Aaron Voronoff...
of http://abztraktsynergy.blogspot.com/
...remarks upon Matt’s unorthodox art-making techniques, including his penchant for burying canvases in the sand at his Florida Keys home, and casting the canvases out to sea and watching them roll back to him on the waves.
Matt responds:
Aaron, thanks for talking about the unorthodox manifestation of art. I always believe that as artists, we should continue to think outside the box. How can we manipulate, coerce, and tempt the materials? What environment can we introduce them to that will mutate, erase, or enhance all the different materials that we introduce into the canvas or wood or whatever, over a period of time, to bring forward something unique, challenging, and hopefully educational to us?
I just spent three hours with Nancy Ellen Abrams, the co-author along with Joel R. Primack, of the book The View from the Center of the Universe. The two of them travel all over the world now, speaking to groups, and they were in Chicago last week giving one of their talks. Nancy and I explored many parts of her book, and we also talked about what I’m doing. It was a very, very wonderful opportunity to meet her and exchange ideas about this universe we find ourselves in.
The theme of that book puts into words much of my meditation about who we are, where we came from, and why we’re sitting on this planet. One of the main axioms is that we are all part of the Big Bang. Each and every one of us has billions of years of knowledge within us that we know nothing about. Our goal in the time we have on this planet is to reach in and find that place that is unique and to ourselves, and present it to the world so that we’ll all have a little bit better knowledge of who and what we are.
Throwing an unstretched canvas into an ocean is one way I do that. I remember when I did some other pieces of work. I called a friend of mine who was a gallery owner and asked, “Did you ever hear what would happen if we took a piece of art and put it in a washing machine?”
She called back two weeks later and said, “As far as I can tell, no one has ever heard of anybody throwing a painting into a washing machine.”
So I thought, “That’s great! Maybe I’ll be the first!”
I never did put it in the drier. My wife would have had my head. I was tempted to go to a public laundromat and do it, but the whole neighborhood would have been coming after me in spattered clothing.
Orthodoxy, unorthodoxy, innovation, and exploration are all part of real life and artistic life. So it’s a great feeling of freedom to be able to throw a painting into the ocean and wonder when it returns what happened to it. What great adventure did it have? Did the turtles and the seaweed like it as it floated by? Are there any art critics in the ocean? Possibly the sharks, who thought about eating it but rejected it. I felt despondent about that. I suppose subconsciously I was trying to make tastier art piece for some of the more predatorial fish, but I don’t believe I ever succeeded.
Thanks for the question, and keep on keepin' on,
Matt