Gordon Matta-Clark: Open House essay

Essay to accom­pany exhi­bi­tion I curated, appear­ing in the Visual Arts Pro­gram Crit­i­cal Reader accom­pa­ny­ing the Mel­bourne Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val 2009.

I see the work as a spe­cial stage in per­pet­ual meta­mor­pho­sis, a model for peo­ples’ con­stant action on space as much as in the space that sur­rounds them. Build­ings are fixed enti­ties in the minds of most—the notion of muta­ble space is vir­tu­ally taboo—even in one’s own house. Peo­ple live in their space with a temer­ity that is fright­en­ing[i]

Gor­don Matta-Clark is that most rare, but often mythol­o­gised, of artists: some­one who died young, but despite a fore­short­ened prac­tice, left in their wake an indeli­ble mark on art and its future prac­ti­tion­ers.[ii] There are many pho­tographs, and a hand­ful of videos, of Matta-Clark at work that prima facie per­pet­u­ate the myth of the ‘heroic’ artist fig­ure. In his case they include: jack-hammering his way through con­crete walls mak­ing Con­i­cal Inter­sect (1975), ren­dered all the more vio­lent by the absence of noise in the still and silent mov­ing images; the artist climbing—without a harness—a flimsy rope lad­der hand-made in his Ger­man hotel room, that he’d attached to the top of a sheer indus­trial chim­ney for Jacob’s Lad­der (1977); the artist swing­ing from the roof of a sub­ur­ban house in the breeze to com­plete the cut in Split­ting (1974)—again no safety har­ness. With Matta-Clark the list goes on. But the promise of feats of dar­ing, and lack of temer­ity, is not Matta-Clark’s legacy (or, at least, only a small part of it) to which works in the exhi­bi­tion Gor­don Matta-Clark: Open House surely attest.

Gor­don Matta-Clark was born to Span­ish Sur­re­al­ist painter Roberto Matta Echuar­ren and Anne Clark, and although they sep­a­rated soon after, Matta was an ongo­ing influ­ence in his son’s life. Like his father, Matta-Clark stud­ied archi­tec­ture, attend­ing Cor­nell uni­ver­sity, then a key site of inves­ti­ga­tion and the­o­retic rigour in the field, from 1962 to 1968. From the begin­ning Matta-Clark had dif­fi­culty with the pre­vail­ing archi­tec­tural winds of the time. He (again, like his father[iii]) respected Le Cor­busier[iv] but was crit­i­cal of the extent to which his the­o­ries were preva­lent in the united States at the time and the way in which they were inter­preted and valorised.

Matta-Clark under­took fine art classes as part of his cur­ricu­lum, in which he excelled. Though, with a highly influ­en­tial fig­ure in the Sur­re­al­ist move­ment as a father, and the leg­endary Mar­cel Duchamp as a god-father, this hardly comes as a sur­prise. After com­plet­ing his degree in archi­tec­ture he spent a fur­ther year liv­ing in Ithaca, assist­ing with the sem­i­nal Earth Art exhi­bi­tion of 1969 staged in con­junc­tion the uni­ver­sity, assist­ing artists such as Robert Smith­son, Hans Haake, Jan Dib­berts, and pre­sciently work­ing with Den­nis Oppen­heim on his frozen lake piece,[v] cut­ting into the ice sheet with saws. Soon after he moved back to New york, where he had grown up, and ten years of art-making fol­low before his death in 1978 of pan­cre­atic can­cer, aged 35.

Matta-Clark’s back­ground, his long engage­ment with archi­tec­ture at the acad­emy, as well as the for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence of inter­ven­tion in the pub­lic realm, are all impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tions in the devel­op­ment of his prac­tice. Much of Matta-Clark’s approach to archi­tec­ture is mis­un­der­stood or over­looked: his engage­ment with the ideas of Le Cor­busier and oth­ers; the des­per­ate desire to ‘push things for­ward’; his frus­tra­tions at pub­lic obses­sion with the ‘sur­face’ and ‘func­tion’ of build­ings over the inti­mate and per­sonal expe­ri­ences of them; at the con­stant drive to pull down com­mu­ni­ties and build them new and ‘better’.

Matta-Clark founded the Anar­chi­tec­ture group with ten oth­ers in 1973. At first glance the pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of this group seem at odds with his com­mit­ment to com­mu­nity and his near nos­tal­gia for the archi­tec­ture of the city (as, for many, are his archi­tec­tural inter­ven­tions). While these sub­se­quent works can be read in a very sculp­tural way, the ini­tial ideas Matta-Clark artic­u­lated through found imagery in the Anar­chi­tec­ture group exhi­bi­tion (1974) cen­tred around build­ings fail­ing, falling or being crashed into. Destruc­tion, or at least per­ver­sion of func­tion, was cen­tral to his propo­si­tion then. Most prophetic per­haps is an image of the World Trade Centre’s Twin Tow­ers, with black X’s etched over each (Matta-Clark was highly crit­i­cal of the build­ing and its impos­ing pres­ence in New york’s sky­line). Con­joined in our con­tem­po­rary read­ings of this work must surely be one of his notes, which sim­ply states:

A RESPONSE TO COSMETIC DESIGN COMPLETION THROUGH REMOVAL COMPLETION THROUGH COLLAPSE COMPLETION THROUGH EMPTINESS[vi]

In many ways Anar­chi­tec­ture bears some resem­blance to aspects of other ‘utopian’ and propo­si­tional archi­tec­tural prac­tices work­ing around this time, Superstudio’s caus­tic cri­tique comes to mind, as does Yona Friedman’s Ville spa­tiale (‘the spa­tial City’), wherein a mod­u­lar archi­tec­ture was to be acces­si­ble by a city’s res­i­dents: one could pull the con­stituent pieces, which were sus­pended above in net­ting, for con­struct­ing some­thing when­ever it was needed—shelter, a bridge—and then return them to the col­lec­tive pool for re– use. Anar­chi­tec­ture was, as Matta-Clark wrote on an art card, ‘about mak­ing space with­out build­ing it’. This idea res­onates in more recent times in the prac­tices and projects of artists such as Ate­lier Bow-Wow who, in their words, find ways to turn ‘pub­lic space into social space’,[vii] and is cer­tainly evoked—with a var­ied range of ref­er­ence to Matta-Clark—by many artists whose prac­tices have been char­ac­tised as belong­ing to Rela­tional Aes­thet­ics.[viii]

Matta-Clark’s ideas were not about destruc­tion— most of his projects utilised only derelict or con­demned structures—they are in fact propo­si­tions for build­ings and the process of liv­ing in and around them. Or, as Matta-Clark sim­ply put it: ‘The pieces I have done that have ‘archi­tec­tural’ impli­ca­tions are really about non-architecture about some­thing that’s an alter­na­tive to…the estab­lished archi­tec­tural vocab­u­lary.’[ix] Many of these projects, includ­ing the works in this exhi­bi­tion, were accom­pa­nied by draw­ings, made with graphite, felt-tip pen and crayons, often in vivid colour and in a rudi­men­tary, child­like style almost as if they were fin­ished in a rush, with half a mind to some­thing else. View­ing them now, they most nat­u­rally read as sketches, plans for think­ing about and around his sculp­tural works, research­ing and the­o­ris­ing, in much the same way Matta-Clark used lan­guage and word­play to extend his thesis.

Sketches, but not plans.[x] Instead they are mod­els, man­i­fes­ta­tions of energy and move­ment.[xi] They are start­ing points for the phys­i­cal­ity depicted in these video works— some­how lost within the still­ness of the build­ing frag­ments or collages—which sug­gest new propo­si­tional spaces, impro­vised from these ini­tial sketches, though per­formed rather than designed.

I feel my work inti­mately linked with the process as a form of the­atre in which both the work­ing activ­ity and sculp­tural changes to and within the build­ing are the per­for­mance. I also include free inter­pre­ta­tion of move­ment as ges­ture, both metaphoric, sculp­tural, and social into my sense of the­atre.[xii]

As the works get bolder, larger, less sanc­tioned, the myth­i­cal ele­ment of the mak­ing starts to grow. Sur­rep­ti­tious activ­ity, creep­ing into spaces at night, then launch­ing into an aural and archi­tec­tural assault of mechan­i­cal saws meet­ing plas­ter and floor­boards, pick­axes and jack­ham­mers meet­ing con­crete and brick. As dan­ger­ous and excit­ing as these actions still feel today, they mark a depar­ture from the works pre­sented in Gor­don Matta-Clark: Open House, which are more reflec­tive and col­lab­o­ra­tive, rely­ing on oth­ers to com­plete the cir­cle and the works.

His prac­tice leads in two direc­tions: the pur­pose­ful decon­sti­tut­ing[xiii] of taken-for– granted build­ings and edi­fices; and the con­sti­tut­ing or recon­sti­tut­ing of spaces with­out ‘build­ings’ to enable new social engage­ment. The Great Amer­i­can Dream is cracked open, let­ting in the sun­light, in Split­ting. The sub­ur­ban home becomes a can­vas for a tem­po­ral, geo­met­ric explo­ration in Bingo Ninths (1974). Inter­sti­tial space becomes a site of con­vivi­al­ity in Tree Dance (1971). Re-valued aban­doned detri­tus is trans­formed into shel­ter in Open House (1972).

Tree Dance, with its writhing, loung­ing mass of bod­ies resem­bling a pyjama party, is par­tic­u­larly rem­i­nis­cent of Michel Foucault’s dis­cus­sion of spaces he termed ‘het­ero­topias’. Het­ero­topias are con­ceived as spaces in oppo­si­tion to utopian (or non-) space, ‘dif­fer­ent space that can con­test the space we live in’.[xiv] ‘Dis­or­der in which frag­ments of a large num­ber of pos­si­ble orders glit­ter’, are the spaces of het­ero­topias.[xv] Matta– Clark could see other orders when he regarded a tree, or a dump­ster, or indeed a build­ing. Accord­ing to Daniel Defert’s analysis:

[Het­erotropias are spatio-temporal] places where I am and yet I am not, as in the mir­ror or the ceme­tery, or where I am another, as in the brothel, the vaca­tion resort, or the fes­ti­val: car­ni­val trans­for­ma­tions of ordi­nary exis­tence, which rit­u­alise splits, thresh­olds, and devi­a­tions, and localise them as well.[xvi]

It is fas­ci­nat­ing to reflect on Matta Clark’s later, grander, archi­tec­tural inter­ven­tion works though the prism of this last phrase— Day’s End (1975) at Pier 52, Con­i­cal Inter­sect (1975) in Les Halles Paris, The Caribbean Orange (1978)[xvii]—but this impulse, and abil­ity to con­ceive of another order, clearly under­scored his con­ceiv­ing of even the ear­lier Split­ting and Bingo Ninths works in the exhibition:

…The things we stud­ied always involved such sur­face for­mal­ism that I had never a sense of the ambi­gu­ity of a struc­ture, the ambi­gu­ity of a place, and that’s the qual­ity I’m inter­ested in gen­er­at­ing in what I do. To some degree that’s the aspect I think of as sculp­tural, a vig­or­ous trans­for­ma­tion process that starts to rede­fine the given. In the case of the Humphrey Street build­ing it was cut­ting.[xviii]

And, indeed, there are hints that the two seem­ingly dis­tinct areas of inves­ti­ga­tion that Gor­don Matta-Clark: Open House fore­grounds were begin­ning to find con­ver­gence in sin­gle rather than sep­a­rate projects. In his 1976 inter­view with Don­ald Wall, Matta-Clark reflects:

A spe­cific project might be to work with an exist­ing neigh­bour­hood youth group and to involve them in con­vert­ing the all too plen­ti­ful aban­doned build­ings into a social space. In this way, the youth could get both prac­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about how build­ings are made and, more essen­tially some first-hand expe­ri­ence with one aspect of the very real pos­si­bil­ity of trans­form­ing their space.[xix]

The four projects pre­sented in this exhi­bi­tion exem­plify dual tra­jec­to­ries in Matta-Clark’s prac­tice, both of which can be thought of along the lines of inter­ven­tion or inter­rup­tion: the first in terms of the exist­ing built envi­ron­ment, and its sur­faces, and the sec­ond in terms of social flow and inter­ac­tion. At their heart they both ques­tion the func­tion of space and objects, and our assump­tions about what pre-exists in our lived space (and this includes a ques­tion­ing of the art ‘object’ itself within con­tem­po­rary prac­tice). While clearly these two con­cerns were begin­ning to fuse within Matta-Clark’s prac­tice, its open-ended nature (as well as its brevity) has bestowed a potent legacy to sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of artists who owe much to his vision and spirit.

Simon Maid­ment 2009

[i] Don­ald Wall inter­view, ‘Gor­don Matta-Clark’s Build­ing Dis­sec­tions’, Arts Mag­a­zine, May 1976. Reprinted in Gor­don Matta-Clark, Ed. Corinne Dis­erns, Phaidon, 2003.

[ii] The idea of myth within Matta-Clark’s oeu­vre has been the sub­ject of schol­ar­ship for some time, and won’t be explic­itly dealt with here, except to note the humour within one of his alchemic works. These incor­po­rated organic mate­ri­als, decay­ing and grow­ing mould, with quick­sil­ver, steel, and plas­tics, and, for the piece Museum (1970), a copy of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ struc­tural­ist exam­i­na­tion of myth, The Raw and the Cooked.

[iii] Roberto Matta worked as an appren­tice to Le Cor­busier draft­ing the draw­ings for La Ville Raieuse, the project that was to have such an effect on urban plan­ning within the United States. James Attlee writes: ‘As has been fre­quently reported, he rejected his employer’s ideas, propos­ing in an arti­cle in the sur­re­al­ist jour­nal Mino­taure an apart­ment with walls “like wet sheets that change shape to fit our psy­cho­log­i­cal fears”, fur­nished with bio­mor­phic couches that appear in his illus­tra­tions to mould to and at the same threaten to swal­low the human body’. James Attlee, ‘Towards Anar­chi­tec­ture: Gor­don Matta-Clark and Le Cor­busier’, Tate Papers, Spring 2007.

[iv] Don­ald Wall: ‘Would you cut into or dis­place a sec­tion of a Cor­busier build­ing?’ Gor­don Matta-Clark: ‘No. I don’t see why that would be desir­able. What would be the point? He did the same thing as I am doing now. He took a box and broke it up in ways that were inher­ently valid then. Right?’ Don­ald Wall inter­view, 1976.

[v] Beebe Lake Ice Cut or Accu­mu­la­tion Cut (1969).

[vi] Note card 1146, undated, estate of Gor­don Matta-Clark, on deposit at the CCA, Montreal.

[vii] In con­ver­sa­tion with the author, 2006.

[viii] None more clearly than Rirkrit Tiravanija’s prac­tice, and his homage exhi­bi­tion Rirkrit Tira­vanija & Gor­don Matta-Clark, David Zwirner Gallery, New york (2008).

[ix] Liza Béar inter­view, ‘Gor­don Matta-Clark: Split­ting the Humphrey Street Build­ing’, 21 May 1974, Avalanche, Decem­ber 1974. Reprinted in Gor­don Matta-Clark, Ed. Corinne Dis­erns, Phaidon, 2003.

[x] ‘If needed we work to dis­prove the com­mon belief that all starts with the plan. There are forms with­out plans—dynamic orders and dis­or­ders’. Gor­don Matta-Clark, note­book, estate of Gor­don Matta-Clark, on deposit at the CCA, Mon­treal. Reprinted in Attlee, 2007.

[xi] Jochen Volz: ‘[A model is] an abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a sys­tem from the modeller’s view­point. It helps to stim­u­late real­ity, and in doing so to ques­tion and under­stand that real­ity…’. Jochen Volz, ‘In the Mak­ing’, Fare Mondi, Mak­ing Worlds 53rd Inter­na­tional Art Exhi­bi­tion, Venice Bien­nale cat­a­logue, Eds. Jochen Volz & Daniel Birn­baum, 2009.

[xii] Don­ald Wall inter­view, 1976.

[xiii] The act of con­sti­tut­ing is also dou­bly important—and Matta– Clark, like his god-father, adored noth­ing more that dou­bling and dou­ble entendre—in that cook­ing and food was cen­tral to many of his projects, most clearly per­haps Food, a restau­rant / art project he co-initiated in New york’s Soho in 1971.

[xiv] Michel Fou­cault, ‘utopie et lit­téra­ture’ [‘utopia and lit­er­a­ture’], broad­cast paper, Decem­ber 7, 1966.

[xv] Michel Fou­cault, The Order of Things, Rout­ledge, 1970.

[xvi] Daniel Defert, ‘Fou­cault, Space and the Archi­tects’, Doc­u­menta X: Politics/Poetics, Cantz Ver­lag, 2000.

[xvii] Or Cir­cus.

[xviii] Liza Béar inter­view, 1974.

[xix] Don­ald Wall inter­view, 1976.

Photo: Gor­don Matta-Clark, Pro­gram Six (1974–76),
cour­tesy Elec­tronic Arts Inter­mix (EAI), New York