Gordon Matta-Clark

Description

After studying architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark developed more interest in buildings about to be destroyed than in the ones about to be built, as most architects would. He first forced his way into abandoned apartment buildings in the Bronx, and using a chain saw, would act as an architecture pirate, cutting pieces of walls and floors, only to leave behind the remains of what once was architecture. From pieces of walls his work shifted in 1974 to the scale of a whole suburban house. "Splitting", probably his most popular work, was made by cutting a vertical line through the entire width of the house, and transforming the cut into a yawn, after lowering the foundations on both sides of the house. Erasing the boundaries between architecture, sculpture, and even drawing (his cuts have often been referred to as drawings in space), his building-cuts can also be understood as a social critique of the standardized suburban architecture that flourished during the postwar decades. This monograph opens with Thomas Crow's survey text on the artist. Divided into four chapters plus an epilogue, this illustrated essay provides insight into the career of the artist, from his childhood spent between New York and Paris, to his premature death in 1978 at the age of 35. This essays spans the multi-faceted practice of Gordon Matta-Clark, with a particular emphasis on his building-cuts, the group of works he is most renowned for and that compose the most important part of his career. Christian Kravagna's essay analyses the different roles played by photography and films in Matta-Clark's work. Since his building-cuts were all ephemeral works done on buildings shortly before their destruction, Matta-Clark started to use photography and film as a way to document his actions. But soon photography and film played a much more complex role, and became works of art in their own right. Judith Russi Kirshner's essay analyzes Matta-Clark's notion of community, ranging from the restaurant "Food" that he opened in 1971 in Soho, to the workshop/artists spaces at 98 and 112 Greene Street where he played a key role in their development, to the creation of the Anarchitecture group - a group of artists and architects that proposed alternative and often political and utopian architecture and environment projects - to his "Fresh Air" piece - a cart with oxygen masks he displayed in Wall Street, free for the passers-by to use. Matta-Clark's work goes much beyond the building-cuts he is most famous for, and is strongly rooted in a notion of social community. This book also includes a "Documents" section, composed of original interviews, articles, and documents compiled by editor Corinne Diserens. Several interviews, some of them never published before, allow the reader to understand more fully, and through Matta-Clark's own voice, the more pragmatic, technical and physical dimensions related to the creation of his building-cuts. Some articles and essays of reference, most of them published in the 1970s and today out of print, are also republished and offer a unique critical background and context to his work.

Corinne Diserens is a freelance curator and artistic adviser for the Association Carta Blanca Editions, Marseille. She recently curated the Marcel Broodthaers exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, co-curated with Marianne Brouwer the Dan Graham retrospective, and with Okwui Enwezor, David Goldblatt "51 years" exhibition. For the Sao Paulo Biennale, she invited the artists Jean-Luc Moulene and Anri Sala, and they published Vista cansada with the Brasilian newspaper Valor. Diserens was curator at the IVAM (Valencia) from 1989 to 1993, where she organized among others the traveling retrospectives of Eva Hesse and of Gordon Matta-Clark, as well as, with the Estate GMC, Jane Crawford and Bob Fiore, the restoration of Matta-Clark films. From 1996 to 1999, she directed the Musees de Marseille where she notably organized the exhibitions of Dieter Roth, Oscar Schlemmer, Trisha Brown, Lygia Clark, and 50 especes d'espaces. Diserens has organized numerous cinema-video programs for various institutions. Thomas Crow is Director of the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, and Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. He was previously Robert Lehman Professor of Art History at Yale University and Chair of History of Art at the University of Sussex in the UK. His first book, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, appeared in 1985 and won a number of awards. He has since published on French painting of the Revolutionary period (Emulation, 1995) and on the art of the later twentieth century (The Rise of the Sixties, 1996, and Modern Art in the Common Culture, 1996). His latest book, The Intelligence of Art, addresses the critical and historical understanding of art objects. His work has been translated into French, German, and Spanish. A contributing editor of Artforum, he writes frequently on contemporary art and cultural issues. Christian Kravagna is an art historian and critic based in Vienna. He has edited several books on contemporary art and theory, among them Privileg Blick: Kritik der visuellen Kultur (1997); Agenda: Perspektiven kritischer Kunst (2000) and The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique (2001). Judith Russi Kirshner is Dean of the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1995, where she also served as Director of the School of Art and Design. A professor of art history, Kirshner previously served as Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from 1976 to 1980, at The Terra Museum of American Art from 1985 to 1987, and in the Art History Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kirshner, who lectures frequently on contemporary art and is a member of the Cultural Affairs Advisory Board of the City of Chicago as well as an advisory board member of numerous national and Chicago cultural organizations, is a critic and curator. She has served on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts since 1980. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1978, Kirshner curated Matta-Clark's last public project, Circus on the Caribbean.

"Stunning... Impressive monograph."-Art Review "Whether in Paris beside the Pompidou, in an office block in Antwerp or a wharf building by the Hudson River in New York, what [Matta-Clark] did is irrecoverable - a matter now of images (photographs and films), contemporary accounts and current reminiscences. And in this respect, the Phaidon book is very valuable. In the main essay, Thomas Crow gives a lucid, informative account of Matta-Clark's art and times, but it is the documents towards the end of the book - reprints of articles, recollections by surviving colleagues and friends, and above all several interviews with Matta-Clark himself, in which he is very articulate about his motives and tactics - that really bring his enterprise alive."-Architects' Journal "Crow's text... while vividly reanimating the freewheeling 1970s... mostly works to brush off the brick-dust of history that has covered [Matta-Clark]... The book has an air of completeness not only because it is a start-to-finish record of Matta-Clark's work... but also because it is lavishly illustrated, with each major project recorded in sketches, plans and documentary photographs. The ever-expanding world of Matta-Clark studies needs such a book, as does anyone interested in the social possibilities of sculpture. In an echo of the artists' peeling back the skin of buildings, the spine of this hardback book has been cut away, revealing the binding beneath: a labour of love, satisfied with a job well done, allowing itself a moment of levity."-Modern Painters "Crow is very good at weaving the biographical details of Matta-Clark's life into the analysis of his art... Given Matta-Clark's inspirational nature, the filmic narrative of his life and the visual impact of his work, I defy any writer to make a boring book out of him. And Crow, who is an insightful art historian, also tells a good story. Then there the generous illustrations. The pictures of Matta-Clark at work among friends and accomplices convey an infectious spirit of creative fun."-Justin McGuirk, Icon "Gordon's work spotlights and pinpoints one of the crucial ideas of modern art - actually doing and redoing an absurd idea. This might sound strange, but he was both a Minimalist and a Surrealist."-John Baldessari, artist