the artists of the `70s, who came out of the Soho, and what an impact they’ve had on the art world.

UD: So this is your primary focus — art-oriented documentaries?

JC: Yes. mine is. Bob and I both come out of the art world, and I prefer to stay in the art world. Bob works as a documentary cameraman and does a lot of news reportage for “60 Minutes”, “Prime Time Live” and “Dateline” and so on. He’s done a lot of programming for NET, PBS, music programs, and all kinds of things.

In fact, there was a film that just came out called “Festival Express” about the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin and The Band, and a bunch of people who were on a train cross-country in Canada, and they would stop and perform concerts and then get back on the train. And Bob did all the photography on the train with the various bands. That was just released this year, but it was actually filmed in the late `60s.

UD: There’s a big trend for that, kind of historical looking back. I think the fact that video is so much more accessible than bulky 16 and 35 cameras and so on.

JC: That’s right. He and I have a 2-man crew now. We can go out and shoot so economically, then edit the work at home. And it’s NHD; it’s quality good enough to be broadcast on television.

UD: You both did the editing on this Matta film.

JC: He contributed a lot of ideas– because he’s really instinctual. He’s got a wonderful sense of film. I edited it mostly with another couple of editors–Amy Kalafa and Alex Gunuey. I’m sort of the nuts and bolts, doing the daily stuff.

Did you know Bob also made “Pumping Iron” with Arnold? He was the director and the DP. There’s another one: “Greetings,” Roberts Di Niro’s film, I think. That was Brian DaPalma. That was funny because both Bob and Brian were really young film makers at the time. And you look at it and see all the film making rules they broke, it’s really funny. Bob was the DP on that.

I’ve stayed in the art world. I had originally an agency called “The Foundation of Art Performances and Projects” that worked with non-object artists back in the `70s. Artists who would do performance, projects, and installations, like specific projects.

UD: Is that how you met Gordon?

JC: Yes, actually it is. I was asked to interview him regarding an installation project. And he had come up with the idea that he wanted to dig down through the floor of the gallery and over, you know, make a tunnel next door and come up in the garages in the building next door, which happened to the be the Chase Manhattan Bank. Tthat was one of his unrealized projects.

UD: I try to glean from these various stories about him. Twins that died or committed suicide? All these wild stories.

JC: Yes. Gordon was a twin. And the other either fell or jumped out a window. He was hearing voices at the time.

UD: Did it have something to do with living under the shadow of the old man’s fame?

JC: Gordon’s brother Sebastian just had been born with a problem. He’d really been different all of his life from other children. And I think Gordon felt guilty about that, responsible for his brother. But he was the strong, healthy one who had friends and was good in school and was outgoing, where his brother was had a hard time his whole life.

UD: There are all these psychodramas and cryptic references

JC: Yes somebody needs to write a book about this. It’s amazing.

And then his children, in addition to Gordon, Federica Matta’s internationally known as an artist. She was Matta’s daughter by Malitta Matta, who was his fourth wife.

Federica is very successful making sculpture in the United States, painting and sculpture, mostly in France. And she’s done projects in Chile. And her brother, Ramuncho Matta is a successful musician. And there’s another brother, Pablo Echaurren, in Italy who’s a very successful painter.

UD: So there’s a whole dynasty kind of.

JC: — of artists. It’s very interesting. That was a very strong gene that Matta passed on to his children.

URI DOWBENKO is an artist and the author of “Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy” and “Hoodwinked: Watching Movies With Eyes Wide open. His website is UriDowbenko.com.

For more information on Dowbenko’s books Bushwhacked & Hoodwinked.

Copyright © 2005 Uri Dowbenko. All Rights Reserved.

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BY URI DOWBENKO
For every Jackson Pollock, there are thousands of Ray Johnsons. They work in obscurity, deferential to the Art World, yet suspicious of its requisite politics. “Success” in the materialistic sense eluded Ray Johnson since he never reached the Art Star pantheon of contemporaries like Andy Warhol or Ray Lichtenstein. Now, however, Ray Johnson has been memorialized (and even given minor league immortality) through a highly entertaining documentary film called “How To Draw a Bunny” (Palm Pictures 2004) by John Walter and Andrew Moore.

Mousy looking and unassuming, Ray Johnson had the stereotypical avant garde credentials. Black Mountain College. Andy Warhol’s Factory. Manhattan Art Scene 101. However he was best known as a collage artist and the originator of so-called “mail art,” which he named the “New York Correspondence School.” It was a Johnsonian pun on “school” as an art movement, as well as the ubiquitous mail order drawing classes popular in the 1960s.

When accused of being a Pop artist, Johnson would say — I do not make pop art; I make chop art. And he did — cutting up his artwork and mailing it off to friends around the country.

A proto-prankster, Johnson relished his role as a provocateur/ performance artist. One sequence in the film describes how he dropped hot dog links over Long Island and had it paid for by the Feigen Gallery. A bemused Richard Feigen tells the story on camera.       When Johnson drowned (himself) in Sag Harbor in 1995, the film shows newspaper headlines announcing “Pop Artist Ray Johnson, 67, Mysterious in Life and Death” and “Mystery Death in Sag Harbor.” His address book showed his acquaintance with Art World luminaries like John Cage, Bruce Conner, Chuck Close and the Christo(s).

Johnson’s artwork typically used images of All American icons like Elvis, James Dean and the Lucky Strikes bulls-eye cigarette logo in a series of collages on similar themes. The dada flavor of his art is unmistakable — tweaking middle class standards of taste and beauty in order to arrive at another destination (and definition) of aesthetics.

An elfin-like and highly proficient bullshit artist, Johnson obviously loved toying with his (would be) collectors. In a fascinating interview with NewYork literary agent Morton Janklow, the film records his recollection of the negotiation for the price and artwork, which Johnson also considered to be part of the art. This is evidently called “process” art, since the “negotiation” of price was part of the “work” itself.

“How To Draw a Bunny” has wonderful interviews with Norm Solomon, Jim Rosenquist, Ray Lichtenstein, Judith Malina and the Christos who describe their relationship with Johnson. The film itself is structured like a collage flirting with the obvious questions about the enigmas of life and death. It’s also like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to assemble the disparate pieces of what is known about Johnson’s long strange trip through life.

In terms of art history, Ray Johnson fits best in the Fluxus movement. Art critic Robert C. Morgan in “The End of the Art World” writes that “those associated with fluxus generally preferred the ephemeral over the permanent, the concept over the form and the event over the object. They preferred absurdity and wit to the seriousness given to expressionist painting or to the more fashionable emergence of pop art.”

Like Yoko Ono, Johnson’s work was part of this movement, since as Morgan points out “there was a certain elegance to all of this, a certain refusal to conform to what the museum wanted as official art or what the history of art seemed to dictate as the next logical step in the progressive linearity of modernism.”

After all, Richard Feigen and Frances Beatty had to wait 14 years for the death of Ray Johnson — before they could finally get a show out of him.

“There are inner directed artists and there are outer directed artists,” Morgan continues. “Inner directed artists deal purposefully with what they have to say as artists. Outer directed artists pay a lot of attention to what is in the mainstream and what is acceptable, before they show. We are talking about careerism: Making the right moves in the right places and if the art catches the fancy of the right dealer or the right critic, then a career is born. Art simply becomes the vehicle for one’s career rather than the other way around.”

The lack of an art world career did not stop Ray Johnson. “How To Draw a Bunny” is a superb case study showing that art world fame and fortune, though certainly desirable, are not as important as leaving a good looking body of work. That was the ultimate cosmic joke of Ray Johnson’s life and certainly his death.

* Uri Dowbenko (http://www.uridowbenko.com) is an artist and the author of “Hoodwinked: Watching Movies With Eyes Wide Open” (2004) (http://www.conspiracydigest.com).

For more information, “How To Draw a Bunny” http://www.palmpictures.com/videos/howtodrawabunny.html

Copyright © 2004 Uri Dowbenko. All Rights Reserved.

* URI DOWBENKO is one of Alternative Media’s foremost writers and media analysts and the author of “Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy”. A distinctive voice of modern American journalism, he is also the founder of Alternative Media websites: Conspiracy Planet.com, Al Martin Raw.com, Steamshovel Press.com, and Conspiracy Digest.com. His latest book to be published in Spring 2004 is called “Hoodwinked: Watching Movies with Eyes Wide Open”, the most politically incorrect movie reviews ever published. He can be reached at u.dowbenko@lycos.com

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Mapping criminal corporate-government connections is a dangerous occupation. Exposing the players and their front companies is even more hazardous. These are the subjects of Mark Lombardi’s art — the hidden global realities of money and power.

His artwork, literally as well as figuratively, connects the dots of international high-level white-collar crime networks.

Lombardi’s drawings are mandalas of conspiracy, flow charts of shady deals and shaky agents, and org charts of world-class con men, revealing the genealogy of wickedness in the highest places of corporate and government power.

“Mark Lombardi: Global Networks” is a traveling exhibition of 25 drawings, some as large as 4′ x 12,’ organized by New York-based Independent Curators International (ICI) and curated by Robert Hobbs of Virginia Commonwealth University. In graphic terms, the drawings document the major financial and political frauds of the late 20th century. They are flow charts of illicit money and power, solid and dotted lines and curves as well as broken arrows denoting the flows of illicit financial operations and covert revenues.

DECONSTRUCTING CRIMINAL CONNECTIONS      

One of the drawings called “George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979-90″ (1999) shows the connections of James Bath, a former CIA spook and business broker, front man for Saudi money who connected the Bush Family and Bin Laden Family (of the Osama bin Laden/ 9-11 legend) in shady deals in Texas and around the world.

Other drawings document the Savings and Loan (S&L) Frauds, IraqGate Fraud (illicit sales of nuclear and biological weapons to Iraqi kingpin Saddam Hussein with a $5 billion US Government-guaranteed phony “agricultural loan” through the Banca Nazionale de Lavoro), Iran Contra Fraud, and the Clinton/ Jackson Stephens Frauds.

Lombardi was an artist and an archivist, not an investigative reporter; he simply used available material from books and newspaper articles (from the public record) for the information “content” of his work.

Viewing his art (mostly un-inked pencil drawings) requires the ability to 1/ see the graphics, 2/ read the names of people and corporate fronts, and then 3/ integrate this content of networks into an epiphany about How the Real World Works.

Historically, of course, the Harken Stock Fraud made George W. Bush his first serious chunk of money. It should be also noted that Bath, a former cokehead pal of George Jr., was also connected with the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) Fraud.

Lombardi’s web-like drawings show the decentralized nature of the networks of crime and flows of global capital. The key is a multitude of front companies, which add layers of complexity to the conspiracies themselves.

Allegedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder (manic depression), Lombardi supposedly died from suicide (or was suicided) in 1999 — after two successful solo shows and just as his career was about to go to the next level.

It should also be noted that Jim Hatfield, author of “Fortunate Son,” (Soft Skull Press), a biography of George W. Bush, which alleged that George Bush Jr. was convicted in Texas on cocaine charges, until his record disappeared from the court system, was also found dead by suicide in an Oklahoma motel.

ADDING A REAL WORLD CONTEXT TO ART

Artist Mark Lombardi (1951-2000), whose business card ironically read “Death Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy,” was found dead in his studio, officially declared a suicide in the police report. Or as government whistleblower Al Martin, author of “The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider” (http://www.almartinraw.com) says, “The guy put together one chart too many.”

Martin was retained by attorney Frank Rubino, defense counsel for Panamanian strongman Antonio Noriega, to produce a chart for the courtroom, which would explain the complex relationships between individuals and offshore companies, etc.

The large-scale 5 foot by 9 foot chart was topped off by a color photo of former president George Herbert Walker Bush and Antonio Noriega embracing one another, both giving a victory sign to the camera.

It should be noted that US troops under George Bush invaded Panama, then hijacked Noriega to Florida, where he was convicted of drug charges. Noriega is still in prison to this day.

“When they set up this chart in the courtroom, the judge said, what’s that? We had Bush connected to this drug operation,” recalls Martin.

Martin says that later CIA operative Frank Snepp joined the defense team (Rubino himself was a former CIA agent) and gave daily reports on how the trial against Noriega was proceeding. /p>

“I was real naive,” says Martin about his participation in the Noriega trial. “I made the assumption that this is what they wanted” — to have a flow chart of personnel, covert operations, as well as banks and other front companies and how the schemes actually worked. Martin notes that they didn’t really expect him to use the real names of people and front companies

“Investigative reporter Dave Lyons from the Miami Herald told me this is what people can understand,” Martin continues. “Graphs and charts help the average person understand complex conspiracies

Martin jokingly concludes, “Charts and graphs — bad. Shredders – good.”

MAKING POLITICALLY INCORRECT ART

In a video of the artist shown at the exhibition, Andy Mann asked Lombard in February 1997, “Do you fear for your life?”

Lombardi didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “This is a way I can map the political and social terrain in which I live.”

According to his friends, Lombardi told them that he was being followed — just before his death.

Lombardi also described his work as “visualized fields of information [which] started out as corporate diagrams.”

In the end, Mark Lombardi’s contribution to culture is his relentless search for the truth. He was a pioneer in the cartography of realpolitik, mapping international networks of crime which include high-level government officials and shady so-called “business” men.

Lombardi’s legacy is his depiction of geo-political realities, the essence of global criminal conspiracies. No theory, just conspiracy –- conspiracies that continue to haunt the planet into the 21st century.

Copyright © 2003 Uri Dowbenko. All Rights Reserved.

* Uri Dowbenko is an artist and media analyst. His book, “Bushwhacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy” is available at Borders and Barnes & Noble stores (http://www.conspiracydigest.com) His email is u.dowbenko@lycos.com
Mark Lombardi: Global Networks Exhibition Itinerary
The Drawing Center New York, New York November 1 – December 18, 2003
Falconer Gallery, Grinnell College Grinnell, Iowa May 28 – August 1, 2004
Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, Ontario Canada September 10 – December 5, 2004
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, California January – April 2005

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