Airborne abstraction: embracing indeterminacy and chance, Jackie Matisse sends her abstract forms aloft on kites. Painted kite tails, assemblages, photo and film documentation, and an electronic simulacrum of kite-flying were recently on view in a New York gallery

On her way by taxi to the airport in New York in 1962, Jackie Matisse saw an object in the sky that changed her life--a kite flying over Harlem. She says she "saw a line drawn in the sky," inspiring her to use the heights as a canvas. She had not made art before, and she was 32, married, with three children. Her third had been born that very year and she would have one more. The escape idea in kite flying seems inviting when linked to a story of domestic confinement, and Matisse makes this connection herself. While we talked in April of this year about her show, "Art Volant," at Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts, she said, "I was trying to free myself from the babies." She had also been "looking for a personal mode of expression." To arrive at this, she had to escape from a past a lot weightier than her immediate married life--a suppressive family history as a granddaughter of the great Henri Matisse. Henri's son, Pierre, the well known New York art dealer, was her father. He had made an escape of his own--to the United States--but it was understood by his three children, of whom Jackie was the eldest and only girl, that creating art ambitiously, in the modernist tradition, at least, would not please him. If they did anything in art, it would have to be peripheral or marginal somehow.

And found ideally (perhaps) by a happy accident, like seeing a kite flying high overhead from a moving vehicle in transit back home to France, where personal freedom was uncertain. Around that time, she came across a tiny box made in Thailand containing a "snake" kite tail 22 feet long. Unfurling it in the wind, she was entranced by its color and unpredictable movement. In her career with kites, Jackie Matisse has made them in part for the pleasure of flying them--the sense of movement and independence it gives her. She has written of the "push and pull on the wind," the play of "hide and seek with the clouds," the sense of "my hand growing longer and longer until I feel I am somehow in touch with the immensity into and out of which all things come and go." But she has treated the tails as seriously as any modernist, outwitting inner family restraints, it could be said, painting them with abstract shapes in vibrant colors, often acrylics, and hanging the tall narrow fabric strips in galleries to be viewed as paintings. At Zone: Chelsea, a group of nine hung loosely around a gallery pillar, and three others made of crepe paper, called "Indoor Kite Machines," were loops hung on rollers powered by small electric motors (visible up top). As the strips turned, they slowly revealed their shapes and colors en mouvement perpetuel.

Matisse wants everything to move. Where things appear fixed in place, as with her delicately beautiful wire box-frame constructions in which small mixed-medium shapes are suspended on practically invisible filaments fastened at the top and bottom, some slight movement or rotation can be detected if you wait and watch. The shapes consist of brightly-colored rescued detritus--bits of painted paper or spinnaker cloth, scraps of foil, wood, newsprint and feathers. In some, I see birds or imaginary avian beings. Their skeletal cages are mere hanging devices, suggesting that whatever is within them is really free. Eight of these structures are titled "Magic Hair." Here the objects are hung by a single strand of human hair. I may have been looking at a hair of my own. In 1981 while I was visiting Matisse's mother Teeny Duchamp (they were living in the same town south of Paris), Jackie asked me for nine hairs when I stopped by her studio. I had no idea what she wanted them for and I never asked.

By then Matisse had had a half dozen exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. of her kites, both underwater and aerial ones, and over a dozen appearances here and abroad in group shows. Between 1959 and 1968, she had assisted her stepfather Marcel Duchamp (whom Teeny, an American, had married in 1954, following her divorce from Pierre Matisse) in creating about 150 editions of his Boite-en-Valise (portable museum), assembling the pieces according to his model. If Matisse's Matisse heritage seemed proscriptive, her mother's second husband was liberating and bracing, as he was for many artists. It was during the time she worked with him that she had her kite vision and saw a limitless palette in the sky. She says Duchamp helped her "find kites because of his tolerant gaze." His influence can be seen in her interwoven themes of unprogrammed movement and the supremacy of chance.

Like her Harlem sighting in 1962 when she adopted virtually a "found object," another accident in 1979, when one of her kites fell into the sea, gave Matisse the idea of launching her kite forms in the aqueous element. One happy result of this was on view at Zone: Chelsea in ten "New York Glass Bottles." Filled with purified water, a dye sometimes added, they are receptacles for miniaturized kite tails. The tiny streamers are made of Tyvek, a fibrous, water-resistant paper, along with sailcloth, India ink, colored gels and pieces of metal. Some of the bottles are equipped with external magnets by which a viewer can manipulate the trapped shapes. A similar piece comprises 17 bottles containing ribbon-like forms made of wire and sailcloth painted in acrylics.