The Visionary, Destructive Art of Gordon Matta-Clark (Metropolis)
January 1, 2000
As a child, I was among the many unwitting admirers of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Every Thurs-day, I went with my parents to Food, a health-food restaurant in Soho that he founded with a group of artists in 1971. Over tuna-fish sandwiches, we would gaze at the high, white ceilings and check out the waiters' tattoos. It wasn't until much later that I learned that the restaurant I loved was a uniquely constructive work by an artist whose name was otherwise synonymous with destruction. After all, Matta-Clark's best-known piece was his 1974 Splitting, in which he fissured a house with a chainsaw.
To make Splitting, which he called a "non-ument," Matta-Clark asked his dealers Holly and Horace Solo-mon for a spare house to destroy. As it happened, Horace Solomon owned such a house in the suburbs of New Jersey. The artist soon "unbuilt" the dwelling by cleaving it in two. And this wasn't unusual for him: Matta-Clark had a penchant for laying waste to buildings he didn't like--and calling it art.
Twenty-five years later, the creator of Splitting continues to hold a cult-like fascination. Matta-Clark, who died at 35 of pancreatic cancer, is the subject of a lively albeit turgid new study, Object to Be Destroyed, by Pamela Lee.
Like most of Matta-Clark's admirers, Lee, a Stanford art historian, is in love with him. The artist, she says, "had the most exuberant of temperaments, a character whose boundless sense of engagement threatened to outstrip any singular persona." She perceives in Matta-Clark's work the qualities that a post-structuralist professor like herself would find most alluring--its ability to contain both sides of an opposition, to be one thing and that thing's antithesis ("timeliness and untimeliness," "worklessness" and "materialism"). One suspects that Lee also likes Matta-Clark for more prosaic reasons. Like the daredevil conceptual artist Chris Burden, he was the art world's equivalent of a swashbuckler: brash, violent, idealistic, and physically fearless.
As Lee underscores, Matta-Clark was a quintessentially New York artist. He was born in the West Village in 1942, to Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta and his American wife, Anne Clark. Matta-Clark attended private schools and wandered through the streets of the Village in the age of the Beats, developing a connec-tion to downtown New York that would heighten his awareness of its transformation in the coming decades.
In 1962, Matta-Clark enrolled in Cornell's School of Architec-ture, where he stayed for six years. He wasn't much of a student: He got three "Ds" in four semesters of Structural Principles. But he managed to strike up important friendships with emerging artists like Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, both of whom were featured in Cornell's groundbreaking earth art show in 1969.
Presented in fields and jetties rather than in galleries, the earth art of Smithson, Oppenheim, Don-ald Judd, and Dan Graham was a radical extension of site-specific art into the wild. Inspired by the idea that art could and should exist in everyday life, Matta-Clark offered his services to Oppenheim, who was then working on his Beebe Lake Ice Cut, in which he pierced a frozen lake in Ithaca.
But Matta-Clark was an iconoclast, even in this group. Whereas most of his peers used rocks and earth and other natural materials, Matta-Clark utilized built environments and man-made products--the "readymades" that Marcel Duchamp had introduced into Modern art. Only, unlike Duchamp, Matta-Clark did not leave these readymade structures intact; he tore them apart.
Faced with works like Splitting, one cannot help but wonder whether Matta-Clark hated architecture. There is no doubt that he shared his father's hatred of architectural convention. (Roberto Matta had worked as Le Corbusier's assistant in the Thirties before becoming a fierce critic of his mentor's rationalist approach to design.) He attacked his Cornell schooling for its "surface formalism" and lambasted the International Style as socially exclusionary. In "undoing a building," he said, "there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I'm gesturing. There's so much in our society that purposely intends denial: deny entry, deny passage, deny participation."
In 1973, Matta-Clark helped found Anarchitecture (an amalgam of anarchy and architecture), a group of guerrilla artists who schemed against conventional buildings and design. The group's objective was, in his words, to provide a "response to cosmetic design/completion through removal/completion through collapse/completion through emptiness."
And Matta-Clark responded in deeds as well as words. He launched his most daring assault on the architectural establishment in 1976, when he shot out the windows of Peter Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. It was a gutsy performance, since his work was to be part of a show opening there the next day. As he fired at the windows, he reportedly shouted: "They were my teachers [at Cornell]. I hate what they stand for." A livid Eisenman likened Matta-Clark's act to Kristallnacht.
A deeply political artist, Matta-Clark was shaken by the manic urban restructuring of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when middle-class neighborhoods were rapidly developed and poor neigh-borhoods were left to wither and die. With the creation of the Department of Housing and Ur-ban Development in 1965, "de-concentrating" American cities became the objective of the federal government.
On a local level, New York mayor John Lindsay had his own "renewal" plans. In 1973, the Westway highway project, which was intended to cut through the Lower West Side--Matta-Clark's stomping ground as a teenager--was announced.
Matta-Clark's work was a spirited, somewhat doomed protest against the destruction by developers of the New York he knew. In his 1973 piece, Fake Estates, for example, Matta-Clark bought slivers of land at city auctions for $35 apiece and framed the deeds and photos of these tiny parcels of gutters and crabgrass, throwing into relief the leftover spaces created by urban renewal. He became an elegist of a vanishing New York, a place where gracious old buildings--Penn Station, most notably--were cavalierly erased from the urban landscape. As New York Times architecture writer Christopher Gray has noted, there was enough demolition in the 1960s and 1970s to keep the city's architectural critics busy eulogizing buildings.
But Matta-Clark was more than a nostalgist for an elite lost New York. He was also a radical critic of urban renewal who assailed the devastation visited upon the "New York ring," as the South Bronx, Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side were called. The Bronx was in flames throughout the Seventies, and Matta-Clark was one of the few artists whose work addressed its destruction. In 1972, he created an installation called Bronx Floors, which consisted of chunks of South Bronx floors--rugs and all--that served as concrete reminders of a local tragedy that most New Yorkers preferred to ignore.
At the same time, Matta-Clark was also experimenting with "unbuilding" suburban buildings. He reviled the antiseptic privacy of suburban homes, and in works like Splitting he literally punched holes in it. The cuts in the house's floors and walls resembled peepholes, but they opened onto a void, suggesting the fragility of the life within.
Although Matta-Clark's art was striking, it did not lack for company, particularly in the world of architecture. As the architecture critic Martin Filler recently observed in the New York Review of Books, Frank Gehry's famous Santa Monica house, completed in 1978, the year of Matta-Clark's death, seemed to borrow a page from the artist's work. Gehry attached corrugated steel and a chain-link fence to a 1920s bungalow, creating a transcendent platypus of a dwelling out of industrial detritus--a new life for old parts.
Lee, ever insistent on her subject's originality, has a horror of such comparisons. "Names ranging from Frank Gehry to SITE are routinely invoked in the same breath as Matta-Clark," she sneers, adding that "a gross pseudomorphism takes place when Matta-Clark and these figures are leveled to the same visual field." In fact, the industrial walls in Gehry's Santa Monica house do bring to mind the walls of a house that Clark "unbuilt" a few years earlier.
But Lee has a point: The resemblances between Matta-Clark's "non-uments" and Gehry's structures are ultimately superficial. Unlike Gehry, Matta-Clark embraced destruction for its own sake. He collapsed standing structures and dissected buildings, but created nothing inhabitable in their stead; his carved and opened buildings have all gone the way of the wrecking ball. Matta-Clark would likely have regarded Gehry's house--built for shelter, as most houses are--as a betrayal of his vision.
In the last years of his short life, Matta-Clark began to consider putting his utopian impulses to practical use. He collaborated on a plan to turn a discarded building in the Lower East Side into a youth community center; he died before this project came to fruition. He also had a few "alternative housing" schemes, though his notion of alternative housing was typically whimsical: He called for housing in air balloons.
The nihilism and ephemerality of Matta-Clark's work, which exists today only in photos and detritus, have only enhanced the artist's aura. The first theoretical survey of his art, Object to Be Destroyed will further help to canonize him. Meanwhile, his predilection for dilapidated buildings remains fashionable among contemporary artists. You can see the afterimage of his "non-uments" in the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread's plaster cast of a row house interior or her famous transparent Manhattan water tower. And on the streets of a city in the throes of a mad real estate boom, Matta-Clark's vilification of realtors continues to appreciate in value. His wry installation of gutterspace deeds in Fake Estates is less playful fiction than looming possibility. It won't be long before an eager developer tries cramming a studio apartment into one of those small slivers.