Roberto Matta was not a preeminent figure in the arts, but he was an important exponent of American Surrealism and a champion for the definition and the self-understanding of a genuine (US-) American type of art. Roberto Matta brings shattered shapes, biomorphic or, more often than that, tool-like or machine-like forms to canvas. Functional, either by themselves or in their arrangements, they do seem not. An interesting importunity and intrusiveness of forms, of materiality, coming packed and in a crowd, you seem to have, prefigurative, preverbal. Hallucinations that may stem out from the depths of the mind, before they can make sense, before they can form a syntax, before they become relatable forms and objects. Matta was convinced of the richness of the inner life, and, as a Surrealist, wanted to depict a very inner life, or epiphanies of the so-called unconscious. The Surrealists, with their dogmatism, however became too narrow for Matta, who wanted to establish a true American art in the middle of the 20th century. Due to his charismatic personality and sharp intellect he exercised great influence on the American artists who struggled for the same cause initially, but alienated them after a while with his own dogmatism and the narrowness of his concepts. Therefore he joined the Surrealists again (the other artists would then become the Abstract Expressionists). In general, there was a representational Surrealism, depicting irrational, dream-like associations between people or objects or showing them from unusual perspectives, as you had it in the works of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst or Rene Magritte. And there was a non-representational Surrealism where you did not even have true objects but imaginary forms. Such was the Surrealism of Jean Miro, or Roberto Matta. In the exhibition at the Vienna Kunstforum I found some of Matta´s paintings striking, even extraordinary, others have not been of that quality. That´s how it is the usual case in an exhibition, yet in general, I find Matta´s symbols and his imagery, though interesting, not strictly convincing or spellbinding. It is too weak and internally diffuse to create an iconography or universal signifiers, his non-representational Surrealism does not have the same originality and freshness as Miro´s. Matta´s use of colours is often extraordinary, but the blurred and washy character of his paintings, in a way, reduces their effectiveness. There are people who consider Salvador Dali´s art as stupid or trivial. But especially when I see other Surrealists in comparison I think Dali´s leading position in Surrealism does not come as a surprise or as unjustified. Dali managed to create an (in a way) concise, noticeable, memorable imagery that became iconic. Matta´s art rather gives me an impression about how paintings could look like if the more apparent possibilities already have been sorted out; American Surrealism was not as important as the European Surrealism; Matta´s art serves as a footnote. Although Matta strived for an objective stylistic intervention and innovation (Automatism), although he was a theorist and intellectual, I think his style finally did not transcend a personal style. Nevertheless, I think these flashy, boundless colours on canvas in this exhibition I will remember forever.
Maybe the Kunstforum made an exhibition on Roberto Matta because he was a friend and intellectual companion of Robert Motherwell, whom they had so graciously featured before. It is also imminent to focus on Surrealism, as the Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton from 1924 makes Surrealism turn 100 years old in 2024. And featuring a less prominent figure among the Surrealists strikes as a good idea. Surrealism emerged out of Dadaism and was anti-bourgeois. With the Surrealist Manifesto, Breton, who both had a concise intellect but also a somehow doctrinarian personality, broke with Dadaism and tried to emancipate new artistic directions from the Dadaist intellectual straightjacket. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Surrealism aimed at a psychological revolution. Breton defined Surrealism as pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation. True artists and intellectuals (and other people) will have a desire to reach some state of purity of mind. They want to do something “true” and “authentic”. Respectively, when you work with the expression of content, of thoughts, of forms, you will then try to realign yourself with the originator of thoughts and forms – with the mind – in a primordial manner. Surrealism tried to reach such purity of mind by applying free association, the bizarre logic of dreams, of (unconscious) desire, of the culturally suppressed, and the like. It was, as is true art, an enterprise in introspection. Roberto Matta, more than anyone else, championed the element of “psychological automatism”, i.e. a direct expression of images that emerge out of the unconscious. (At least since the times of Arthur Rimbaud) in their desire to reach purity of mind, there is desire in artists to break up with ordinary syntax – or, as they envision, to break “through” syntax to achieve a vision of a different, transcendent or more primordial reality. Reality, as they think, is something “magical”, whose magic, nevertheless, is only able to shine through occasional cracks and gaps within ordinary, culturally conditioned experience. So they want to reach a total, or at least a different experience. I know this quite well because in my Book of Strange and Unproductive Thinking I strived for such a kind of “infra-writing” or “micro-writing” myself; trying to express dreams, hallucinations before falling asleep, phantasmas or the states of mind and the cognition of little children or of animals (which, naturally, failed (so far)), to get at some kind of “core” of the cognitive process or the syntax, or to transcend it in order to get a fuller perspective on everything or reach some kind of meta level. Most prominently, Getrude Stein struggled for a pure unconscious automatism in writing. After years of trying to achieve it, she noticed that in the final consequence it is a vain attempt. Regardless of how hard you try, you do not seem to be able to break through preconditions or through the syntax. Maybe this should not come as a surprise, since there supposedly is no actual reality and no actual thought process beyond the syntax. The syntax mirrors the way things happen in the world. Therefore, one also should not be frustrated with the art of Dali or even Miro (since one might think it is not as radical and completely otherworldy as Surrealism seems to initially promise). Also their art is bound to be “conventional” – and that is the way in which it successfully works. Upon reflection, Matta was actually more radical and went further down the abyss. His forms, achieved by Automatism, are actually more primordial, pre-logical and pre-syntactic than those of most of his fellow Surrealists. Therefore, Matta´s work has actually achieved something objective and serves as giving an illustration of how expression of a specific content (the “unconscious” and the most primordial, pre-syntactic depths of the mind) might actually look like (and it is not just a “personal style” as mentioned above). Yet it also seems to illustrate that the primordial, pre-syntactic depths of the mind are not necessarily a higher state of consciousness or that you operate at a higher plane of reality when you operate on such a level. Likely, it is a less competent level of cognition – and of phantasy and imagination. I think I can tell you: breaking through the syntax is not an end in itself. The goal of the purification of the mind is that the mind finally encounters itself. The destruction of forms should finally enable you to erect new and fresh forms. Surrealism should likely lead to some “Super Realism”, which means a more total and lucid grasp on reality, on the “infra level” of individualities and aberrations as well as on the level of abstraction and intellectual integration.
Surrealism, as Breton also acknowledged, should not serve merely as offering you a glimpse on an alternative reality. By merging “dream” and reality, it should give you a total view on reality. I think this is true because a more comprehensive view on reality should also include the imaginary and the possibility of alternative realities (in a more mundane as well as in a more lofty sense). Actually, the imaginary and chance and possibility are integral part of reality. To grasp that character of reality, your mind should be equipped with some kind of Möglichkeitssinn, a sense for possibilities. Surrealism champions for such a Möglichkeitssinn, therefore it is actually mind-expanding as well as liberating. The surrealist imagination is more liberating and superior to the ordinary imagination, as it imaginatively tries to realign possible realities with impossible realities (that run against natural laws, logic, syntax etc.). Therefore, you should both become a heightened sense for what is possible, but also a sense for what is impossible, and what finally serves as a limitation. Therein, Surrealism will equip you with a sense of irony. And irony is a supreme sensibility; it makes it possible to take things more lightly – while actually taking them more seriously than you pretend to do. Irony, as opposed to cynicism or sarcasm, is a sympathetic attitude towards things. It helps you to escape from prison-like viewpoints and give you a more floating experience of reality to which you nevertheless sympathetically hold on to. I like heavy metal because it serves me as a “surrealist exaggeration”, therein expanding my competence in dealing with reality. Metal people usually are funny people with a sense of irony. Irony even seems a basic attitude, a Grundhaltung, to them. I seem to like that. Surrealism was profoundly inspired by the writings of the obscure Comte de Lautréamont. As I suggested, I consider myself as a revenant of Lautréamont. Lautréamont, Rimbaud or Büchner expressed reality in such a dense way that it seems to come as a hallucinative epiphany of reality. I consider such a kind of consciousness as the Einheits-Bewusstsein, as the unitary consciousness. All my work revolves around outlining the unitary consciousness, is about the unitary consciousness being at work. Therein, I am a Surrealist as well; yet rather than that, a Super Realist.
When I was writing and investigating about the Abstract Expressionists last autumn I also wanted to investigate about Arshile Gorky. Arshile Gorky is not very popular in Europe, but he was considered a true giant artist by the American artists, on equal footing with Jackson Pollock. Unfortunately, like Jackson Pollock he was an immensely troubled person who died young (he killed himself at the age of 44). Yet Arshile Gorky´s role in art was not that of a staunch innovator, like Pollock, rather he was the one who gave a finish to stylistic developments and brought them to a logical end. The art he developed in his final years could be considered a Surrealism that merged with the upcoming Abstract Expressionism. Arshile Gorky was a non-representational Surrealist as well, with his painting depicting biomorphic forms and the like. I could not come to a conclusion about his art; on some occasions it struck me and impressed me, on other it didn´t. So I think I need to wait until I have the possibility to experience the originals, until there is an exhibition about Gorky. At the end of his life, when Gorky struggled with cancer, Roberto Matta started an affair with Gorky´s wife. Finding out that he was too weak to kill Matta in revenge, due to his illness, served to plunge Gorky further into depression, which finally resulted in his suicide. According (not only) to Gorky, the American Surrealists were obnoxious people with low morals; cheating and fucking around with each other´s wives, whom, in a male chauvinist manner, they considered merely as “muses”, serving the pleasures of the male artist. Taking this into consideration, it seems almost astonishing that an exhibition about Matta could take place and not get cancelled, because stuff like this seems to provoke panic reactions among most contemporary intellectuals and in the art world. But maybe the notion that there was an omnipresent so called cancel culture is a panic reaction and an exaggeration.