Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark
Bronx Floors: Threshole 1972
2 black and white photographs
Each 356 x 508 mm

Gordon Matta-Clark was a key member of the New York avant-garde from the late sixties to his death in 1978. Matta-Clark’s work was formed “outside of the parameters of gallery presentation” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011). Matta-Clark’s work does not concern itself with form (Fineberg, J., 1995, p.382). Instead “his work involved a sense of place” not with “constructing a site”, but with the attack on “the structural integrity existing buildings, cutting gapping holes through the walls, ceilings, and floors” (Fineberg, J., 1995, p.382).  Matta-Clark’s “subversive activities were rooted in a critique of bourgeois American culture” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011). How is his work subversive and how is it an attack on “bourgeois American culture”? For many the work either symbolized a “violation of domesticity” in its attack on the family home, while others saw the work as “a commentary on the depredations of real estate development and urban renewal” (Joselit, 2003 p.147). 

Gordon Matta-Clark
Bronx Floors: Threshole 1972
2 black and white photographs
Each 356 x 508 mm

It is interesting to note that Matta-Clark trained as an architect. As an architect he was “well aware of what he called the “containerization of usable space” as both an economic and social form of regulation” (Joselit, 2003 p.147). Works like Splitting 1974 allude “to these urban realities through the use of procedures of inscription and displacement” (Joselit, 2003 p.147) and of course the process of dislocation.

 Splitting, 1974
Chromogenic prints mounted on board

 Splitting, 1974 Colour Photograph 680 x 990 mm

Matta-Clark was compelled to focus his attention on modernism anti-humanism. Matta-Clark attacked standardization and the rationalized structures of modernist architecture. This practice of splitting and incision is called “anarchitecture”- a play on words, fusing anarchy and architecture” (Fineberg, 1995 p.383).This was a deliberate form of political expression. “By undoing a building”, he said “there are many   aspects of social conditions against which I am gesturing”  (Simon, 1976 p.13). Matta-Clark “saw the housing of the New York Ghettos as akin to prison cellblocks and the isolation of the suburban ‘box’ as scarcely better” (Fineberg, 1995 p. 386). Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” was meant to “destroy the barriers between people, literally and figuratively” (Fineberg, 1995 p.386).

Window Blowout 1976 Photography Mounted on board 406 x 559 mm

Sources:

Fineberg, (1995) Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being London: Lawrence King

Joselit, (2003) American Art Since 1945 London: Thames and Hudson

 

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (2011 ) Splitting, 1974 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1992.5067

 

Simon, (1976)"Gordon Matta-Clark 1943-1978" Art in America (November/December 1978).