In a statement on his website, Matthew Satz says, “There are still voids in the specific history of painting.” Since the late 1990s, Satz has devoted his practice to overcoming those voids through strategies that are, in his words, “conceptually based and process-oriented.”
During a conversation at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, where his exhibition “(There’s Gonna Be a) Showdown” is on view through July 26, a visitor thought of “The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry” by the late literary critic Harold Bloom. Bloom’s argument, which can be said to apply to all art forms, was, simply put, that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them — and an effort to surpass them.
Thus, Satz’s “Tar and Feather Mural,” a nine-foot-diameter mural of a target installed on the walls of the Parrish Art Museum in 2005, is not only an instance of one of his recurring processes — the application of tar and feathers to a canvas or other surface — but also an acknowledgment of the targets of Jasper Johns, an artist Satz admires and whom he became friends with after meeting him on the island of St. Martin.
Satz was born in Brooklyn in 1971 and grew up in Huntington. He made art from a very young age and went to Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts near Melville when he was 7. “The professor at the time said there were only two other kids who had the aptitude I was showing. I was carving these ebony stones that to him looked like Henry Moore sculpture.” Satz’s family had the Time Life books on artists, so the young artist delved into the book on Moore.
Art wasn’t his only talent. He earned a scholarship to Brandeis University to play basketball. “We were all under 6-foot-7 but my teammates had friends who were either on their way to the N.B.A. or already there. It was very competitive.”
He started out as an economics major and at first thought he would end up in advertising, which he considered a creative environment. However, an art professor suggested he switch to fine arts, and you know what the rest is. At the time he was making abstract, organic work, more sculptural than painterly.
Because two of his professors had studied with the head of the painting department at Yale, “there was a track to get an M.F.A. But by then I had come up with the idea of the tar and feather paintings, so I already felt competitive with my professors and I didn’t feel I needed to go to Yale. I probably saved myself $200,000 worth of debt.”
After graduating in 1993, he began to look for a space in Chelsea, where galleries were just starting to move from SoHo. “Chelsea was kind of sketchy then. It was a totally different environment than it is today. I didn’t feel I could be creative in that space.”
In 1995 he came to East Hampton to take the Jimmy Ernst Artist Alliance Tour, where he first met Terry Elkins, a painter living in a potato barn in Sagaponack that had once been a studio for Frank Stella. “Terry was a Southern gentleman, and I needed to know one person out here if God forbid something happened to me.” He had enough confidence in Elkins that he settled into a space in Amagansett that year.
He landed a job with Glenn Horowitz when his bookshop/gallery was on Newtown Lane “and that opened some doors as far as introducing me to artists and books.” While there he had interactions with Ronald Lauder, Richard Prince, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut, and came to know Eric Fischl, David Salle, and Bryan Hunt, among others. “The circles grew from Terry to all those guys.”
In 2005, Horowitz published “How to Shoot at One Who Outdrew You,” a monograph covering Satz’s work from 1997 to 2005. (The title is a phrase from Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.”) It is clear from a perusal of that book that Satz’s practice was already fully formed, ranging from his early flypaper paintings from the late 1990s to his smoke paintings, tar and feather paintings, ash paintings, strip paintings, strands, as well as some obsessive grid works on paper, a series titled “American Mandala.”
One of the latter works, which is in the exhibition, is a sheet of 10-by-10-inch graph paper on which is a 10-by-7-inch grid comprising 28,000 boxes. Satz placed an ink mark in each box. “There’s an element of faith in trying to arrive at that level of perfection,” he said.
The tar and feather paintings, which he conceptualized while at Brandeis, first appeared in 1999. Satz said that those paintings represent a perfect balance between concept and process. “I don’t know if I’m going to find that balance again between the idea of the process and the actual end result.”
The smoke paintings, which seem to put the lie to Satz’s doubt about finding that balance again, also date from 1999. “The smoke paintings to me are a challenge to making the most beautiful lines.” He holds the canvases, some of which are monochromatic, some colored, above the flames. One source was the idea of the earliest men in caves and the discovery of fire.
Another series, the strip paintings, dates from 2001. “I was looking at Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, artists who thinned and poured paint. For me it wasn’t about the aesthetic of the strip, it was a way to show skill in manipulating the paint. I’m pouring a line of paint out of a squeeze bottle and then manipulating the ground of the canvas so gravity pulls it. The idea was to get color A next to color B next to color C with there being no discrepancy in between.” Stalactites of paint began to form hanging from the bottom edge of the support. Eventually he stopped painting the faces of the canvases, only putting paint on the bottom edge of an otherwise raw canvas and letting those drip.
In order to keep paint off the studio floor, he put sheets of paper below the paintings to catch the drips. Thus, the byproduct paintings, which he does not manipulate. “It’s interesting that there’s a space between the line on the canvas and the line on the byproduct. It’s the same line. It’s the idea of questioning the hierarchy of mark-making that’s intentional as opposed to unintentional.”
The detached drips led to the strands, which play such a prominent role at the Pollock-Krasner House and first appeared in 2002. Realizing he didn’t need the traditional format of the painting anymore, he applied paint to long narrow strips of rolled linen. “Though sculptural,” wrote John McWhinnie in the introduction to the Horowitz-published monograph, “he referred to these pieces as paintings, for they were elemental reductions of canvas and paint.”
A kind of apotheosis of the strands is now installed in Jackson Pollock’s studio. (Lynda Benglis is the only other artist to ever show work in that space.) Over 20 strands of paint, each about four feet in length, hang from an armature suspended from the studio ceiling. “It’s sort of a culmination of 80 years of painting, Pollock’s drips on the floor having come from changing the course of painting,” said Satz. There are four colors on each strand, and Satz tried to put some of the colors from the floor into the strands, suggesting a metaphorical strand connecting Pollock’s drip paintings to Satz’s strips.
While all of Satz’s series are represented in the exhibition, what suggested “The Anxiety of Influence” was not an artwork but the refrigerator in the kitchen.
“I got a hug from Jasper Johns, I can sit down with Bruce Nauman, I hung out with Robert Irwin, I hung out with all my heroes. They’re all on the refrigerator.”
Transferred from his own refrigerator, the surface includes Malcolm Morley’s “School of Athens,” Walter de Maria’s “Lighting Field,” Nauman’s “From Hand to Mouth,” a photograph of Johns, plus images referring to Sol LeWitt, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Botticelli, Yves Klein, Dan Flavin, and others, along with a drawing of Satz by his 8-year-old son, who lives most of the year in London.
“I really want to spend more time in Europe,” Satz said. “Keith Sonnier told me for the kind of work I’m doing I have to go to Europe. That’s been on my mind. But Keith’s been dead for how many years? That’s the other thing. When I moved here I was a little baby among all those artists who were giants, and now they’re all dying off, John Chamberlain, Malcolm Morley, real heroes of mine. I didn’t spend enough time with them when they were here.”
