San Francisco - In the midst of the mid-May heat wave, Matt Gil and I met at the Glen Park BART station. Trawling for a space suitable for a meaningful exchange turned up mostly dark and empty cafés. We said "Uncle" and pushed through a roaring local bar after the third time glancing past. The gem: an outdoor patio sat bare, and we gladly swapped the imbibing Friday throng inside for the patio's tropic heat. We chatted over a beer and eased into my complicated questions concerning simplicity, a kind of untouchable touchstone in his work.

-Andy Ritchie

Matt Gil's exhibition Reel to Real will be on view until July 2, 2008 at Marx and Zavattero.

Andy Ritchie: OK, let’s go back to “The simpler thing, the better”—I was reading off your artist statement—I’m wondering, do you apply this [approach] as a physicist applies the idea to physical laws, as in “Simplicity is beautiful because it’s true,” or is it simply an aesthetic principle…or do you not see a separation there?

Matt Gil: Oh jeez. If I…I’ve always liked the thought of “less is more”. That’s the most simple way of putting it, and I remember quite a long time ago somebody fiddling—I might’ve been in second grade—I remember somebody fiddling with this complex tape recorder when they used to have tapes decks, y’know? And it was like this lever turned it on and this lever turned it off and this engaged the cap stand and this turned off the heads, y’know? I kinda liked tape recorders a long time ago. They’re gone, but there’s a few beautiful German tape recorders—one was called a ReVox, and there was a Tandberg, and it had one knob, one knob that—kuh-kuh—engaged everything. It was beautiful; it’s so simple. And it didn’t have these kind of shifting levers, y’know. And a person who was working on his, my dad—‘cause he built a tape recorder one time, when you could buy kits like that—and he just said “You know when you can make it simpler, it’s usually a little better.” It’s just sorta stuck with me. I find it very easy to just keep glomming on things to things and building assemblage, which I love when it’s done beautifully, but the really hard thing to do is to get rid of all the crap and cut it down to the essence of things, as much as you can. I haven’t figured out how to make something super-super simple, the most minimal work in the world, like Dan Flavin—a fluorescent stack of tubes or something.

AR: Is that a goal of yours?

MG: No, it’s not, because my work is coming from a little bit of a different place. Now that you’ve got me thinking about it, I don’t usually describe this to people and write it all out; it’s easier to verbally explain it. But when I look at an object, I see the object at face value, for what it is, but then I’ve always been able to kind of look through it and see the negatives. Because everything has negative space, except for just like a block or something. It’s the negative space that’s really powerful. That void in there, to me, is like the ether, the quintessence of the world. I kind of find a way in my mind to eliminate the sculpture as if it was a black hole and just sorta see that space around it. And then the third thing, besides the object and the negative space, is the composition. The sculpture is really the composition of the balance between those two things: the positive and the negative. And so when I start looking at those two things, it’s really the driving force in anything. ‘Cause even like our bodies, you’ve got these bones, and this flesh hanging on it, but there’s a conduit going all the way through. It’s a negative. It starts and it comes out the end. It’s really gorgeous. But nobody really deals with that.

AR: It’s a hole.

MG: It’s a hole. And you’ve got big cavities that go here [gestures to face] and go quite a ways up and in and out, and that’s a beautiful thing. So we really are like the voids through here.

AR: Kind of a vessel.

MG: Yes. Yep.

AR: I was thinking about the way you define simplicity in your artist statement, without going “all the way” as the formalists did with, y’know, flat, white rectangular paintings or something. And you also mention—I’m just trying to clarify for my own purposes—you mention economy of line. Is the idea that economy of line is better than no line at all? [The latter] is how I would view those formalist works that bring it down to ground zero. There’s a difference between economy of line and no line, and from what you just said—

MG: In the context of drawing, that line to me, in a drawing, is…the line itself can be drawn as if it had no width or dimension. But some lines grow or shrink, perhaps describing a little shadow under an object, perhaps a little curvature on an object. And I have a real love of drawing. Drawing to me is somewhat the root of everything. I’m getting a little off your subject, but in discussing lines…if I’m starting with a drawing, to discover shape or form, the line, if it’s continued and encapsulated, it’s basically a silhouette, a profile. And then what’s happening after that, well, does it stay like that? Are certain voids described like a horseshoe, y’know, how a horseshoe would have an outside and an inside cavity? It just depends what you do with the line to create your work. [Laughs] You’d either have to ask me the question again and I start off from that or—

AR: No, no. I’d rather hear your rants. But I do have a couple more questions about simplicity. It just sparked a whole lot of ideas when I read your artist statement. For one thing, the concept is pretty abstract, simplicity. It’s broad and it changes, depending on your orientation. On one hand a person could see simplicity in your work if it were left as just the raw structure, whereas you see the simplicity in getting rid of the rawness. In that sense the simplicity depends on who’s perceiving it. Are you more interested in the perception of simplicity as opposed to just a structural simplicity?

MG: They go hand-in-hand for me—they really do. There’s a certain kind of simplicity for me in working with very simple materials, materials that are so basic that everybody would look at it and go, “Oh my god. That’s just a piece of cloth. Why didn’t I think of that? I could’ve done that.” But you didn’t do it. I did it. So that’s a very simple concept. There’s another kind of simplicity in that if something is very well composed, such that it doesn’t even look like hands touched it. [Touching a plant leaf nearby] It’d be just like this leaf: If you look at…just look at the one leaf, it’s just a simple little thing, but it’s not simple. I mean, if you really sat down and just…even tried to draw a potato chip, it’s such a complex thing. Every one is unique—a super simple thing. There’s a professor I know who used that as an example of what he was gonna teach his first-year drawing students. He said, “I think we’re just gonna draw a potato chip,” and I thought to myself That’s a great drawing exercise. Very complex. Super simple.

AR: Did it have ridges?

MG: Whatever. But if you could draw that with one line, you’d say that’s simple, but it’s very hard to do. If you could make that line go around and describe the taco-ing of a chip, y’know, the negative and positive…there’s so many forces going on. It’s almost describing pressure, tension, a lot. A lot in that simple activity. That goes back to the line idea and the simplicity. Does that kind of explain where I’m coming from? I’m not trying to fake anybody out. I want people to think I love art and this stuff’s great but how did you do it? I think I could do that.

AR: That definitely helps to clarify it, the anecdotes from your past especially. I think it’s kind of cathartic, talking through your past, because a lot of the time it’s easier to describe [your work] in practical terms instead of academic terms. I’d like to move on now and talk about something I would not describe as simple, the conveyor belt. I understand you’re roasting, to a certain degree, the commercial state of the art world—

MG: Yeah, a little bit.

AR: I’m curious, are you also poking fun at the “objectness” of your own work?

MG: Yeah, yeah, very much so. That’s a good way of putting it. Objects are really beautiful, but they’re not really understood, I think, by everybody—that’s not a good way to put it. I don’t think people appreciate ‘em as much as they should. [Matt e-mailed me a few days after the interview to add an idea that eluded him earlier: “Our primitive minds are set up to notice things that move, and my machine drags the viewer in on that level and sort of forces you to look and see.”] I love objects. I love things you can hold and feel and collect. It’s very kidlike, y’know. I always had little collections when I was a kid, and they just grew, and I realized I could make my own things that were a collection. And just kept makin’ ‘em and makin’ ‘em and realized that I’m off on my own little journey of exploring the compositional elements that we’ve talked about.

AR: I actually collect my own work. I’m my own leading collector.

MG: I agree. I go for it. There becomes a good reason for doing anything. I’ve done that my whole life. I have sculptures that I made in first and second grade still, stuff I carved. I put ‘em in a box, and I liked ‘em…things I made out of wood. Things I made out of metal.

AR: You still hold onto them?

MG: Yeah. You know all that stuff, all that crap you had in your bottom drawer when you were a little kid? If it was something I made, I just kind of collected it all, y’know, and when it got to the point when folks were moving to a new house, I’d take all my cool stuff and put it in a box and save that, then throw away all the other junk. Next place, save that. You move away to college, you take that. You go to your first apartment, and I got three boxes of crap—it’s kinda neat. Some of it’s adorable. Some of it I made in the early ‘60s. Some of it is from when I was eight years old. Stuff’s going on like 45 years old.

AR: I’m actually trying to reclaim some of my childhood artwork from my parents. I made sure that they still had it. They do! I’ll be back.

MG: Good good good. Or at least make a facsimile of it, a photocopy or something.

AR: Definitely. So now, along the lines of the conveyor belt, now that you’ve dabbled in kinetics—

MG: Oh, I’ve done as much kinetic artwork as I’ve done three-dimensional non-moving artwork.

AR: Really? You’ve always done it? I was just going to ask, “How do you go forward now that you’ve done this?” but you’ve always been doing mechanical things?

MG: Yeah. What happened was, during high school…I’ve welded since I was about in seventh grade. I had an oxyacetylene and I loved it. I would weld and weld and weld. It just took off, and it kinda made me a popular kid in the neighborhood. I’d fix everybody’s motorcycle. People would come over: “Hey, my brother-in-law’s got an ice cream truck with a broken blah-blah-blah.” I’d fix that and trade for something else. So, I’ve worked on mechanical things my whole life. When I was in college, I started thinking, learning more about what sculpture could be, and I was really drawn to kinetic work. When I found Jean Tinguely’s work, I just went, “Aw, that’s the bomb,” you know? “That is so cool.” And then there was Calder, and there was George Rickey, who is just an elegant, elegant master. You might look him up online. He died about three years ago. He made it into his late nineties. I met him a few times. His work is so elegant and graceful, just two moving parts. Have you been to the Oakland Museum [of California]?

AR: I haven’t yet. I’m a little slow.

MG: Have you been to the library…it’s in the Civic Center in San Francisco? There’s these two huge Ls that are moving in the wind. You’ll see it. Very graceful, very elegant…just a master of elegance and simplicity. If I could come up with something as graceful as that in my life… But that would really intrigue me, so I started studying kinetic artwork very in-depth, trying to find out who the masters were. There’s a good five or six people who have branched out into these three, four, five different directions, and I tried to find something in between there, and I thought I did have something there, I thought very well—it’s really what launched my career…through the seventies. I mean, I had a gallery before I got outta college.

AR: Really?

MG: And then I had two other galleries, one in Carmel and one in Chicago. It just really took off. It wasn’t like I was making a living at it, but as soon as I was in my early 20s, I was making stuff and having little shows.

AR: That’s a big deal, y’know?

MG: It was great. I got to sell stuff and start meeting collectors. I just kept doing kinetic work, and I did that all through the eighties until about ’91. The last piece I started was in ’94. And I didn’t really finish that until about 2004. I just sort of put it aside. But about 1990 I decided to cut my losses, because a lot of people don’t know how to take care of kinetic artwork. It takes a person who likes machines. They need adjustments; they need maintenance; they need an outlet. They need a lot of stuff.

AR: So [the collectors] need to invest in someone who can properly care for it.

MG: Yeah, yeah, they need to be careful. And they’re inherently gonna wear out; they’re gonna break down. It’s a mechanical thing. But people get upset when they’ve spent $1000 on something and they’ll call you and they’ll say, “Hey, you know the thing stopped running.” And I’m like, “I don’t own it anymore. You do.” But it’s kind of worthless if it doesn’t run. And then so you kind of lose a little credibility if stuff breaks down, so that’s the real grace, the real beauty of kinetic artwork—when it doesn’t break down. That’s why Calder is a genius: what can break down on a mobile? There’s nothing to break down. Rickey: nothing to break down. Tinguely didn’t care if they broke, y’know? He didn’t care. That’s great. There’s three. Then there’s a few others.

AR: Now, just because I’m curious, and a little self-indulgent when I write these, can you tell me which direction the artwork moves on the conveyor and is it important?

MG: No, not important. Actually, once I started building it, I was so into it, I mean I designed it, I made the main parts, I put it together, it ran, I started putting the pallets on and I thought, Ah, this is great. And then I looked at it and I’m like, “Holy shit, it’s going backwards!” And I’m like, “It doesn’t really matter.” But each pallet has a slice out of it. You would typically want something to go with the bull nose forward, plowing through.

AR: So the tail kind of curves out at the end?

MG: Yeah, the scoop goes forward on this one. And at that point it took so much time to just get everything screwed together. There’s 52 pallets, four screws holding each one of the pallets in, and I got it all assembled. And each one has to be put in pretty much by hand. We did the hours yesterday, and it was about 230 hours to build that thing.

AR: Wow. Have you finished it? Is it all installed right now?

MG: It’s done. It’s running great, yeah. Just taking it apart, moving it, getting it all back together, dialed in and running. Yeah, it’s not bad.

AR: Cool. Well, I guess I’m off the topic of the conveyor belt, but I was wondering if you could chime in if you want [regarding] a lot of talk I’ve heard lately pitting art vs. design. Actually, right now Artkrush.com has a feature on art and design and I only bring this up because I saw the furniture on your website and figured you had probably come across this dilemma before…or not this dilemma, but this dialogue about what’s art and what’s design. Care to throw any weight at this issue?

MG: This is a subject…and I don’t want to become some kind of a bad guy. Architects are right on the edge, right in-between art and design. Consequently it’s very hard for an artist to come in and work with an architect because there’s a little head-butting. Who’s the better spatial designer? Richard Serra is a master at it, because he’s found an object that really doesn’t detract from the architect’s glory of “This is my building, its colors and its panels and its spaces and its volumes,” and you can plop a Richard Serra in front of it and do a little this-or-that to it and…it’s a very thin idea, but done very masterfully. There’s a little art and design comment.

AR: I don’t think Serra would complain [to any architect] right now because of how much space he’s given. He has a whole wing in Bilbao just of his steel structures…and he’s definitely earned it.

MG: But I think it works because he’s not stompin’ on anybody’s toes, really. And they really shake hands well. And I think a lot of artists have done stuff that’s really gorgeous and really steals the limelight from the architecture, which I think’s great. I love that. When all of a sudden the sculpture is the hood ornament, you know, and who cares about the other half of it? And that’s the power of art. But I don’t think a building is really going to steal the limelight from too many—I mean, Frank Gehry is trying to do that, but I don’t think his buildings are going to wear really well. That’s just my personal sense.

AR: It’s hard to say, yeah.

MG: I think they’re going to start to look a little gaudy. Maybe a little loud. All of a sudden I think someone’s gonna go, “Oooooh, that’s a millennium building,” you know?

AR: They will be dated, I think.

MG: Very much so.

AR: I’m not going to pressure you to comment on the furniture or the other aspects of design, but that’s at least a good insight into your perspective.

MG: On the furniture, real quick, when I stopped having a full-time job, if you want to call it that, I opened my studio up to do fabrication work for other artists and designers. So I would get calls from interior designers who had designs, didn’t know how to make them, artists who have gotten commissions based on a little maquette or a few drawings but didn’t know how to build them, and then I would execute the project. Sometimes designers would come to me and say, “Hey, I’d really like you to make something that looks like it’s stone but I want it made out of metal,” so I came up with a way of doing that. Some of the textured pieces you saw were reminiscent of that. I love intricate pattern. I love mosaic. I like tile-setting. It’s like this lattice [in his field of view] is very distracting to me. There’s two different spacings going on here. You got like a 3X3 pattern and a 2X2 pattern, and they just stick ‘em next to each other. They’re amusing to me. But I came up with a couple of woven techniques that I utilized to make some pieces and some designers liked them and used them in some really high-end residential projects.

AR: That grew directly out of your skills, would you say, rather than an actual active interest in making furniture?

MG: Right, and most of the furniture in my house I made myself.

AR: Hey, if you can, you might as well. Save a little money.

MG: Exactly. I can make something that’s way beyond what I could afford. I just have to take the time to make it.

Aware of Matt’s considerable sway over matter—the man’s practically an alchemist—I enjoined him to contribute some fundamental knowledge to aid the budding DIYer. Behold Some Physical Laws All Should Know, by Matt Gil (which he is seeing for the first time right here and now).

--Andy Ritchie

(*Images, from top to bottom: Matt Gil, Reel to Real, May 15 - July 2, 2008; Marx and Zavattero, installation view 1, photo courtesy Marx and Zavattero, San Francisco. Matt Gil, Reel to Real, May 15 - July 2, 2008; Marx and Zavattero, installation view 2, photo courtesy Marx and Zavattero, San Francisco. Matt Gil, Reel to Real, May 15 - July 2, 2008; Marx and Zavattero, conveyor belt, photo courtesy Marx and Zavattero, San Francisco. Matt Gil, Reel to Real, May 15 - July 2, 2008; Marx and Zavattero, installation view 1, photo courtesy Marx and Zavattero, San Francisco.)