Gordon Matta-Clark, Clockshower, 1973, 13:50 min, color, silent, 16 mm film. In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Humphrey Street Splitting, 1974.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Fresh Kill, 1972, 12:56 min, color, sound, 16 mm film. This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Camera: Burt Spielvogel, Rudy Burkhardt. Producer: Holly Solomon, Burt Spielvogel.
Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting, 1974.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, Installation, Centre Pompidou, Airs de Paris, 2007.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo, 1974, Building fragments, three sections, Overall: 69" x 25'7" x 10", The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest Fund, and the Enid A. Haupt Fund, 2004; copyright Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Digital Image copyright The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Food, 1971. Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. |
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The Pulitzer
Foundation for the Arts
3716 Washington Boulevard
St. Louis
314.754.1850
Urban Alchemy /
Gordon Matta-Clark
October 30, 2009-June 5, 2010
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He carved out sections of buildings with a power saw in order to reveal their hidden construction, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition. He spoke of his work as an activity that attempted “to transform place into a state of mind by opening walls.” When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained. He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments, known as "cuts." They include a section of an apartment floor (Bronx Floors: Double Doors), three parts of a house near Love Canal (Bingo), a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City (Pier In/Out), and the rooftop corners of a house in New Jersey (Splitting: Four Corners). For this exhibition, the Pulitzer is borrowing these very cuts from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and from the private collection of Thomas and John Solomon. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York, are also lending nearly fifty photographs, while the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, is providing numerous works on paper, including eleven drawings. Two of Matta-Clark’s films, Fire Child and Conical Intersect, is also shown, offering a means to understand better the performance aspect of his art.
The placement of Matta-Clark’s work in the exhibition spaces designed by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer encourages new ways of looking at art, architecture, and the urban environment. Ando’s pristine building not only heightens the roughness of Matta-Clark’s cuts, but it also recalls the artist’s lost interventions. Both he and Ando sought to break the visual and metaphorical boundaries normally associated with the architectural “box” by allowing light to penetrate spaces in unexpected ways.
Reminiscent of an alchemist, Matta-Clark pursued the transmutation of a discarded object into something filled with “hope and fantasy.” He was deeply concerned with the abandonment of buildings and the fate of urban communities. He became socially and politically active during the 1970s and wrote that he focused on buildings, “for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures. Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with languages and others with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change.”
The exhibition programming connects the artist’s social activism to present-day St. Louis. The Pulitzer, in collaboration with Washington University's George Warren Brown School of Social Work, is organizing programs that build upon Matta-Clark’s desire to imbue abandoned objects, buildings, and parcels of land with new meaning. The Pulitzer hopes to help carry Matta-Clark’s legacy into the 21st century and to inspire a new generation of social activism through creative acts. An interactive web presence reflects this community-driven programming at mattaclark.pulitzerarts
.org/transformation. A web catalogue corresponds with the exhibition at mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org.
Matta-Clark (June 22, 1943-August 27, 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his "building cuts," a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls.
Both of Matta-Clark's parents were artists: the American Anne Clark and the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, artist of Basque, French and Spanish descent. His twin brother Sebastian was also an artist, who committed suicide in 1976.
He studied architecture at Cornell University, but did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as “Anarchitecture.” At the time of Matta-Clark's tenure there, Cornell's architecture program was guided in part by Colin Rowe, a preeminent architectural theorist of modernism. His vision of modernism later influenced much of Matta-Clark's own work in its relation to modernist practice and theory. He also spent a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and was in Paris during the student strikes of May 1968. It was in Paris that he became aware of the French deconstructionist philosophers and Guy Debord and the Situationists. These cultural and political radicals developed the concept of détournement, or "the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble." Such concepts would later inform his work. He is most famous for works that radically altered existing structures. His "building cuts" (in which, for example, a house is cut in half vertically) alter the perception of the building and its surrounding environment.
Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his "building cuts."
Matta-Clark also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture). He demonstrates that the theory of entropy applies to language as well as to the physical world, and that language is not a neutral tool but a carrier for society's values and a vehicle for ideology.
"An Ark Kit Puncture, Anarchy Torture, An Arctic Lecture, An Orchid Texture, An Art Collector …"
In February, 1969, the "Earth Art" show, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the invitation of Tom Leavitt, was realized at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Sharp then encouraged Gordon Matta-Clark to move to New York City where Sharp continued to introduce him to members of the New York art world. Matta-Clark's work, Museum, at Klaus Kertess' Bykert Gallery, was listed and illustrated on pages 4-5 of Avalanche 1, Fall 1970.
In the early 1970s as part of the Anarchitecture group, Matta-Clark was interested in the idea of entropy, metamorphic gaps, and leftover / ambiguous space. Fake Estates was a project engaged with the issue of land ownership and the myth of the American dream — that everyone could become "landed gentry" by owning property. Matta-Clark "buys" into this dream by purchasing 15 leftover and unwanted properties in Manhattan for $25-$75 a plot. Ironically, these "estates" were unusable or unaccessible for development, and so his ability to capitalize on the land, and thus his ownership of them, existed virtually only on paper.
In 1971 Matta-Clark cofounded Food, in SoHo, New York, with Carol Goodden, a restaurant managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at Food helped delineate how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan. The first of its kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists and was a central meeting-place for groups such as the Philip Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, and the dancers of Grand Union. He ran Food til 1973.
In 1974, he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, and moving the resulting walls to Artpark, in his work Bingo.
For the Biennale de Paris in 1975, he made the piece titled Conical Intersect by cutting a large cone-shaped hole through two townhouses dating from the 17th century in the market district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to construct the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou.
Matta-Clark died from pancreatic cancer on August 27, 1978.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Pier In / Out, 1973, photograph, 8 x 10". In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Pier In / Out, 1973, photograph, 8 x 10". In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof. |
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