The Cutting-Edge Art of Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark was the James Dean of postwar American art. Like Dean, he was a charismatic rebel who upended conventional notions about his craft, inspired countless younger artists, died at an early age, and left cult-like legions of fans who mourn his loss to this day. Matta-Clark’s audacious hybridization and redefinition of three mediums—architecture, sculpture, and painting—opened new modes of contemporary expression just as decisively as the maverick actor had done.

Much in the same way that Dean’s subversive remake of Hollywood stardom during the mid-1950s drew on his deepest psychological conflicts, two decades later Matta-Clark cut through derelict buildings with chainsaws to reveal their long-hidden interiors. He likewise saw the spray-painted graffiti that were appearing all over New York City not as vandalism but as a means for common people to reclaim their civic identity, and his arresting super-long photos of “tagged” subway cars presented them as a new kind of kinetic pop sculpture. This interest anticipated by several years the emergence of artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who began as outlaw taggers but became stars of the 1980s art scene after being discovered by savvy dealers, as well as Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film Wild Style, the first cinematic treatment of the downtown graffiti and hip-hop culture. In all, Matta-Clark sought to expose the failures of a rich but misdirected society that during the Vietnam War let its public responsibilities erode, which gave his seemingly destructive approach a sharply political edge.

Many reasons for this master troublemaker’s continuing grip on the artistic imagination are evident in the Bronx Museum of Art’s exhibition “Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect,” which takes its subtitle from the subject’s own coinage for his contrarian occupation. Insightfully organized by the museum’s curatorial director, Antonio Sergio Bessa, and Jessamyn Fiore, co-director of the Matta-Clark Estate (along with her mother, Jane Crawford, the artist’s widow), the retrospective fully conveys the conceptual grandeur and raw physicality of Matta-Clark’s art, despite the fact that his most famous site-specific works no longer exist. Termed “building cuts,” those projects can only be revisited through photographs, videos, drawings, and fragmentary details, all of which are on view here.

By partially dismantling large-scale structures to make something entirely new, Matta-Clark defined an urban equivalent of Land Art, the massive earthwork installations created in remote settings during the 1960s and 1970s by Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Richard Long, and, above all, Robert Smithson, best remembered for his Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. (Smithson, who hired Matta-Clark as an installation assistant for the Cornell University art museum’s landmark 1969 “Earth Art” exhibition, was killed in a plane crash while scouting sites for an earthwork in Texas at thirty-five, the same age at which his protégé would die.)

Never was Matta-Clark’s genius more dramatically demonstrated than in Day’s End (1975), his unsanctioned appropriation of Manhattan’s abandoned Pier 52 on the Hudson River, which he stealthily turned into what he called a “sun-and-water temple.” This he accomplished by burn-cutting through the corrugated metal walls of the vast, disused maritime cargo terminal to create a series of painstakingly plotted, curved openings through which sunlight would stream to form veritable sculptures that had a cosmic aura that, doubtless, would have impressed the druids of Stonehenge. 

Matta-Clark was a son of the Chilean Surrealist artist Roberto Matta and the American painter Anne Clark. Matta had studied architecture and worked as a draftsman in the Paris atelier of Le Corbusier from 1935 to 1937. Even if one resists the temptations of psychobiography, it is difficult not to see an oedipal element in Matta-Clark’s vocational path. A few months after Gordon and his twin brother, Sebastian, were born in New York in 1943, Matta abandoned his wife and sons, who thereafter led what has blandly been called a peripatetic existence until, five years later, Clark remarried and resettled in Manhattan, with the film critic Hollis Alpert. Despite evidence to the contrary, Matta insisted that he barely saw his sons while they were growing up; in any event, it cannot have been a happy relationship. (Sebastian committed suicide in 1976 when he jumped from a window in Gordon’s SoHo loft studio.)

Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell, where he received his degree during the cataclysmic spring of 1968 and promptly rejected routine applications of what he’d learned there. He was especially disdainful of his father’s erstwhile employer, despite Le Corbusier being the twentieth century’s most influential master-builder. In a 1973 letter about a proposed “Anarchitecture” exhibition, he turned one of Le Corbusier’s catchphrases on its head by suggesting that the show include “AN [sic] MACHINE FOR NOT LIVING IN WITH AN EXTRACT FROM CORBUSIER’S VERSO UN ARCHITEC [Vers une architecture] SHOWING THE VIRGIN MACHINE HE WANTS US ALL TO LIVE IN.” Although there was already a nascent revolt among Postmodernist architects who opposed Le Corbusier’s mechanistic aesthetic, Matta-Clark’s family history gave his contempt a more personal edge.       

Within a very few years, he single-handedly established a new genre of environmental art, in which he used abandoned buildings as raw material and radically transformed them into stunning found sculptures. A prime example was Splitting: Four Corners (1974), in which he took an unoccupied wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, and made a two-story-high vertical incision from the roof to its raised masonry foundation, which caused the rear half to lean back slightly, although the whole did not collapse.

Despite distancing himself from the architectural mainstream, Matta-Clark kept an eye on what the leading avant-garde figures were up to, including Louis Kahn, whose concept of “wrapping ruins around buildings” was echoed by the artist. Clearly, the gigantic oculi that Kahn employed in contemporaneous buildings such as his Philips Exeter Academy Library of 1965–1972 in Exeter, New Hampshire, must have been known to the anarchitect, who made similar voids in several of his deconstructions.

Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect of 1974 in Paris aligned two circles of different sizes that he cut into parallel walls of a building being torn down next to the new Pompidou Center’s construction site. Those paired Kahnian apertures defined a cone-like volume of light that seemed to hover in mid-air while the half-wrecked relic briefly stood. This widely-publicized project resonated among experimental-minded architects, most notably Frank Gehry, who has often cited the huge impact that Matta-Clark’s work had on his own sense of how beautiful a building could be if its structural components were not concealed.

The Cutting-Edge Art of Matta-Clark. By Martin Filler. The New York Review of Books,  January 16, 2018.

The book :

Gordon Matta-Clark : Anarchitect by  Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore.

Yale University Press, 2017. In association with The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Matta-Clark knew how buildings were made. In the late sixties, he’d returned home to New York City from Cornell University, where he’d gotten an undergraduate degree in architecture. But he wasn’t interested in erecting more modernist monoliths. The buildings New York already had were crumbling, along with its infrastructure, and the city had neither the money nor the will to fix them. Matta-Clark knew firsthand the enormous cost of this neglect; his cousin died in 1973 when the Broadway building he lived in collapsed. In words that remain chillingly prescient, Matta-Clark identified the South Bronx as a neighborhood “where the city is just waiting for the social and physical condition to deteriorate to such a point that the borough can redevelop the whole area into the industrial park they really want.”

His cuts through buildings were an intervention, an act of careful destruction, shot through with hope. He suggested that the deteriorating tenements were not a fact or a given; that they could be something else, and better. For Matta-Clark, architecture meant more than buildings—it represented the social structure of the city, including the way certain people were pushed to the margins and ignored. “In spite of no longer working as an architect, I continue to focus my attention on buildings, for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures,” he wrote in 1975. “Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with language and others do with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change.”

(….)

The show begins in the Bronx Museum’s lobby café, where a display case and film introduce Food, perhaps the project for which Matta-Clark is best known. Food was a fully operational restaurant in SoHo, founded by Matta-Clark and his partner Carol Goodden in 1971. Run in collaboration with several other artists, the place drew in people of all kinds for inexpensive, informal, creative meals. Special Sunday menus were curated by artists, including Donald Judd. As art historian Cara M. Jordan notes in the Bronx Museum catalogue, Matta-Clark’s collaborators on Food did not view it as a work of art, but he did. Indeed, even as a functioning restaurant, it embodied themes that would be crucial throughout Matta-Clark’s career: the possibilities of transformation (of which cooking is a kind), collaboration and exchange with members of a non-art community, and reimagining the substance of everyday life as artistic material.

That last idea is the master key to Matta-Clark’s work; it’s the foundation upon which everything is built. In the Bronx Museum’s first large gallery, photographs from the Bronx Floors series and one surviving sculpture—a squat, L-shaped chunk of floor whose blue linoleum is still surprisingly vibrant—occupy the center of the room, surrounded by photographs of graffiti. Matta-Clark took these pictures in the early 1970s, before graffiti culture became explosively popular in the following decade. The bulk of the photographs are close-ups of tagged walls, without any identifying building information in the frame. Hung around the gallery’s perimeter, they launch the viewer into a mysterious world of words that supplies the artworks’ titles: “Pain I is Pain II” (1973), “War 222” (1973), “Sexy” (1973).

(…)

Matta-Clark dreamt big but always returned to the possibilities of individual agency. The cuts were meant to create visions of new openings, but they were perhaps too metaphorical to inspire real action. Before he died, Matta-Clark began thinking about how he might do that more directly. One of his ideas was to create an organization (and artwork) called the Resource Center and Environmental Youth Program for Loisaida. The center would consist of a space housing donated and salvaged materials and equipment for local community groups. The youth program would train local children and teenagers to manage the center, renovate buildings, and initiate other environmental improvement projects in the neighborhood. In his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, on view at the Bronx Museum, he called the training program “an informal school-of-the-streets.”

How Gordon Matta-Clark Saw the City. By Jillian Steinhauer. The New Republic, February 5 , 2018

“In 1971, when many people were moving out of the Bronx amid the chaos and destruction, a group of local activists thought that culture could turn things around,” according to Sergio Bessa, Director of Curatorial Programs at the Bronx Museum, in reference to the museum’s conception. “In the following year, Gordon starts to visit the surrounding area and begins his pivotal series of works Bronx Floors. I was personally very inspired by this symmetry, and by the fact that both Gordon and the Bronx Museum's founders did not shy away from the situation.”

While Matta-Clark took his “architectural subversions” across the U.S. and, later, to Europe, this particular exhibition focuses on Matta-Clark’s direct involvement with New York City. “His concerns were not merely aesthetic or architectural but political,” said Jessamyn Fiore, who co-curated the show. “His practice drew attention to a failure in contemporary architecture and urban planning, a failure of the city to address the needs and everyday reality of the people who lived here. The questions he asked and potential solutions he proposed are still relevant to today.”

“He’s often categorized as this vigilante, this criminal, this rebel, but in fact, he really tried to get permits to do all of his work,” says Joan Kee, professor of art history at the University of Michigan, explaining that, unlike his enfant terrible reputation, he really did hope to work within the system to improve it.

 “He challenged this idea of property being tied exclusively to monetary or exchange value,” said Kee, who also points out how Matta-Clark’s work has been a great inspiration to her students, especially those from Detroit.

 “They look at him as almost a template in imagining what we can do with the buildings and the resources we have now,” she explained. “The cuttings that he did touch a nerve for artists who were thinking of ways to put work around established structures.”

New York Needs Gordon Matta-Clark Now More Than Ever. By  Laura Feinstein. CityLab ,  February  22, 2018

On view at Jeu de Paume in Paris, Anarchitect — a portmanteau of “anarchy” and “architect” — is an exhilarating exhibition of Gordon Matta-Clark’s post-minimal photography, photo-collage, film, and printmaking. Though Matta-Clark — who was, for better or worse, a key player in New York’s 1960s SoHo art scene — died of cancer in 1978, at the age of 35, I found the exhibit riveting and relevant to today’s anti-immigration political atmosphere, especially when read as a critique of the “build the wall” border security sentiment currently plaguing the US.

Border walls were anathema to Matta-Clark, an artist best known for making monumental cuts, holes, apertures, and excisions into the walls of derelict buildings in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, and abroad. Indeed, in 1976 he proposed making an art hole in the Berlin Wall. In light of Trump’s Mexican border-wall proposal, Matta-Clark’s artistic holes have a gleam of renewed symbolism and allegory about them. Thus even decades after his death, Matta-Clarke’s avant-garde art interventions have not fallen into the hole of dry academic intellectualism; they remain in vital dialogue with today’s social, economic, and political realities; and this makes Matta-Clark an artist worth rhapsodizing over.

Matta-Clark’s iconic deconstruction practice of directly hacking into hard walls was a sophisticated negotiation of physical boundaries that insisted on the primacy of physical force tied to the artistic imagination. This negotiation is documented in some of the films featured in the exhibition, as well as in numerous books on his work. But beyond his socio-political street work, which includes his less interesting hand-painted photographs of early graffiti, Matta-Clark’s site-specific, abstract geometric cut-aways evoke (and subvert) much 20th century art historical discourse.

This is most obvious in the majestic cut he made at New York City’s Pier 52 in 1975, called “Days End”, with a flat arch shape that could be right out of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism playbook. Sited in the abandoned Pier 52, a monumental former industrial building on the Hudson River, across from a section of the collapsed West Side Highway, “Day’s End” was Matta-Clark’s most ambitious site-specific work in New York City and a thing of gritty grandeur. By slicing broad grooves in the pier’s floors and ceiling, Matta-Clark turned the abject abandoned building — previously a gay sex enclave and haven for prostitution and drugs — into a light-shifting post-industrial site of majesty.

Though the main puncture is the shape of a tilted slice of watermelon, the scale of the hole, and the quality of light entering it, had the impact of a visit to the Pantheon in Rome. While he envisioned the site to be experienced throughout the different seasons, the project was short-lived and closed to the public shortly after its unveiling. Matta-Clark undertook cutting the “Day’s End” project without filing for permission, and while New York City officials did not notice his activity during the artwork’s creation, priggish police showed up at the opening after reading about it in a newspaper. A police investigation opened just as Matta-Clark went to France; and he stayed abroad while his lawyer tried to convince the bemused authorities that “Day’s End” was art, not maladroit vandalism. Eventually the pending charge against Matta-Clark was dropped and that was the end of “Day’s End.”

Anarchitect debuted last year at the Bronx Museum, which placed a rightful emphasis on the cuts Matta-Clark made into abandoned tenements in the Bronx, such as “Bronx Floor: Boston Road” (1972), part of his “Bronx Floors: Thresholes” (1972) series. But the exhibit at Jeu de Paume emphasizes the Parisian elements of the artist’s life and work, starting with the first meeting of his parents, American painter Anne Clark and Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, at a Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938. It also highlights his studies of French Literature at the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 1963, as well as his underground explorations of the Paris Catacombs and other sites in Paris, and peaks with what I consider Matta-Clark’s majestic masterpiece: the ambitious and comical “Conical Intersect” (1975) — a massive work he made for the Paris Biennale in 1975.

The work consisted of a cone hollowed out of two derelict seventeenth-century buildings in the city’s Les Halles – Plateau Beaubourg area, next to the site where the high-tech structure of the future Centre Georges Pompidou was rising amid medieval and pre-revolutionary buildings. Les Halles, known as the ventre de Paris (belly of Paris), had been the city’s marketplace since the Middle Ages.  As Gerry Hovagimyan (aka G.H. Hovagimyan), Matta-Clark’s assistant at the time, told me, the starting point for the conical holes is outside the building, the angle of the central axis being something like 45 degrees. At the points of intersection, between the walls, floors, and ceiling, it produces ellipses, and the end result resembles an oculus.

Shaped like twisted cones, the cuts in this work were inspired by Anthony McCall’s 1973 film, Line Describing a Cone. They also drew on the art world’s general fascination with the literal and figurative artistic voyeurism exposed by Marcel Duchamp (Matta-Clark’s godfather) in his peep show installation “Étant donnés” (1946–1966), as well as a broad interest in the history of dioramas as a space of transformation.

Such circular openings are typically meditative passageways to reverie. The cone shape of “Conical Intersect” might even be said to have functioned like a symbolic lens looking down from the future Centre Georges Pompidou, through the past derelict cut-up edifices, and opening up onto the present Parisian street scene. Hovagimyan tells me that Matta-Clark always wanted to make sure that his cuts were as precise as he could make them, but part of what was important about the artwork was the spectacle of the hard work itself. There was an elevated street performance component to “Conical Intersect”, as Matta-Clark considered the loud physical actions of cutting open walls part of a performative piece, not just a means towards a sculptural-architectural end.

Yet the fevered brilliance of Matta-Clark’s photo-collages of “Conical Intersect” still allow the viewer to sink into the skin of the old buildings. These buoyant photo-collages show, with phenomenal transparency, a number of views from within the dissected buildings, and are themselves jaunty comments on conventionally strict architectural perspective systems. They are to be praised for capturing the complexity of Matta-Clark’s work with such spry sensitivity while engaging us in a radical rethinking of the status, history, and purpose of city building walls and their rapport with diversely populated streets – something along the lines of the earlier décollage works of Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains. Like Matta-Clark’s “Conical Intersect,” their affiches lacérées displayed a basic theoretical concept suggestive of the political art positions of the Situationist International movement, which challenged the boundaries between everyday street life and high art.

Gargantuan actions defined Matta-Clark’s artistic process, yet the poetic achievement of “Conical Intersect” lay in its intricate combination of monumental scale with intense interior exposure. In addition to undermining the homogeneity and repetitiveness that characterizes so much neo-modernist architecture, Matta-Clark’s provocations punch holes in the postmodern city’s monoculture, helping us to think about what is proper(ty) and what is improper.

40 Years After His Death, Gordon Matta-Clark Takes on New Relevance. By Joseph Nechvatal. Hyperallergic , September 4, 2018

Soapbox: Gordon Matta-Clark : A Collection of Lectures on Gordon Matta-Clark.  By

Anthony Morey. Archinect , June 6 , 2018

Particularly interesting :

In "Unbuilding Gender," Jack Halberstam extends the ideas of unbuilding and creative destruction that characterize Gordon Matta-Clark's work to develop a queer concept of anarchitecture focused on the trans* body. 

'The form of embodiment that, in the 20th and 21th centuries, we have come to call transgender is not simply a gender switching, a wrong body replaced by a right body, a shift in morphology. Trans* embodiment, rather, is the visual confirmation that all bodies are uncomfortable and wrong-ish, situated as they are within confining grammars of sense and security. 1 The wrong body — an appellation mostly used in the 1980s for people who have felt themselves to be out of place or out of time — now comes not to claim rightness but to dismantle the system that metes out rightness and wrongness according to the dictates of various social orders. Trans* bodies, in other words, function not simply to provide an image of the non-normative against which normative bodies can be discerned, but rather as bodies that are fragmentary and internally contradictory; bodies that remap gender and its relations to race, place, class, and sexuality; bodies that are in pain; bodies that sound different from how they look; bodies that represent palimpsestic identities or a play of surfaces; bodies that must be split open and reorganized, opened up to chance and random signification. And because it is not a matter of replacing wrong with right, we require different visual, aural, and haptic codes and systems that can figure the experience of being in such bodies. After all, the trans* variant body is not so easy to represent, and the visual frames that establish such representation tend either to reveal sites of contradiction upon the gender-variant body (through nakedness perhaps, which risks sensationalizing) or to mediate other kinds of exposure, violent, intrusive, or otherwise.'

 Places Journal , October 2018