Matt Freedman – Art Is Long, Life Is Short, Only Friendship Is Eternal

Salut, Matt

“Forewarned or not, we are doomed to a lifetime of mistakes, for words mean nothing, only experience counts.” By Matt Freedman, “The Importance of Being Clumpist”, 2009

(Also see his performances at Endless Broken Time and on Instagram @endlessbrokentime)

I’m taking these meaningless words by Matt Freedman (few artists used so many words) as a kind of get out of jail free card for this article – and also as an opening for what is planned to be a rolling tribute to him over an extended period of time, from people whose many and varied experiences with Matt counted deeply. For those of you who’ve sent material – watch this space, and for those who’d like to, please send it to tealec@newschool.edu.

As I Zoomed with Romanov Grave artists, sharing stories and considering how to honor Matt, it became apparent that we all secretly harbored the view that he was better than us. He was just plain smarter, more curious, funnier, kinder, more multi-faceted, and probably better looking too. This was the night before the election, a dark and anxious time where it seemed that, along with the virus, the worst of us were triumphing, and goodness was on the outs. As tributes to Matt have poured in, ever more aspects of his life appear, from athlete to academic, multifaceted maker, collaborator and curator, showman, raconteur; and we want to make space here to record all of that.

Twin Twin III at Big&Small/Casual Gallery 2009, All photos:David Henderson

I got to know Matt well in 2009 as he staged his third “Twin Twin” show at my studio gallery Big&Small/Casual, (previous versions being at Vertexlist in 2005 and Pierogi in 2006, with a final postcard edition at Pierogi in 2011). The “Twin Twin” series started as a response to 9/11 – Matt was fascinated by how he kept seeing the twin towers everywhere in everything from parallel scratches on a boy’s knee to paired piles of boxes. This collection, that appeared to be a crazy-hoarder accumulation of objects, revealed itself to be a communal state of mind. By its third iteration at Big &Small/Causal, Matt asked artists “I want work repurposed for this show, work that would mean something else in any other context, and only in this one would remind us of 9-11. I’m not asking you to make a piece for the show, but to find a piece for the show from your own body of work.   If you find you have produced work in the last eight years that you feel was influenced by 9-11, or if you see in a work of yours the shadowy image of the towers themselves for reasons you cannot fathom at all, I hope you will consider sharing that work with us for the weekend.”

My space was small, out of the way, and it was its’ first show. I was uneasy as more and more artists responded. He was delighted and revealed to me his curatorial maxim: “Trust artists”. I observed this trust in action, and the sense of play, commitment and creativity it ignited with every conversation and interaction over the period of that show. Amazingly, all that effort was for three short days, and Matt remarked that it meant we got through both the opening high and post-show low all within one weekend. Matt the artist and Matt the friend and collaborator are inextricably inter-twined.

The poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory”, by W B Yeats, has helped me to organize my thoughts about Matt. It starts:

Now that we’re almost settled in our house
I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us

We’ve never been more settled in our houses, and never more conscious of the loss of our communal lives with their groups and gatherings that stimulate and sustain us. Although we’d been preparing for years, it seemed a particularly hard time to lose Matt. In his December 26 article “The Year Without Art”, Thomas Micchelli, who’s written several brilliant pieces on Matt’s work, nails it: “The breadth of Matt’s practice mirrors the vacuum exposed by his death — the synapses left unfired, the loose ends left to dangle, the hole in kinship’s fabric.” Kinship is key. Matt was above all an artist for his fellow artists and wider circle of friends, students, mentees and others he encountered. He believed in community and his work was so much about engaging, nurturing, playing with, and giving back. His shows were intimate and specific, and in being so, touched on huge universal questions such as the nature of friendship, the role of story-telling, masculinity, mastery, play, suffering, love…

Back to Yeats:

What other could so well have counselled us
As he that practiced or that understood
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone?
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone.

This is both true and completely untrue of Matt, and I laughed thinking of it. His 2009 show with Paul Rhoads at LIU Gallery, Brooklyn “A Moon Will Come Which all Shall Cry” was one of my favorites of all time. For it, Matt revealed his and Paul’s childhood art movement, Clumpism, which might be summed up as a polymath’s pragmatic acceptance of imperfection. The show itself was a layered meditation/provocation/conversation on aesthetics and complex friendship – a kind of joust. “At 20, I suspected something was wrong and Clumpism was my answer. At 50, I know something is wrong and Clumpism is again my answer. The problem is that half a lifetime later, I no longer believe in answers. The roads to the freed man are paved with sad interventions.”

The pun on their names, Rhoads and Freedman is classic, but pun or no, Matt was a freed man in that nothing stopped him from creating what he willed. Although it absolutely wasn’t about doing it technically perfectly, the last repeat of the refrain in Yeats’ poem seems just right:

“Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.”

And the scope of that is what we hope to show in this rolling memorial.

I’ll leave the last words, also from “The Importance of Being Clumpist”, to Matt

Who said this? Hippocrates?

Ars longa
vita brevis
occasio praeceps
experimentum periculosum
iudicium difficile

Art is long
life is short
opportunity fleeting
experiment dangerous
judgement difficult
I say:
tantum amicitia est eternus
only friendship is eternal

Supping with Matt and Jude

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory by William Butler Yeats

Now that we’re almost settled in our house
I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower,
And having talked to some late hour
Climb up the narrow winding stairs to bed:
Discoverers of forgotten truth
Or mere companions of my youth,
All, all are in my thoughts to-night being dead.

Always we’d have the new friend meet the old
And we are hurt if either friend seem cold,
And there is salt to lengthen out the smart
In the affections of our heart,
And quarrels are blown up upon that head;
But not a friend that I would bring
This night can set us quarrelling,
For all that come into my mind are dead.

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind.
Though courteous to the worst; much falling he
Brooded upon sanctity
Till all his Greek and Latin learning seemed
A long blast upon the horn that brought
A little nearer to his thought
A measureless consummation that he dreamed.

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
Passionate and simple like his heart.

And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars incline
By opposition, square and trine;
Having grown sluggish and contemplative.

They were my close companions many a year.
A portion of my mind and life, as it were,
And now their breathless faces seem to look
Out of some old picture-book;
I am accustomed to their lack of breath,
But not that my dear friend’s dear son,
Our Sidney and our perfect man,
Could share in that discourtesy of death.

For all things the delighted eye now sees
Were loved by him: the old storm-broken trees
That cast their shadows upon road and bridge;
The tower set on the stream’s edge;
The ford where drinking cattle make a stir
Nightly, and startled by that sound
The water-hen must change her ground;
He might have been your heartiest welcomer.

When with the Galway foxhounds he would ride
From Castle Taylor to the Roxborough side
Or Esserkelly plain, few kept his pace;
At Mooneen he had leaped a place
So perilous that half the astonished meet
Had shut their eyes; and where was it
He rode a race without a bit?
And yet his mind outran the horses’ feet.

We dreamed that a great painter had been born
To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,
To that stern colour and that delicate line
That are our secret discipline
Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And yet he had the intensity
To have published all to be a world’s delight.

What other could so well have counselled us
In all lovely intricacies of a house
As he that practised or that understood
All work in metal or in wood,
In moulded plaster or in carven stone?
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone.

Some burn damp faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?

I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.