Stephen Walker - Gordon Matta-Clark - Art, Architecture and The Attack On Modernism-I. B. Tauris (2009) PDF
Stephen Walker - Gordon Matta-Clark - Art, Architecture and The Attack On Modernism-I. B. Tauris (2009) PDF
Stephen Walker - Gordon Matta-Clark - Art, Architecture and The Attack On Modernism-I. B. Tauris (2009) PDF
‘In this excellent study, Stephen Walker draws upon the thought of Henri
Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to develop a new kind of
account of Gordon Matta-Clark's work. Paying close attention to primary
sources, the author takes a wide-ranging approach to Matta-Clark, resulting
in a book that makes innovative arguments and which, while focused on
architecture, will also be of great interest for related subject areas in the
humanities.’
Mark Dorrian, Reader in Architectural Design and Theory, University
of Edinburgh
to Julia, Felix and Benjamin
Gordon Matta-Clark
STEPHEN WALKER
Published in 2009 by I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
The right of Stephen Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Introduction 1
1. Discrete Violation 13
Notes 181
Bibliography 199
Index 203
Illustrations
the Getty Research Institute; and Jessica Eckert and Angela Choon at David
Zwirner for their help providing illustrations.
Preface
To begin a book on the artist Gordon Matta-Clark with a passage from the
French thinker Georges Bataille is not, on the face of it, new or surprising.
Several distinguished writers have enjoyed this connection, using Bataille’s
thought to elucidate Matta-Clark’s work, or using Matta-Clark’s work to
clarify the relevance of Bataille for contemporary debate in art and
architecture.2
However, to read Bataille’s architectural analogy here praising the work of
the mason, the assembler, and stressing the importance of the ensemble,
may strike those already familiar with the work of Bataille or of Matta-Clark
as odd. Wasn’t Matta-Clark, and wasn’t Bataille, consistently critical of
architecture? Certainly. Isn’t Matta-Clark best known for his dramatic,
physical ‘attacks’ on architecture? Apparently. Then surely, his work was
anti-architectural? No.
Since Matta-Clark’s death in 1978, his work has exerted a significant
influence on artists, architects and critics. Now, a generation after their
production, his projects still elude easy classification, and continue to raise
questions that bear on the production and reception of artistic and
xii GORDON MATTA-CLARK
architectural work. While his projects are frequently used to illustrate a kind
of paragon of ‘deconstructive’ architecture, dissenting voices to this
interpretation can be heard, voices that explore beyond the formalism or
sensationalism that can be associated with some of Matta-Clark’s work.
One such exception is Rem Koolhaas, who recounts how his own interest
in Matta-Clark’s work has changed:
—Gordon Matta-Clark4
Introduction
This book is not a biography, though it does no harm to begin with a few
biographical ‘facts’: the artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) was born in
New York. He grew up within an artistic milieu; his mother, Anne Clark,
had been a member of the Surrealist group in Paris, where she met his
father, the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta Echaurren; his
godfather was Marcel Duchamp. This avant-garde artistic and social
environment combined with the physical, and culturally bohemian,
surroundings of lower Manhattan where he grew up, and with periods
spent in Paris and in Chile, are remarkable enough to be worth observing.
Having ‘grown up’, Matta-Clark spent a year studying French literature at
the Sorbonne in Paris shortly after enrolling at Cornell University, where he
was studying architecture. He graduated from Cornell in 1968. His artistic
career began shortly afterwards: hugely productive, it was cut short by his
untimely death from cancer at the age of thirty-five.
By the time of his death Matta-Clark was held in extremely high esteem
by his peers and his mentors; in the decades since, his work has continued
to exert an influence on artists, architects and critics. In spite of the breadth
of this influence, he has no obviously apparent heirs: this situation echoes
that of Charles and Ray Eames, Robert Smithson, and even Duchamp
himself, none of whom have easily identifiable successors. In contrast to
these, though, Matta-Clark’s work has found neither a substantial public
audience nor attracted sustained critical engagement, and it has until very
recently remained something of an awkward misfit.
This book sets out to explore the ongoing awkwardness that Matta-
Clark’s œuvre carries, and to articulate why, in spite of—or indeed because
of—this awkwardness, his œuvre remains so important to a wide range of
situations and disciplines. The work for which he is best known, the
building dissections or building cuts, have skewed his œuvre by instilling a
hierarchy that Matta-Clark himself fought (unsuccessfully). A prodigious
artist, Matta-Clark produced a huge amount of work in a wide range of
2 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Introducing Modernism
Matta-Clark’s ‘abhorrence of flat art’ mounted a direct challenge not only to
high modernism’s valorisation of painting over other arts, but to the
broader value system it enshrined. In addition to the issues of ‘purity’ and
disciplinary separation, Matta-Clark’s criticisms extended to the apolitical
attitude of North American modernism, and to its increasing liaison with
scientific, rational thinking.
Greenberg’s attempt to define modernism was overarching, applicable to
all artistic disciplines: ‘The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use
of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself–
not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of
competence… Thereby each art would be rendered ‘pure’, and in its ‘purity’
find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its
independence.’5 For Greenberg, this quest for purity demanded the
identification, isolation and elimination of any expendable conventions,
anything that might conceivably be shared with any other artform.6 The
very nature of his generic definition was to exclude and eliminate; the
evidence he used to back up his position was highly partisan, and (at least in
the caricatured version of his position that circulated) passed over a whole
range of work from the historical avant-garde and other geographical
locations as part of the process. Inevitably, there remained other claims for
modernism within the stuff expended by Greenberg: these were often just
as universalising, and (frequently) irreconcilable.
Shadowing Greenberg’s particular account of modernism’s evolution
was a rapid demise in its overt political intentions, despite the various
revolutionary goals of the historical avant-garde artistic and architectural
movements. For example, modern architecture was stripped of any such
social dimensions on the occasion of perhaps its first significant
transatlantic crossing in 1932, where it was the subject of Hitchcock and
Johnson’s International Exhibition of Modern Architecture at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, and their simultaneous publication The
International Style. Their presentation defined three principles: architecture as
volume; regularity; and the avoidance of applied decoration, thus opening
modern architecture to subjective formal manipulation.7
Gavin Macrae-Gibson roundly criticises this subjective turn, arguing that
it reduced the architect’s concern to the literal content of architectural
form, ‘an amnesiac and contextless concern for the purely material aspects
INTRODUCTION 5
—Gordon Matta-Clark22
parts, the first ‘within’, the second ‘without’. The organisation of the
chapters takes its cue from this positioning; the first two explore aspects of
the relationship that Matta-Clark’s œuvre can be seen to hold with, or
within, some of the key terms of modernism—Form, Space and Time. The
second group of three chapters takes up other aspects of his work, in order
to explore how his interest in User, Process and Discipline might be
encountered in his œuvre and point to its possible operation without
modernism.
1 Discrete Violation
taken away to violate expectations and call into question that which was
taken for granted. From the remains of a door, to the activity of the cutting,
to the central concerns that motivated Matta-Clark’s work, his projects
established a complex traffic between the objects of familiar experience and
what he here refers to as the real idea, associated with the conditions of that
experience while also pointing to possibilities that lay beyond. In the case
of works such as Circus, this traffic aimed to produce a ‘clearly new sense of
space’ alongside the alterations to the sense of orientation. Matta-Clark
emphasised the point:
FORM–PLAN–PARTI–UNITY–ORDER
MEASURE–SCALE–PROPORTION–RHYTM
? ? ? ? ? ?
—Gordon Matta-Clark9
Across his œuvre, Matta-Clark’s discrete violations worked with aspects of
familiar experience, and attempted to balance the supports and collapse of that
which is taken for granted about such experience. Building dissections such
as Circus, whether in their ‘real’ form or in subsequent reworkings such as
the photocollage reproduced in figure 1, are open to a literal interpretation
of this balance. It is clear that Matta-Clark has removed a substantial
quantity of the building’s primary structure, as we are presented with the
raw ends of timber floor joists at every turn; secondary elements such as
partition walls similarly present their raggy innards, now finishing in mid-
air, all of which immediately call into question the building’s structural
integrity. Is it about to fall down? Evidently, the building confounded such
expectations and continued to stand, and visitors were able to move around
the building without precipitating its collapse. Certainly, their movement
through the building would be radically different from that of previous
occupants, and we can appreciate how their sense of the building’s spaces
might approach the ‘entirely new’ condition that Matta-Clark pointed
toward. At this level, Richard Nonas’ assertion that Matta-Clark’s work was
fundamentally concerned with the production of emotionally charged
spaces appears to be straightforward, with the response brought about by a
feeling of danger to the visitor’s own person. 10 However, if we take account
of Matta-Clark’s claims for discrete violation, the full resonance of Nonas’
comment begins to emerge, and the emotional charge can be understood to
involve many more dimensions than just a fearful reaction.
Circus clearly presents the original building in a sufficiently coherent state
to permit observers to understand it as a building; in addition to the
recognisable elements such as the ‘doorknobs and cut doors and things like
that’, the original disposition of spaces is entirely legible through the
substantial fragments of floor, wall and ceiling that remain. Matta-Clark’s
cutting activities disrupt this legibility, and it is only with a concerted effort
that it can be momentarily regained. The cuts impose a new mode of
behaviour, a new reaction to the spaces of the building. Familiar sequences
of spaces and movements are replaced with new possibilities that
simultaneously expand the visual space within and through the building,
18 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
and both expand and restrict its physically accessible spaces on the limits of
perception, and the existence of other kinds of space.11
At this point, it is helpful to refer to the passage by philosopher Henri
Bergson (1859–1941), set out in the epigraph at the start of this section.
Considering Circus in the light of this, Matta-Clark’s discrete violation will
be taken not simply as an uncovering, but as a process of inventing: Circus
posits a question rather than provides an answer. Beyond this basic
assertion, Bergson’s own work can help articulate how such an inventive
question operates within Matta-Clark’s œuvre. At first sight, these two may
seem strange bedfellows, and the move to bring them together should not
be taken to suggest that Matta-Clark was directly or indirectly influenced by
Bergsonian philosophy. However, there are significant points that they have
in common, and it is a relationship that will develop in later chapters of this
book. Both were interested in broadening the possibilities for human
experience beyond the limits sanctioned by scientific thinking, yet both
were particularly mindful of the importance of science: recall Matta-Clark’s
demand that discrete violation maintain the conditions it sets out to exceed.
Addressing the inventive question posited by Circus, Bergson’s work can
clarify how this mode of question differs from scientific questioning. For
Bergson, (bad) science was concerned with the repeatable: to get at what
eludes scientific thought ‘we must do violence to the mind, go counter to
the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of
philosophy.’12 Bergson distinguished intellect from instinct, but crucially he
argued that however much they diverged, they did so from a single point of
origin, and could not be ‘entirely separate[d] from each other’.13 Moreover,
his plea for a violent philosophy was not aimed at eliminating the intellect,
but making it more supple, in order to allow for a ‘perpetual creation of
possibility and not only of reality’.14 He expands on this point:
Although the attack here is phrased against the efficiency army, where it
might be assumed an overarching rationalism wins out as the rule is
established, it is important to add, beyond the Anarchitecture argument, that
were a similar hegemony to be established by inventive irrationality, it
20 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
would be equally problematic. The danger would arise not through the
elimination of the question—no problems—but rather through the
instability this might instil in the solutions they deserve. Matta-Clark’s
discrete violation, like Bergson’s violent philosophy, held that a fully
inventive statement of a problem, a creative question, inscribes both reason
and imagination, however much these two dimensions might pull against
each other.
This antagonism in no way prevents the question being answered (Circus
can be navigated, for example), but calls for an answer that is different in
kind from that given to a scientific question (the visitor or observer can
‘make sense’ of Circus once their ‘logical’ response has embraced the new
spatiality and become more supple). Moreover, this answer could bring
about further creative questions, though these would not become linked
together in a dialectical progression towards a single goal: Matta-Clark’s
demand, Anarchitecture’s demand, was that an inventive, creative questioning
should maintain these irreconcilable dimensions in a relation that could
point to particular ends in particular circumstances, but that must remain
open to further questioning, ‘JUST KEEPING GOING AND STARTING OVER
AND OVER.’18
If the movement of Matta-Clark’s work maintains such a relationship—
and the bulk of the present work is taken up suggesting how and why this
might be the case, and examining the consequences of this on the
production and consumption of art and architecture—then this can also
suggest why his œuvre appears to have resisted art-historical
systematisation so successfully, and how it might be considered more
fruitfully as a shifting constellation that permits an ongoing and creative
interrogation. As such, it continues to overreach itself, a result of the
necessarily excessive dimensions of the questions associated with each
piece.
This excess brought about by the creative question is not a failure, it
does not signal a wilful avoidance of any attempt to offer an answer. While
opening up an examination of the real, it simultaneously invites a reasoned
and an imaginative dimension to this experience, and expects a reciprocal
acknowledgement to occur in the process of offering a response: this
demand extends both to the artist and to the visitor or observer of the
work.
Any solution offered to a creative question posed by Matta-Clark’s work
necessarily refers to an aspect of that which escapes the domain of reason.
While this permits a reasoned response—either from the artist or from an
observer—it prevents that response from becoming the one correct way to
respond to the work. This is admittedly hard work; Bergson suggests
scientific questioning ushers in a response that is ‘…easy and can be
DISCRETE VIOLATION 21
Obscura a priori prevents the observer from seeing his or her position as
part of the representation.’ 27
Many of Matta-Clark’s projects, from the Santiago piece through to
Circus, mimicked the schematic mechanism of the Camera Obscura,
although they did so in such as way as to introduce a discrete violation of
its traditional arrangement, one that questioned this pervasive hierarchy of
mind (or eye) over matter. They reintroduced the observer as part of the
representation, demonstrating the relationships that existed between the
observer’s position and the space or object they observed.
In the specific case of the Santiago project, the simple redeployment of
the traditional Camera Obscura arrangement led to the subversion of its
exclusively cerebral enjoyment; the selection of the urinal upset claims to
any direct mental communion with ‘truth’. Instead, the screen of this
Camera Obscura was framed in a familiar receptacle for bodily waste,
positioned in the basement toilet rather than the elevated ‘chamber’ of
polite society, and connected directly to the sewers beyond, as well as to the
sky above. By locating the screen in the basement urinal, the observer
would have been made aware of an overlapping spatial situation, with the
reflection of the sky framed within the sanitary ware and including
fragmentary reflections picked up en route between the glass dome and the
screen. By firmly positioning the observer in the complex spatiality of the
world, this and other projects attempted to avoid the observer’s traditional
removal from the process of representation. Instead of the dark room of
the traditional Camera Obscura, which allowed the fundamental separation
between observer and world, Matta-Clark’s optics operated to highlight
their connections.
This distinction is important; the separation between interior and
exterior effectively predicated the use of this metaphor in the philosophical
writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Crary argues that
there occurred an epistemological shift during the early years of the
nineteenth century, and it suits his project to maintain and emphasise this
interior-exterior separation up to that point. However, it is no surprise that
we can find differing approaches within the variety of Camera Obscura
metaphors. The most interesting of these in the present context was that
held by the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646–1716), who used the metaphor in his New Essays on Human
Understanding (Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain, completed 1704, but
published posthumously in 1765), where he discussed the resemblance
between the understanding of a man and ‘a closet wholly shut from light,
with only some little openings left, to let in external visible images’.
However, Leibniz was dissatisfied with the accepted metaphor, and
found the need to complicate the screen that for others was simply an inert
24 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
DISCRETE VIOLATION 25
2 (above and facing) Untitled, Museo Nácional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, 1971
26 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Matta-Clark was broadly critical of the role that ‘form’ assumed within
modernism, how it contributed to the acceptance of architecture as static
object. However, as we have seen, he did not consider formal work to be
exclusively reductive, nor did he perceive the term ‘formal’ as merely
pejorative:
Surface Formalism
—Gordon Matta-Clark5
He made very similar remarks to Donald Wall, though dwelt a little more
on the establishment of surface: ‘…what interests me more than the
unexpected views that were being generated by removals is the element of
stratification. Not the surface, but the thin edge, the severed surface which
reveals the autobiographical process of its making.’ 7 This ‘autobiography’
and the spatial complexity were both products of the cutting operations,
and clearly they were closely inter-dependent. Moreover, they both
contested the ‘static object’ conception of architectural form that Matta-
Clark criticised, working away from the cut surface in two different
directions. The spatial experience of these projects could not be anticipated
from any of the ‘ideal’ forms of which they were comprised; it had to be a
three-dimensional, dynamic experience, one that occurred over time and
continued to offer ‘unexpected views’. Additionally, the revelation of what
was usually hidden away behind the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings
displayed the process of making, its maintenance and decay, in short the
process of change, that the built ‘object’ was caught up in.
As Matta-Clark stated in the context of Circus, the discrete violation of a
visitor’s sense of space presumed that aspects of the previous situation
would comfortably survive the cutting operation and remain a crucial
ingredient in the new experience. The same cannot quite be said of the cut
surface (where what was revealed did not belong to the same mode of
34 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
FORM (& MATTER) 35
3 Bronx Floors: Threshole, 1972 (opposite page), A W-Hole House: Roof Top Atrium, 1973
(above), and Splitting, 1974 (following pages)
Splitting, A W-Hole House, and other work such as Bingo, 1974, operate by deploying
standard techniques of architectural design, in particular orthographic drawing
conventions, out of the usual sequence, out of the protected domain of the architect and
onto the building proper. Although he made cuts to buildings from as early as 1971, such
as the Santiago piece illustrated in figure 2, or the renovations he made as part of the
collaborative Food Restaurant in New York (1971–3), the more deliberate investigations
into the repercussions of cutting began around 1972 with a series of cut drawings, and
work to buildings such as the Bronx Floors series. The scale of this work increased
substantially in the following two years with A W-Hole House, Splitting and Bingo. Matta-
Clark made four cut drawings for the exhibition of Intraform and A W-Hole House: Datum
Cut at Galleriaforma in Genoa, 1973, underscoring the point that his cut drawings were
not simply a precursor to a building dissection.
36 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
FORM (& MATTER) 37
38 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
experience presumed by the surface itself), and we might at this point ask
whether, and if so how, Matta-Clark’s projects usher in a clearly new sense of
form.
Matta-Clark’s cutting illustrates his broad concern to address form and
architectural object together; as a technique, it cut against not only the
surface formalism of his Cornell education, nor modernism’s close liaison
with form, but with a far longer architectural tradition that sought to
separate architectural form from built object. Although the white walls that
characterise, even caricature, modern architecture mark the apogee of this
separation by appearing to deny any kind of material involvement in
architecture, this really just marks the culmination of a process that
emerged during the Renaissance, when architecture sought to separate itself
from the manual trades of construction. Moreover, the idealised approach
to architectural form that emerged to justify that separation was itself linked
back to a much older difficulty concerning form that can be traced back
within the Western tradition to pre-Socratic thought, though which is
perhaps epitomised by Plato’s Theory of Forms.
According to Plato’s theory, forms were located in an ideal, metaphysical
realm. Things in the world were imperfect imitations of these unchanging
ideal forms; although the imperfect form of worldly things was available to
the human bodily senses via their outward shape, the ideal form they
referred to could only be approached by the intellect. Plato used the word
eidos () for both these situations, form-as-shape apprehended by the
senses, and form-idea comprehended by the intellect. For Plato, how one
proceeded beyond the surface of a thing and negotiated this complex
relationship between surface form-shape and form-idea was crucial. He was
adamant that truth would only give itself up to objective enquiry. To get
below the superficial appearance of things required that they be divided up
in a way that was informed by and respected the component forms that
together made up each thing: ‘…we are enabled to divide into forms,
following the objective articulation; we are not to attempt to hack off parts
like a clumsy butcher…’8
Sidestepping the broader applications that Plato sought for this method,
there are two aspects of it that are important in the present context. Firstly,
the method of division itself needed to be ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’:
secondly, the same method provided Plato with the model he
recommended for ‘skilful’ or ‘scientific practitioners’ of artistic production.
For example: ‘Whenever… the maker of anything keeps his eye on the
eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of
his product the result must be good…’9 Now while this echoes
Schumacher’s account of Cornell Contextualism given in the introduction,
Matta-Clark’s technique clearly looked the other way, and got below the
FORM (& MATTER) 39
surface of form thanks to some very deliberate and clumsy butchery, and
thus called the underlying assumptions and priority given to form-idea into
question.
While his work was not anti-intellectual, it did operate by reintroducing,
or re-evaluating, the balancing role played by form-as-shape, with all the
material, worldly implications this brought. For example, Circus, which was
generated by the inscription of three spheres (the most perfect of all the
Platonic solids) into the existing rectilinear geometry of a Chicago
townhouse, did not prevent either of these geometric forms being
perceived. However, as figure 1 demonstrates, what the cutting did bring
about was a disruption in the usual legibility of surface form, the ease with
which surface form could be perceived, and thus a disruption in the
unquestioned assumption that experience should proceed from perceived
experience of clear surface form to clear understanding that is linked
somehow to an unchanging truth. In this example, the disruption is not
caused by a contest between two strong geometric formal systems, but by
the role of surface form being disrupted by the mutual interference between
architectural form and cut surface. This was not just an interplay between
positive and negative spaces or forms, but between architecture as static
object, and architecture as a dynamic, contingent process. To reiterate the
broader claims made earlier for Matta-Clark’s notion of discrete violation,
this operated by setting up a process of creative questioning, rather than
with the intention of providing a clear answer.
Seeing that Design [disegno], the parent of our three arts, Architecture,
Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the intellect, draws out
from many single things a general judgement, it is like a form or ‘idea’
of all the objects in nature, most marvellous in what it compasses…
Seeing too that from this knowledge there arises a certain conception
and judgement, so that there is formed in the mind that something
which afterwards, when expressed by the hands, is called design
[disegno], we may conclude that design [disegno] is not other than a
visible expression and declaration of our inner conception and of that
which others have imagined and given form to in their idea.11
For Vasari, disegno was the foundation or animating principle of all the fine
arts, and on first inspection his position seems to correlate with Plato’s
recommended procedure for the ‘skilful practitioners’ of art. However, the
two positions do diverge around their accounts of what happens to the
form-idea as it is realised. For Plato, the adoption of his method was no
guarantee of good art: the artist needed a ‘corresponding discernment’
regarding what was most appropriate for the audience concerned, and the
FORM (& MATTER) 41
…what design [disegno] needs, when it has derived from the judgement
the mental image of anything, is that the hand, through the study and
practice of many years, may be free and apt to draw and to express
correctly… whatever nature has created. For when the intellect puts
forth refined and judicious conceptions, the hand which has practised
design [disegno] for many years, exhibits the perfection and excellence
of the arts as well as the knowledge of the artist.12
The consequences of this are manifold; it separated the task of the artist
from the production of objects, perhaps most famously and decisively in
architecture, where Vasari argued that ‘…because its designs [disegno] are
composed only of lines, which so far as the architect is concerned are
nothing else than the beginning and the end of his art…all the rest… is
merely the work of carvers and masons.’13 Matta-Clark often discussed the role
that drawing played in his work, though his use of the term ‘drawing’
demands a more expansive definition than usual, in order to accommodate
the ‘simple cut or series of cuts [that] act as a powerful drawing device…’14
Although not strictly interchangeable with the activity of cutting, his
drawing was frequently the work of carver and mason: in an interview with
Liza Bear, he discussed the similarities and differences between a cut seen
as a graphic thing only, and a cut deployed as an analytical probe, and in
this regard, his notion of drawing carries some of the intellectual operations
included in Vasari’s disegno while simultaneously exceeding the sphere of
architectural activity that Vasari sanctioned.15
Matta-Clark’s drawing enacted something of a reductio ad absurdum on the
principles of architectural form as these had developed since the
Renaissance. By lodging itself firmly in the stuff of the world, his drawing
deliberately attempted to carry over principles from the realm of the
intellect and maintain them in things: ‘T HE IDEA IS TO SUPERIMPOSE
DRAWING ON STRUCTURE.’16 Drawing thus became a property of the thing
itself, and not just a generating principle: ‘…it’s as much the idea of a cut as
the functional construct that interests me.’17 What is challenged by this
reductio is the alleged reduction or purification of form, by demonstrating
that ‘form’ cannot be located, or that it must substantially overflow any
single location in the material object, in the architectural disegno, or in the
42 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
4 Agar pieces in process and Incendiary Wafers (top), and Museum (bottom), 1970–1
This series of works involved ‘batches of undefinable stuff…constantly brewing in large
vessels or fermenting in large flat trays’. A number of these pieces were displayed in
Museum, mimicking the typical arrangement of a nineteenth century picture gallery. In
front of the wall Matta-Clark hung further stuff from a chaotic lattice of vines; these
moldering pieces were supplemented with a microscope, provided to allow the visitor to
make more detailed inspections of the life of the agar-matter.
FORM (& MATTER) 45
Both projects actively demonstrated a life-cycle of the ‘cultivating’ process beyond the
specific ‘Cooking’ work of ‘time and the elements,’ and thus challenged the claims these
processes made for timeless supremacy. In contrast to the Agar pieces, they also clearly
articulated the ‘Selection’ and ‘Preparation’ operations, by arranging easily recognisable
debris into deliberate compositions.
FORM (& MATTER) 47
48 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
—Gordon Matta-Clark39
— Gordon Matta-Clark 1
I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE WORD ‘SPACE’ MEANS… I KEEP USING IT. BUT
I’M NOT QUITE SURE WHAT IT MEANS.
— Gordon Matta-Clark2
last for long. These two clarities work together, allowing spaces to be
comprehended and navigated while preventing a once-and-for-all account,
a balance that echoes Lefebvre’s analysis: ‘This pre-existence of space
conditions the subject’s presence, action and discourse, his competence and
performance; yet the subject’s presence, action and discourse, at the same
time as they presuppose this space, also negate it.’ 9
Although Matta-Clark’s projects have frequently been read as a negation
pure and simple, it is important to repeat that his work was primarily
constructive, and that the negation they involved was similar to Lefebvre’s
positive negation, encouraging the individual’s broader experience beyond
narrowly sanctioned responses. For Lefebvre as for Matta-Clark, to
acknowledge this relationship between human activity and the production
of space was to acknowledge not only the general contingency of space in
contrast to modernism’s idealist a priori version, but also to address its
inherently social and political dimensions.
Matta-Clark championed the importance of moving through the building
dissections: ‘You have to walk,’ he told Judith Russi Kirshner. He related
the importance of moving to the way in which these projects are
experienced:
There are certain kinds of pieces that can be summarized —or at least
characterized—very quickly from a single view. And there are other
ones which interest me more, finally, which have a kind of internal
complexity which doesn’t allow for a single and overall view, which I
think is a good thing. I like it for a number of reasons, one of which is
that it does defy that category of a sort of snapshot scenic work and
that whole object quality that is with all sculpture.10
modernism. Bodily movement per se does not guarantee that the whole
object is defied in this way, and it thus becomes important to distinguish
between the kinds of spatiality that can be associated with movement. The
philosopher John Rajchman distinguishes between ‘intensive’ and
‘extensive’ spatiality, which can be strongly related to Matta-Clark’s two
complexities.11
The overt and immediate can be associated with Rajchman’s ‘extensive’
spatiality; however complex, these qualities are present to sight, they could
be mapped out and understood mathematically. In contrast, Matta-Clark’s
covert and durational complexity chimes well with Rajchman’s ‘intensive’
spatiality: the latter is based on and establishes a kinaesthetic relationship
between a space and our movements in and through it, it is experiential,
partial, experimental, and cannot be mapped out either in advance or after
the event: the closest we can get is an ‘informal diagram’ that, like covert
complexity, does not completely organise space.12 Intensive space involves
those aspects of the body and the mind that operate outside the intellect, a
configuration that permits and sustains ‘extensive’ space, allowing
contingent understanding (form-moment) while defying the whole object.
Matta-Clark’s valorisation of works with ‘internal complexity’ can be
positioned around this interplay, which conditions his demand ‘you have to
walk’, such that this bodily movement must enjoy intensive as well as
extensive spatiality. Rajchman appears confident that such kinaesthetic
relations do occur, and his interest lies in the possibilities this opens up for
artworks; he implicitly makes a distinction between modernist work on the
one hand, which is limited to and by ‘extensive’ spatiality, and what he
refers to as fully ‘modern’ work on the other; this enjoys an ‘experimental’
spatiality by overcoming modernism’s requirement for experience to be
underwritten by intellectual accountability. In contrast, Matta-Clark
identified the possible co-presence of intensive and extensive spatiality as
desirable but by no means certain or easily attained, and his œuvre explored
how such relations might be brought about by artworks, and the
relationship between these two modes of experience occurs in a subtly
different way in Matta-Clark’s œuvre.
—Gordon Matta-Clark13
6 Open House (also known as Drag-on or Dumpster), 1972. (The image opposite is from
one of several reconstructions, this one recreated in 2007 for Gordon Matta-Clark &
Rirkrit Tiravanija at David Zwirner, New York.) There was a performance that took place
in Open House at the project’s opening, and also a film of Open House made by Matta-
Clark (super 8; colour, silent, 41mins, 1972)
Discrete violations of the familiar were played out along various axes in this project:
domestic+urban (familiar domestic architecture of the doors positioned out of doors in the
street); domestic+urban/waste (domestic architectural elements positioned in a
recognisable waste container); ‘form’+waste (the old doors effectively ‘belonged’ in the
dumpster—it was their ‘proper’ place, but they failed to adopt their ‘proper’ form, that is to
say the recognisable ‘bad’ form of a heap of rubbish, by being organised instead
according to conventional architectural rules.
SPACE (& TIME) 61
62 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
without walls, a labyrinth without any one route hidden within false paths,
without any ‘right’ answer; a labyrinth within which one would have to
struggle, admittedly, but this was a struggle that would permit a fuller
experience:
which it serves as other. This strategy denies the possible struggle that
would involve constant give and take between different spatial
complexities, and is instead based on a desire to be situated beyond the
‘whole’ system of the labyrinth that effectively replaces it with another (the
outside, or full knowledge of the labyrinth), playing into the trap of self-
defeating alternatives that Matta-Clark noted, either here or there.
Rather than adopting this strategy of replacement, a life that knows no
limits (Bataille) can be lived as a trajectory within a dynamic labyrinth, where
one is neither inside nor outside, but rather moving between and
contingent. If Open House can be considered as a labyrinth, it can only be so
as a playful version of this dynamic model, where the openness refers less
to the fact that it was open to the sky, and more to the open exploration of
space that it encouraged. There was no ‘goal’ or escape involved, and the
project’s limited overall size did nothing to dilute the labyrinthine
experience; rather it emphasised the point that ‘getting out’ was not the
point, a visitor would have known that the outside was not far away. Once
inside, one could stay there, exploring over and over,20 without the thread
of knowledge to structure this experience, all the while encountering
different people who together animated the spaces: as with much of his
work, it expected this social dimension, the ‘open house’ as open invitation,
a social event, a social space. Rajchman reiterates the difference between
extensive and intensive spatiality around a similar theme: ‘social space can
never be fully drawn from “Cartesian coordinates”, since it always
“envelops” many “infraspaces” that introduce distances and proximities of
another, nonquantifiable sort.’21
The ease with which Open House exceeds its physical size highlights how
the two different notions of labyrinth bear on the same project. Matta-
Clark expressed that this particular approach was taken up more generally
across his œuvre; he was ‘WORKING BEYOND INSIDE OUTSIDE BY SEEING
WITHIN’. 22 For the overt and immediate labyrinth model of Daedalus,
identification of an outside is brought about through the valorisation of
knowledge following its separation from desire or ‘being’. In contrast, the
covert and durational labyrinth possesses no outside in this sense, for the
outside that can really provide an escape is already contained within, further
than the furthest spatial distance, its attainment requiring instead a switch
from extensive spatiality to intensive spatiality.23 These terms have a further
resonance here: any knowledge of Open House gained from an overview (an
extensive spatiality of geometry and measure, ‘visual knowledge’) would
have only been of marginal bearing on the ‘intensive’ or experimental
experience of visitors, which was underwritten by a spatiality reliant less on
vision than on other modes of navigating (or involving non-optical vision
at most, because the spaces themselves were generally so small that most
SPACE (& TIME) 65
visual experience was reduced to the same range as that of touch, providing
no reassuring warning of what was coming up while exploring).
While Open House could offer a manifest demonstration of this difference
between intensive and extensive spatiality, the promise of such spatial
experimentation-exploration was championed more generally by the
Anarchitecture group, of whom Matta-Clark was part: Anarchitecture
emphasised that their interest was not in the attainment of knowledge (not
in escape) nor in changing human faculties, but rather involved exercising
them all:
he was also interested in emphasising the role that could be played by other
kinds of time, other temporalities.
The contrast [in Splitting, between the whole and the detail–sw]… I
think of it in terms of time as well as scale, because there’s obviously a
kind of detailed concern with the event… It’s a kind of strange
contradiction, something that doesn’t fit into performance as such
because there has been no specially isolated activity, so the whole
place and its constituent actions form the record. I suppose in that
sense it’s very clear that the activity and the detailed time are part of
the piece.26
to interpret the other.30 That said, his own focus is to register the
importance of incorporated memory. He acknowledges that while this is
more or less traceless, it is charged with important tasks: ‘Every group…
will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are
most anxious to conserve. They will know how well the past can be kept in
mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body.’31
Similarly, Matta-Clark felt such habitual or bodily memory to be
‘infinitely more accurate than all of the machine vocabulary’, as it could
never be given up to the intellect. He stressed the resistance that this could
offer, where the confrontation with time could occur beyond
understanding.
When confronted with time, with the real mysteries of time, there’s a
kind of central nervous spasm that takes place when you really get
into it, which just amounts to a sort of all-consuming gag, all
consuming quake of some sort which you really don’t understand.32
This preoccupation with the real mysteries of time, the resistance to the
machine vocabulary, and so on, indicate Matta-Clark’s concern with the
broad treatment or rather the erasure, of time during the modern period. At
an everyday level, the intensification of experience that characterises
modernism, where modern inventions are typically taken to have reduced
the experience of time and distance, has frequently been made out to be
approaching simultaneity.33 Lefebvre suggests that this is symptomatic of a
general tendency to conflate time and space, which has become chronic as
a consequence of the ever-increasing domination of scientific thought that
he associates with modernity: ‘With the advent of modernity time has
vanished from social space. It is recorded solely on measuring-
instruments… This manifest expulsion of time is arguably one of the
hallmarks of modernity.’34
Matta-Clark’s firm advocacy of the ‘fine memory device’ can be grasped
in this context. To recognise and maintain the bodily aspect of memory
could prevent its co-option and ultimate erasure by modernism’s purifying
drive, by encouraging a different kind of measure, not tied to the generality
and repeatability of measuring-instruments but associated instead with the
individual human being. To put this another way, individual memory
contested the immanence required by modernist art and architecture, it
could disrupt their portrayal as static object.
Matta-Clark’s motivations are echoed in Connerton’s analysis, where the
habitual memory of the body operates in the gap between knowledge and
action; mere knowledge of something gives only imperfect mastery. 35 In
Matta-Clark’s register, mere knowledge would dull the accuracy of
SPACE (& TIME) 69
I started out with an attempt to use multiple images to try and capture
the ‘all-around’ experience of the piece. It is an approximation of this
kind of ambulatory ‘getting-to-know’ what the space is about.
Basically it is a way of passing through the space. One passes through in a
number of ways; one can pass through by just moving your head; or [by]
simple eye movements which defy the camera. You know it’s very
easy to trick a camera, to outdo a camera. With the eye’s peripheral
field of vision, any slight movement of the head would give us more
information that the camera ever had. 40
way in which such experience can be accounted for. This can have far-
reaching consequences. In place of linear narrative, where systematic
exploration produces increasing clarity on its way to ‘truth’, the inscription
of false movement not only accepts that an overall account of these
projects cannot be arrived at, it upsets the priority of Cartesian co-ordinates
and rationality and all that this traditionally supports.
The traditional expectations of space, time and memory, and the role
they play in sustaining such a world view, were also raised by Matta-Clark in
the context of a number of different projects, which developed through his
interest in archaeological exploration. These develop questions about
‘truth’, narrative and movement, as well as expanding on his response to
modernist conceptions of space and time, as he attempted to use—and
alter—the latter to inform and extend beyond commonly accepted limits.
Archaeology
…BEGINNING NEW YEAR’S MORNING ’71 A 4’X 8’X 6’ SUBCITY NON-
STRUCTURAL DIG WAS MADE BELOW 112 GREENE ST … WORKING WITH
THE FACTS AND FABRIC OF BUILDING SPACE TIME WELL USES
ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENTS TO EXTEND A ROOM BEYOND ITS COMMON
LIMITS AND IMPLIED PERSPECTIVES BENEATH THE FLOOR.
—Gordon Matta-Clark47
This hope that art would relocate to the sewers repeats the challenge to
the traditional relationship between art object and impassive observer that
was issued by Time Well, Open House and later works. In his subsequent
76 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
expeditions there was an increasing interest in both the form of the act of
searching, and in the role of memory as an aspect of the quest and the
discoveries made. These can be drawn out with reference to Matta-Clark’s
interest in archaeology: in contrast to what he perceived as the
systematising methods of traditional archaeology, his approach was more
concerned to show the past as incomplete, fragmentary, and involved in
other, non-chronological relationships with the present.
Matta-Clark’s interest in archaeology cannot be explained as simply
riding the growing wave of interest in history. Admittedly, following its
long eclipse by modernism, history was visibly back in architecture by the
early 1970s, though this occurred mostly through the application of certain
recognisable motifs, and there was no consistency within architecture or
artistic practice regarding what history meant. Although Dan Graham could
comment that ‘a Matta-Clark “deconstruction,” unlike “minimal,” “pop” or
“conceptual” art, allows an historical time to enter,’49 the nature of this
‘historical time’ must be further distinguished from the models emerging
within contemporary architectural debate. Matta-Clark’s search for forgotten
spaces uncovered a different and more complex kind of space and
(historical) time than that associated with architectural remains.
The kind of discovery that Matta-Clark hoped to make expressly
exceeded the prosaic concerns of traditional archaeology; ‘I find
archaeology baffling, impossible’ he stated.50 In contrast, he linked his
belief in human beings as a ‘fine memory device’ to an archaeology of a
different kind, which he referred to as ‘living archaeology’.51 Traditional,
baffling archaeology employed the methods of classical science, amassing
evidence to substantiate an objective version of events in the past,
promoting anonymity around such work in order to ease subsequent
liaisons with the discipline of history the way it really was. Living archaeology,
rather than attempting the recovery of forgotten spaces or objects by
recording them according to ‘accurate’ objective description, operated
according to a different kind of spatiality. Matta-Clark developed his
interest in exploration through projects such as Underground Paris (1977),
Substrait (1978) and Sous-sols de Paris (1977), which were attempts to enact
possible methods of this ‘living archaeology’. 52
Underground Paris comprises a set of four photocollages, each of which
documents a particular investigation undertaken by Matta-Clark at Les
Halles, the Ópera, St. Michel, and Notre Dame respectively (figure 7). Each
collage gives up a small amount of space towards the top of the
composition for a photograph of the particular site, below which are
collaged images taken from the particular exploration that took place in that
location. These vertical axes run through three horizontal zones that are
quietly legible in the strata of the collages: the horizontal extension of the
SPACE (& TIME) 77
7 (Following pages) Underground Paris, (Ópera, Les Halles, St. Michel & Notre Dame),
1977
8 (Above & opposite) Stills from Sous Sols de Paris (Super 8 and 16mm, B&W, sound,
18:40 min), 1977
In Sous sols de Paris there occur many repetitions and juxtapositions of both visual and
‘narrative’ motifs in the film language and events. Also, there is a gestural stammering,
with same camera movement run over different terrain. The movement suggested by the
cinematic image is frequently contrary to the actual movement of camera.
9 (Following page) Stills from Substrait (Underground Dailies) (16mm, colour and B&W,
sound, 30 mins), 1976
Substrait is more consistently and rigidly structured and edited than Sous-sols de Paris.
Each of its six sections is clearly identified and self-contained, each is introduced by a
clear caption, and each follows the same pattern, with an ‘introductory’ sequence, shot in
colour, that quickly changes to black and white as the particular subterranean location is
entered. On the whole, the protagonists are clearly identifiable and their involvement
does nothing to undo what each section possesses of a narrative structure. Camera
movement fairly consistently follows a documentary approach, sound and image can
both be made out and are generally synchronic, although the direct-sound inscribes off-
screen space that unsettles any straightforward spectatorial identification with the space
of the image.
82 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
SPACE (& TIME) 83
photography and stammering’,55 and opens these acts out across time, her
work maintains the observer, and the stammerer, along a linear temporal
axis. However, her introductory analysis stresses the enabling aspects of
stammering, how it works without strict adherence to the rules of ‘good
speech’: this bears more on the stammering within Matta-Clark’s
photocollages and filmic work, which is less interesting when read along
lines of anticipated hesitation than when it remains open and inventive.
Matta-Clark’s representations were neither about getting stuck in one place,
nor recovering one place, nor about escaping entirely, but about exceeding
any experience that occurs along a single temporal axis (however complex
the anticipation and retrieval of time along that axis might be). His concern
was to chart the search and discovery of these expeditions in order to
encourage an inventive non-chronological, non-linear time within
experience. In this context, stammering is enjoyed as an dynamic form of
representation that accommodates ‘error’ by failing to follow entirely the
expectations of ‘good’ speech, allowing access to non-sanctioned modes of
representation and experience, experience beyond systems of rules, a living
archaeology.
Matta-Clark acknowledged the influence of Anthony McCall’s expanded
cinema projects on his own attempts to record and represent his
explorations. The work of both artists attempted to involve the spectator in
ways that would unsettle their normal orientation by challenging their
relationship to ‘the real’, which as Malcolm Le Grice has argued, could no
longer simply be equated with the direct experience of things: ‘Some works
of Expanded Cinema made it evident that if the concept of “the real” is to
retain any currency it cannot be based on the unproblematic tactile
physicality of objects—their evident presence.’56 Whereas McCall’s work
enacts this literally, evacuating external content from the projection space
in favour of a direct experience of the formal manipulation of beams of
light, Matta-Clark’s projects attempt to open gaps in the unproblematic
tactile physicality and ‘history’ of objects through these stammering and
collaging techniques which offer unusual contact with external content:
moments of unsettling occur when an observer’s normal orientation
devices associated with ‘the real’ begin to fail, inviting a contribution to
their re-establishment through which individual circumstances and
possibilities can be inscribed.
McCall expanded the traditional cinema screen, which became co-
extensive with the total projection space explored by a spectator: Matta-
Clark represented his own explorations by attempting to develop an
‘experience-optics’ that reconfigured the screen differently. This kind of
reconfiguration was itself prefigured in Matta-Clark’s Camera Obscura project
in Santiago, illustrated in figure 2 and discussed earlier. In that project, the
SPACE (& TIME) 85
The expanded notions of time, space, matter and form that Matta-Clark’s
œuvre offers cannot be sustained without the work of the observer, a
situation that contrasts with the passivity expected of modernism’s viewer.
Matta-Clark’s œuvre developed a number of strategies to contest the
expectations of the relationship between this viewer and a work, and
moved instead towards more contingent relationships where the observer’s
body became significant in the establishment and maintenance of the
various complexities introduced in previous chapters.
If we return to Matta-Clark’s conversation with Donald Wall that
introduced the earlier discussion of archaeology, we can begin to get a
better understanding of his priorities regarding the relationships between
work and gallery. The intention to use his artistic activities as a way of
‘working back into society from beneath’ clarifies that his principal concern
was not just to address the gallery-going public, but to have a broader
impact on people generally. He continued: ‘Although the original idea
involved possible subversive acts, I am now more interested in the act of
search and discovery. This activity should bring art out of the gallery and
into the sewers.’1
While Matta-Clark’s interest in bringing art ‘out of the gallery’ echoed
growing contemporary criticism of the gallery system that culminated in the
institutional critique of the 1970s and 80s, his projects were not a simple
subversion of that system. It must be emphasised that his central concern
was to expand human experience by encouraging participation (the act of
search and discovery), and that for him, simply working in non-gallery
spaces would not necessarily overcome the reductive situation of modernist
aesthetics, as he emphasised to Judith Russi Kirshner: ‘even…the people
who have escaped the so-called “sculpture habit” by going into some sort
of landscape, or extra-gallery, extra-museum type of territorial situation
[repeat the whole object quality that is with all sculpture.]’2
90 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
While Matta-Clark’s stated interest in bringing art ‘out of the gallery and
into the sewers’ 9 implicitly echoes this criticism of the gallery as an ‘ideal
space’, his projects were not a simple reversal of Plato’s schema. His real
target was the system that these spaces stood in for. The allegory of the
cave from Plato onwards (Republic VII) has accumulated a number of
interpretations; it is frequently taken to emphasise the Western tradition’s
privileging of idea over the sensual and the material, and the notion of
‘progress’ or ‘civilisation’ linked to its accomplishment. Within the
hierarchy of the senses that is established and sustained by Plato’s cave,
vision occupies an ambiguous position, as it is apparently privileged over
the other bodily senses, only to be undermined, along with these, as the
92 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Body
The Platonic distinction between the material world and the metaphysical,
ideal realm was reinforced by the emergence in modern science in the
seventeenth century, with particular consequences for the body, which was
objectified and split from the mind in a move epitomised by Cartesian
Dualism and widely repeated elsewhere. As Connerton remarks, ‘[t]he
ground was prepared for this backgrounding of our bodily practices by
modern natural science. The mechanisation of physical reality in the exact
natural sciences meant that the body was conceptualised as one object
among others in an object-domain made up of moving bodies which obey
lawful processes. The body was regarded as a material thing: it was
materialised. Bodily practices as such are here lost from view…’20 The
particular laws of nature governing the movement of bodies per se were
progressively applied to the behaviour and interaction of human bodies.
Natural laws quietly governed social norms, where the behaviour of the
materialised human body became increasingly predicated on ‘the propriety
of gravity and the upright viewer. This is the etiquette of normal social
discourse’.21
These laws were not only applied to the body, but extrapolated to
predicate many of the spatial frameworks introduced earlier. Considering
‘the act of search and discovery’ that Matta-Clark linked to Underground
Paris, for example, the illustrations in figure 7 demonstrate how these acts
are traditionally linked to implied notions of going-down, going-under,
going-back, phrases which rely on the cardinal directionality of the body
that is established through its relationship to gravity, and which grants
primacy to the vertical axis. Along this axis in turn, primacy is traditionally
granted to the going up, with the head qua location of thought being
USER (OBSERVER/VIEWER) 95
privileged over base stuff found down there. Moreover, the notion that going
down is to go back, to uncover the foundations, and so on, relies on a
naturalised temporality and epistemology that echo the consequences of
Plato’s invocation to leave the Cave. Needless to say, this same framework
of cardinal directionality has traditionally predicated the language of
architecture. This framework’s axes of space and of time, and the
assumptions made by the laws that deploy them, are implicitly called into
question by Matta-Clark’s projects and his proposals for living archaeology,
in order to allow other locational possibilities to be enjoyed.
To start from both ends and every side is to exceed the framework of
cardinal directionality, a process of discrete violation where that which is
taken for granted, here gravity and verticality, is maintained and
supplemented with other experiences. In the process of discussing his
interest in the additive nature of human experience, William James argued
the importance of areas which are not subjected to Newtonian gravity, and
clarifies the kind of relationship that they might enjoy with our experience
of the world:
The possibilities and the demands that this can bring to the spectator
may be explored initially through the invitation to overcome traditional
expectations of static disinterest: instead movement, exploration and
invention are encouraged.
96 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
…when you were in [Conical Intersect] as you move from floor to floor
that had been cut out, your normal sense of gravity was subverted by
the experience. In fact, when you got to the top floor and you looked
down through an elliptical section in the floor that was cut out, you
would look down through the fragments of a normal apartment space,
but I had never seen anything like it. It looked like – almost as though
it were a pool. That is, it has a reflective quality to it and a surface –
but the surface was just the accumulation of images of the spaces
below it. It had had this strange reversal.25
of the gravity that links the human body to such a Cartesian space and
quietly but effectively holds the whole system together.
spectator would neither just occupy the centre nor just gain the outside.
This bicentric situation, to give it a name, contests the existence of any
single location from which orientation must be established, and instead
pushes the establishment of orientation onto the moment of experience
itself. This exceeds not only the Cartesian account, which grants mind
primacy over matter, but also the primary phenomenological relationship
between perceiving subject and the horizon of the world. Moreover, it runs
contra Plato with regard to the direction of judgement, by establishing itself
both inside and outside the cave.
The consequences of such an ongoing formation and dissolution return
us to the main concern of this chapter, spectatorial participation, and
indicate both what is at stake in Matta-Clark’s œuvre, and the price to be
paid if this aim is to be achieved. For William James, whose own metaphor
for accrued experience provided it with both a ‘real’ core and a cloudy
periphery, experience occurs prior to the establishment of traditional binary
categories, and the constitution of subject and object is contingent on that
experience. This division of experience into thought or thing depended on
the addition of other, previous experiences to it, a process that would
involve the various models of memory that were rehearsed in the previous
chapter.
To valorise this sort of experience is to push spectatorial involvement
beyond the expectations of modernism’s disinterested observer and the
White Cube gallery space that both houses and stands as a metaphor for the
paradigmatic experience that ought to occur there. Matta-Clark’s express
interest in bringing art out of the gallery and into the sewers must not then be
understood as a strategy of replacement, a simple spatial switch or reversal
that maintains the previous overarching ontological system intact while
changing the terms (non-gallery for gallery, and so on), but rather a strategy
that offers the observer an alternative that is different in kind. While
William James’ account of core and peripheral rules for experience is
helpful in explaining the impact of Matta-Clark’s projects on the observer,
Matta-Clark’s discrete violation works more deliberately with the
misapplication of rules, not simply to upset but to reposition the ‘core’
according to different frames. For Matta-Clark the additive production of
division, whether in the filmic works that have been discussed in this
chapter or found more broadly across his œuvre, repeats the strategic
aspects of James’ account, while providing for a spectatorial involvement
that enjoys bringing together different modalities of experience that cannot
be easily assimilated back into the expectations of ‘core’ rules.
While this chapter has focused on the experience of the observer and the
ways in which Matta-Clark’s projects offer to radically reconfigure the
conceptual framework for their experience, these issues impact elsewhere.
USER (OBSERVER/VIEWER) 103
In particular, they clearly raise questions for the creative process that is
charged with such reconfiguration, and the impact of these deliberations
extends beyond the user (viewer, observer) to the artist and architect,
challenging assumptions regarding the production of their work in a variety
of ways. Indeed, it acts as a reminder of the increasingly atrophied
understanding of process itself, and points to the relationship between the
processes of production and judgement, and their thoroughgoing role in
the fuller spectatorial involvement that Matta-Clark sought. This contrasts
with the model assumed by modernism, where the passive observer was
expected to commune instantly with an autonomous art object, the
judgement of which could be predicted and policed by clearly defined
medium-specific disciplinary rules; these rules in turn clearly identified
disciplinary boundaries and distinguished between them. In order to
develop these issues, the following chapter will examine Matta-Clark’s own
particular approach to processes of production and judgement.
5 Process
It was not only the spectator who was called into question by this
working activity; there are a number of other significant factors that open
out from this point. In contrast to the wholeness, autonomy and stasis
expected of most modernist work, Matta-Clark’s suggestion that his work
was incomplete and perhaps best considered as a form of theatre calls into
question not only the audience’s relation to the work, but goes behind the
expectations of stasis to question the relation of the artist, and of authority,
to the creative process itself.
Much avant-garde art activity during the 1960s attempted to disrupt the
assumptions that lay behind modernism’s autonomous object. The results
of this move away from object-based art cannot simply be read in the
106 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
It’s true that the principal altération is not that undergone by the
support of the drawing. Drawing itself develops and becomes richer
in diverse ways, by accentuating the deformation of the object in all
senses (sens).17
Addressing the object ‘in all its senses’, Matta-Clark’s œuvre undertook
an ongoing altération that ran comfortably across a variety of media and
disciplinary expectations. The full potential of altération exceeds the partial
decomposition of any particular work, by opening onto the heterogeneous
support involved in the various artistic and architectural rules, and social
mores, governing the production, positioning and maintenance of that
object in its ‘proper’ place. Understood in this context, Matta-Clark’s
altération is not a simple attack on the autonomous art-object or its
architectural equivalent, it is an approach that demonstrated the
assumptions complicit in the broader support required for such autonomy.
Lefebvre makes a related criticism when he suggests that the blank sheet of
paper on which an architect may make their first sketch is no more
innocent than the plot of land they are given to build on, or indeed the way
they imagine space during the design process;18 to attack the paper may well
get to the ‘support’ of the drawing, but it would leave the architect’s
disciplinary support unaffected.
Within the various altérations that were involved in Matta-Clark’s building
dissections, for example, the cutting stage was not simply a low blow
against building fabric: the principal altération occurred beyond the
buildings’ physical changes, in order to deform architecture’s broader
support, which usually remained hidden from the everyday, sanctioned
architectural experience. As such, Matta-Clark’s operations here
demonstrated the richness and diversity that Bataille hoped for, by not
simply abandoning architectural principles, but by using them as part of a
broader technique of rule breaking. Similar strategies can be read in other
moments of altération associated with these projects: rules are not simply
broken, but deformed by being applied beyond their sanctioned sphere, or
out of step with their usual sequence of operation, such as the cut of
Splitting, which deliberately misapplied the imaginary ‘sectioning’ of a
building through its physical fabric—it inscribed a view usually only
PROCESS 111
involvement: one broad tranche of this new work was concerned with
performance.
environment, other work was located firmly in the gallery itself. In both, his
overarching concern with location was as a ‘uniquely cultural complex in a
given social fabric’, where the schizophrenia harboured by the ‘internal
dependencies’ underlying that location were revealed through the processes
of altération.
Matta-Clark’s project in the Museo Nácional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, for
example, installed a camera obscura mechanism in a public museum building.
The camera’s traditional sphere of operation, in both actual and
metaphorical usage, was at most a domestic space, and the experience to be
had there was to be enjoyed by a private, isolated individual. Matta-Clark’s
potential renovation of this model of the private individual has already been
examined; beyond this, by mocking up a camera through the spaces of the
museum, the project also highlighted how these particular assumptions also
predicated the traditional role of the art gallery or museum, which
accommodated the essentially private moments of communion between
this disinterested individual with the bounded work of art. The Santiago
piece unsettled this rather cosy model of aesthetic judgement by playing out
the extent to which the public art institution and the private individual were
intertwined: instead of the (allegedly) unmediated image available within the
traditional dark room, visitors to this project would encounter the path of
mirrors running through the museum. Although there was a notional
viewing position (basement urinal), the transmission could be picked up en
route in various other spaces within the building, as can be seen in figure 2.
These other spaces were also partially reflected in the ‘final’ image, and
would combine, along with the potential presence of other observers, as an
interference pattern.
Although the Santiago piece was disruptive of the art institution, literally
and metaphorically de-architecturing it along with the spectatorial
conditions of aesthetic judgement and the ‘proper’ behaviour associated
with this, the fact that it took place through a public building is not
sufficient to substantiate the claim that it was accessible to or engaged the
public. Away from any simple conflation of ‘public space’ and public
involvement (and equally away from any simple retort that because the
Museo was closed awaiting refurbishment would mean it was no longer a
public space) the importance of this project was that it rehearsed the
complex cultural aspects of this relationship as they occurred in a social
fabric.
Matta-Clark’s interest in these relationships between public and private
motivated a number of projects where they were explored through the
complication of the (apparently) clearly demarcated ‘domestic’ realm, which
again must not be conflated to numerous projects within his œuvre which
occurred in domestic settings. It was the process of the work that mattered,
PROCESS 117
not the building type he was working on; late in 1975, he would still stress
to his lawyer, Jerald Ordover, ‘[i]f anything emerges to cut up, I’ll go
anywhere anytime.’30 Any motivation to work on ‘dwellings’ per se was an
aspect of his broader interest in the social fabric, and must be taken as
political rather than typological. More instructive of his approach to the
domestic were projects such as Homesteading, or his 1973 performance-film
Clockshower, where recognisably domestic activities were transposed to very
public sites (figure 10). Writing to the authorities at St.Mark’s church, the
proposed site for Homesteading, Matta-Clark outlined his intentions:
The activity will involve building a wall out of urban junk… once I
have built a wall it will provide a setting for some very simple
‘domestic’ activities. I will work, eat, and clean around this
maintaining this area around the wall… Since I consider the whole
process my performance Other people will come in…the audience,
pedestrian and actors…are all naturally combined by the character and
location of the activity…The total effect will be a home-street
cycle…growing from and returning to the garbage bin.31
‘Directional Law’
Matta-Clark’s directional law, allied to his working process, countered
various approaches that attempt to establish judgement against pre-existing
criteria, and that are typical of the idealism associated with modernist art
and architecture. The architectural historian Peter Collins has discussed
‘pure’ law and compromise, arguing that the solipsism implied in
(jurisprudential) idealism must be reconciled with the everyday situation of
the world. Of interest in the present context, Collins links the implicit
political aspect of this negotiation with the emergence and ongoing
involvement of the professions in the judgement process. Matta-Clark’s
directional law also involves these various aspects, while offering an
alternative to the situation that Collins describes here:
The distinction between justice and public policy is… the political
aspect of a dilemma… namely the problem of finding a just mean
between ‘minimum’ and ‘optimum’. ‘Justice’ is the optimum; but
perfect justice is only attainable in law (just as perfect harmony is only
attainable in architecture) when an individual’s right to pursue
happiness is unlimited by any other individual’s right to pursue his
own particular kind of happiness. This limitation is what brought the
professions into being, and still dictates their essential task.35
If you like the law, yet at the same time recognize that the ultimate law
cannot possibly exist, then wouldn’t it be better to talk about the
impossibility of law than run around being a lawyer practising law?
Better perhaps to discuss the impossibility of architecture than the
possibility of being an architect.38
Here particularly, this notion is found within Matta-Clark’s œuvre and its
critical reception. Throughout his career and following his death, Matta-
Clark faced accusations of violence from a variety of sources: although
most were reported anecdotally and in the general pejorative sense
associated with violence, Maud Lavin’s 1984 article in Artforum remains the
most thoroughgoing criticism of his work undertaken in terms that attempt
to articulate the nature of violence involved. Discussing Splitting, she argues
that ‘Matta-Clark’s dissected, abandoned building is a representational
system of destruction… By an act of destruction, Matta-Clark possesses a
home which is about to be demolished, and he substitutes his sign for ruin
for the actual imminent destruction.’39 She reads this sign as a pointer to
‘the individualistic power of the artist’40 that actually furthers the social
systems he criticised. Lavin’s argument is multi-faceted, though her own
conclusion is itself violent to the extent that it is law-preserving; summing
up, she suggests that Matta-Clark’s artistic process enacts ‘the ultimate
freedom of private ownership, possession through destruction’.41
Lavin’s conclusion relies on a notion of possession allied to the system
of private ownership that is motivated and governed by a logic of
possession-as-accumulation: any acts of deliberate destruction would be
fundamentally at odds with this logic, and the violence involved would be
taken as precipitating a straightforward material ruin. Although her
exploration points to the complex inter-relationships that projects such as
Splitting reveal, in her final analysis these inter-relationships are casual, and
her judgement defaults to the autonomous and prior logic of each of the
systems involved. All through these systems, there is an underlying belief in
prior wholeness and the priority of wholeness; Matta-Clark’s violence is
against this wholeness, and it occurs where Lavin identifies it—‘possession
through destruction’. However, to recall the over-and-over altération that
Matta-Clark’s projects enjoyed can highlight an important difference
between them and the underlying logic of Lavin’s analysis, which emerges
from the difference between actual material alteration and the principal
alteration this effected on the underlying systems themselves.
Lavin’s conclusion pits Matta-Clark’s work against the legal or socially
accepted norms of accumulative possession. He clearly recognised this
situation when observing his ‘ongoing challenge to the 9/10 legal property
structure’ that upsets the dictum possession is nine-tenths of the law. But
positioned without the logic of accumulation, observers are not pointed
toward Matta-Clark’s individual artistic authority but toward their own
relationship with the work, and to their simultaneous involvement as
individuals and as members of the public, having to wrest themselves from
Ward’s ‘grey zone’. Instead of being bound by contract to one position, an
individual’s situation in society would be redraughted as an ongoing
124 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
themselves are caught up in this changing situation and are part of its
ambiguity, or more strongly, its undecidability. Process for Matta-Clark
involved the undecidability both of the work and its evaluation; just as
process continues over and over, there is no singular private audience
position removed from this process; to accept the ambiguities of the grey
zone is also to negotiate the individual and social dimensions of audience
position.
This fuller notion of process has further implications. In his exploration
of systems to establish viewing position and judgement, architectural writer
Robin Evans suggests that ‘All acts of violence are illegible during
performance.’44 On Evans’s account, this is because one cannot tell which
phase of a process such acts belong to, nor what their outcome might be,
nor what their motivations were. While his assertions are commensurate
with the present account of Matta-Clark’s process, they also point beyond
the present discussion. If we were to reconsider Lavin’s criticisms of Matta-
Clark’s work in light of Evans’ position, it would involve asking whether,
and if so how, Matta-Clark’s is legible. Lavin’s argument is based on an
assumption that the act of violence has stopped, and that it is thus legible
as a violence manifest through destruction. But if we consider that the
‘performance’ has not ended, and that as part of any involvement as
‘audience’ it is necessary to determine how we might view the work, then
legibility cannot be attained until we have gone through the ordeal of the
undecidable. What Lavin’s criticisms begin to reveal is a broader discomfort
regarding the authorisation of legibility and the suggestion that all acts of
interpretation are inherently violent. While the discomfort associated with
the fear of the undecidable has produced untold versions where this ordeal
is somehow sidelined and looked after by higher authority (god, the legal
profession, the disciplines of art history, architecture, and so on), this
tendency arguably increases during the modern period. Indeed it is this
tendency to restrict the use of violence to some prior or outside control, to
sanction that violence and accept its outcome, which Lavin ultimately
defends.
Disciplinary authority operates, among other strategies, by maintaining
audience constitution and viewing position. The framing of views and
positioning of spectators attempted by various systems of aesthetics, for
example, already involves the whole judgement process and prior
(executive) violence that sustains it, hiding both aspects of process as they
have been discussed here (the ongoing process of making, and the process
of judgement), and presenting only the final work. Matta-Clark’s œuvre
challenged this position by revealing these aspects of process in everyday
situations. It could be suggested that the executive legislative theory of
architecture (which attempts to control how architecture is viewed and
PROCESS 127
Carol Goodden, who actually did the cutting, recounts how she ‘carefully
tagged each clump [of hair], like an archaeological dig, and then tied each
130 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
According to Carol Goodden ‘In 1972 he decided to make his hair a sculpture. He
wanted to grow [his hair] and have a wig made out of it so that he could always have it
when he wanted it. He grew his hair for over a year, never combing it so that it matted
and snarled… and ended up looking like he was wearing one of his agar pieces…
Finally on New Year’s I talked him into cutting his hair off.’
DISCIPLINE 131
132 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
piece (this was his idea) to a wire cage so that I could photograph it for
identification purposes to make a wig’.4 Whether phrenological or
archaeological, the broader implications of their approach occur in this
deployment of systematic measurement, exemplified particularly in the
identification of clumps of hair via the geometric mapping of Matta-Clark’s
cranium. More than a simple hair cut, the project begins to articulate the
relative successes and failures of such systematic measure, and the gap
between the clear diagrammatic approach and the hairy reality. The
unexpected ‘Medusa-like effect’ of the systematic process is significant, for
it opens the process up to a scrutiny it is normally saved from.
In Goodden’s photographs, Matta-Clark appears both humane and
monstrous at once; they are both composed portrait and caged beast or
gothic horror shot, and play out in miniature the struggle between human
rationality (traditionally associated with the mind and located inside the
skull, which Matta-Clark’s calm facial expression does nothing to upset)
and animal unpredictability, a collision between ideality and reality. Georges
Bataille’s work on systems shares many affinities with that of Matta-Clark;
he observed that any attempt to establish a system of common measure for
human beings was an attempt to ‘give a kind of reality to the necessarily
beautiful Platonic idea’. 5 But these photographs of Matta-Clark illustrate
Bataille’s broader point that ‘… each individual form escapes this common
measure and is, to a certain degree, a monster’.6
Bataille’s discussions of these monstrous Deviations of Nature take place
more or less on idealism’s own terms, and remain above the passage of
‘natural time’ (he discusses the human face and pebbles almost
interchangeably). To this analysis, Matta-Clark’s Hair adds other roles
frequently thrust upon ‘nature’, and provides a reminder of other modes
that this escape from the common-measure can adopt. On nature’s own
terms, it is beyond human control; however close to ‘ideal’ beauty an
individual might come, that proximity is only fleeting: memento mori. In spite
of this reminder, idealism enlists system and approaches nature as
controllable, understandable, and it is this encounter in particular that Hair
plays out.
The process of tagging tangles up the systematically ordered archaeology
of a year in the life of Matta-Clark’s hair: this attempt to discipline the scalp
involves an interesting conflict between lawful and lawless hair, where its
predictable growth rate produced untidy results. This, of course, was due to
Matta-Clark’s actions during the preceding year, ‘never combing [his hair]
so that it matted and snarled,… [he] ended up looking like he was wearing
one of his agar pieces…’ 7 Effectively, he granted his hair a quasi-
independence, demonstrating that it had a life of its own (despite being
dead), one that was resistant to the mores of social acceptability, resistant to
DISCIPLINE 133
When I bought those properties at the New York City Auction, the
description of them that always excited me the most was
‘inaccessible’. They were a group of fifteen micro-parcels of land in
Queens, left over properties from an architect’s drawing. One or two
of the prize ones were a foot [wide] strip down somebody’s driveway
and a square foot of sidewalk. And the others were kerbstone and
gutterspace that wouldn’t be seen and certainly not occupied. Buying
them was my own take on the strangeness of existing property
demarcation lines. Property is so all-pervasive. Everyone’s notion of
ownership is determined by the use factor.12
Not only did Reality Properties: Fake Estates respond to the ‘strangeness of
existing property demarcation lines’ and explore particular, related systems
of abstract spatialisation and their relationships to drawing and the world,
this project demonstrated various ways in which the roles of drawing and
viewing position are caught up in the wider socio-political establishment
and maintenance of authority. Not only did this project operate within such
systems, it also deployed something like a disciplinary working surface,
which can help to clarify how this analogy for architectural technique is
caught up in a wider network of relationships.
Like Hair, Reality Properties: Fake Estates involved both a performative and
a documentary phase; like Hair, the relationship between these two
moments is not clear-cut.13 Like Hair, Reality Properties: Fake Estates operated
according to the rules of a particular system: in this case, Matta-Clark
136 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Matta-Clark intended Reality Properties: Fake Estates to exceed the gesture of the
land purchase, though it is not clear in what format it was first exhibited. Some initial
thoughts shared with the journalist Dan Carlinsky indicate that he proposed a gallery-
based work involving written documentation and a full-size photographic work. The
implication was that these would establish a relationship with the third part of the work,
the plot of land itself, in a way that echoes the Site/Non-Site projects of Robert
Smithson. His intentions for exhibiting the project are uncertain; although they
developed beyond these early thoughts, they were still to involve a combination of
written and photographic work. In the version illustrated here, the project was
(re)presented in frames plot by plot through a juxtaposition of the architectural drawing
of the city block plan, the title deed, and a documentary photograph of the plot.
Broadly, each plot receives this same treatment: fourteen plots, fourteen frames. (The
fifteenth Estate has never been exhibited, as it is impossible to photograph.)
DISCIPLINE 137
became a buyer and played the spaces and processes of the real estate
system at its own game. His intention was not to make commercial gain
from his ‘investment’, but to demonstrate the mechanics of partition that
predicate the real estate market. His investment opportunity came about as
a result of the operations of systematic partition undertaken in the drawing
of an architect’s plans. The initial phase of Reality Properties: Fake Estates
operated by revealing the presence of ‘useless’ plots within the apparently
logical system of real estate itself. The mechanics of this process stem from
the representation of the properties on the architectural drawing of the city
block plan, which ignores a very real distinction between these ‘useless’
plots and their ‘useful’ neighbours. The partition of space indicated on the
city plans does not necessarily map the location in an entirely logical way.
Matta-Clark’s suggestions for (re)presenting the project demonstrate this
further. Although an early version of the project was exhibited while the
initial (buying) stage was still in progress, in what has accidentally become
the definitive version the project is generally (re)presented in frames plot by
plot, mostly juxtaposing the architectural drawing of the city block plan, the
title deed, and a documentary photograph of the plot: these are the frames
that can pick up the analogy of architecture’s working surface. Beyond the
differences immediately apparent between the media favoured by each of
these three discourses, a more thoroughgoing disparity exists between the
various modes of description that are brought together within each frame,
each mode ‘accounting for’ the plot in a different language, or according to
the rules of a different system. Architectural, legal, and documentary
(photographic) claims for the same property are juxtaposed: as a
consequence, three purportedly definitive systems are played off against
one another, though none gains the upper hand. Photographic ‘evidence’
(the camera never lies), architectural (geometric, orthographic) definition,
and legal ownership fail to coincide completely with the plots themselves,
an inconsistency stemming from the differing interests held by each
account. Following this failure to add up, it becomes apparent that there are
gaps between the parameters of the discourses that constitute each frame.
Just as the framed (re)presentations can clearly cope with this disparity,
so can the working surface of the real estate system. What Matta-Clark’s
project illustrates is that such systems do not usually hand over evidence of
disagreement to those consuming their products. The initial target of this
project was the system of real estate, where the ‘lot’, exemplar of private
property, appears at the intersection of the bureaucratic, legal and
economic systems identified by Lefebvre’s abstract space. In common with
most systems, this one works according to its own logic, developed in this
case to follow the economic system of exchange, which allows the market
to determine ‘value’ on its own terms by narrowing the definition of space
138 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
You mean you were interested in these spaces on some non-functional level?
Beyond the particular machinations of the real estate market, the project
also implicates certain accepted codes of behaviour: it operates in the gap
that Connerton observed between ‘code and execution’ where individual
habit-memory can flourish and open experience out beyond systematic
judgement. Here in particular, these codes implicate both the rights and
expectations that ownership bestows upon the legal proprietor: just as Hair
brushed aside certain expectations regarding appearance, Reality Properties:
Fake Estates called into question how we might behave in these and other
spaces (though here he operated strictly according to the rules of the game).
Behind the particularities of legal ownership or hirsute appearance, what is
more interesting is that Matta-Clark’s projects address and enlist the
apparent will to abstraction that is involved in the workings and behaviour
140 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Matta-Clark’s projects were not about the simple collapse of any particular
discipline. His response to architecture would demand the continuing—
though altered—role of propriety, operating with many different levels and
modes of disciplinary activity (both covert and overt), in order to challenge
the location from which authoritative judgement concerning architecture
might be issued. The projects just mentioned operate by drawing attention
to architecture’s attempts at total revelation (the establishment of a position
from which architecture can be produced and evaluated, but which only
architects can occupy), and they counter this by pointing to the existence of
various contingent (spatial) readings, thus allowing for an experience
neither foreclosed by one pre-established definition of space nor self-
defeating in its complexity.
user, the non-expert. That is to say, the structure of the law remained
unchanged. Consequently, the enormity of the paradigm shift that Watkins
observes in modern architecture appears to be overstated: ‘usefulness’
becomes the latest in a succession of attempts by architecture to provide
itself with grounds to claim unshakeable authority. Read as such, it no
longer carries an intrinsic moral imperative but becomes simply another
manifestation of the architectural debate concerning the appropriate style in
which to build.
‘Usefulness’ takes on the role previously occupied by ‘nature’, a concept
or force that appears to belong outside of architecture and to which both
the design and the judgement of architecture refers. However, the particular
dynamics of this relationship are not so straightforward. In fact, the laws of
architecture enjoy a sleight of hand at precisely this junction: rather than
being controlled by outside forces such as ‘nature,’ the discipline of
architecture gathers up and assumes control over a variety of processes
while passing this situation off as natural.
What architecture puts forward as ‘natural’ or common-sense judgement
is carefully policed to ensure that ‘we’, the users of architecture, continue to
take it for granted and accept that its authority is underwritten by an
outside force: but this state of affairs is in fact anything but natural.
Architecture deliberately obfuscates the mechanisms of judgement. While it
insinuates itself into our own common-sense judgement, a very different
process is operating behind the scenes, where the architectural profession
attempts to retain control over the practice of architecture: the complex
relationships between these two processes or economies are identified by
much of Matta-Clark’s œuvre.
These two economies are charged with accounting for very different
aspects of the architectural process: the covert, professional economy has
rarely been acknowledged, even within the profession itself. One exception
is Peter Collins, whose book Architectural Judgement was introduced in the
previous chapter. Collins is an apologist for this two-tier system, who sees
it as another natural phenomenon: ‘…the ‘aesthetics’ of any profession are
inseparably bound up with the nature of the profession itself’.22 Collins
raises these issues as he attempts to account for the difficulties faced by
non-experts when they have to evaluate the architectural process; he
observes the difficulties they experience reconciling price and value, and
goes on to argue that this situation is repeated whether they are faced with
architectural drawings or completed buildings. In both situations, he claims
the layman can’t appreciate the full value of architecture.
The dynamics of the situation Collins asserts are nothing new; the user’s
contingent experience and subsequent evaluation of a building must defer
to the architectural knowledge protected by the profession if it is to be
144 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
obligation, and distance themselves from art (as that which is not useful),
they admit and cover over a creative phase to their own internal structure.
Here again, Collins voices the traditional assumption that architecture
ought to be aligned with other learned professions: ‘…whatever the merits
of art for art’s sake, there is clearly no value in advocacy for the sake of
advocacy, or surgery for the sake of surgery, except as academic exercises.
If the practice of law and medicine are not in every respect social arts, they
are not arts at all; and the same may be said of architecture.’25 The paradox
of this assumption appears to be lost on Collins: his assertion sloughs off
the artistic (aesthetic) phase, which is retained by the profession; society
then gets what the profession determines to be its truthful, moral
expression, an architecture that is neither artful nor social.
During the period when Matta-Clark was working, the gulf this
assumption attempted to cover over became increasingly difficult for the
profession, and indeed for modernism as a whole, to ignore, and
consequently it became increasingly difficult for these disciplines to
maintain the moral high ground. Although there were some vigorous
challenges to disciplinary organisation and definition, the consequences of
many such challenges were quickly re-appropriated by the existing
disciplinary framework. Art historian Anne M. Wagner has examined the
dynamics of these renovations through the lens of Matta-Clark’s projects.
As part of her work to situate the latter within the broader context of 1970s
sculpture, she suggests that even the radical renovations to the disciplinary
consideration of sculpture continued to overlook the involvement of the
observer, and the general contingency and messiness that they bring. In
other words, these challenges pertained only to the ‘aesthetic phase’ of the
discipline, where rules and codes were disputed, while continuing to ignore
the contingent phase of the observer’s experience.
In contrast, Matta-Clark’s projects proved resistant to re-appropriation
(and indeed they continue to defy easy classification) by operating in both
phases of disciplinary economy. Moreover, they operated with the tacit
relationships between disciplines: as Wagner notes, although some 1970s
sculpture undid architecture at the level of function, Matta-Clark’s
dissections were ‘ready to sacrifice everything, including any claim on a
single identity as a purely sculptural work’.26 It is important to add, though,
that he was equally ready to include everything.27 His œuvre may represent an
all out challenge to the status quo, but it was not simply an all out attack on
architecture, and to read it as such, the way some have received (and
celebrated) his work as a straightforward attack on form or function, opens
it to the dangers of re-appropriation. To transpose an object from the
realm of one discipline (architecture) to another (sculpture) by erasing its
function or use was to miss the point: Matta-Clark’s work was not against
146 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
use, but rather it aimed to reorganise the grounds of authority. It was not
against architectural judgement, but rather against the way in which the
narrow and static definition of usefulness adopted by the architectural
profession had become petrified as a ‘visual vocabulary’ and put to work in
order to support that profession’s exclusive claim to architectural authority.
He reiterated his belief that his own projects were useful, and emphasised
how these considerations opened onto moral and aesthetic aspects of
judgement:
I do not think [that the building dissections are] useless since I am not
talking about use in the utilitarian sense. There is an issue here, and a
very important issue. It has to do with our responsibility for
evaluation, a responsibility which, for the creative individual, assumes
the pressure of a categorical imperative. The issue for modern
architecture… ‘International Style’, ‘Machine Age’, ‘revolutionary
architecture’, however you want to call it… is this: all these various
ideologies accept machine functionalism as a kind of visual
vocabulary, about which they can moralize in terms of the inevitable
needs. The morality that is rooted in such design mentality is valid.
The functional issue was chosen because it seemed the most critical
break from a lot of beaux-arts, historical garbage. It was valid for its
time. But how long has it been? Seventy years since any kind of radical
evaluation has gone on. And I think that’s the crux of the issue.28
13 Untitled Wall and Floor Cutting, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, Italy, 1975
This project comprised various interventions, including a wall cutting, a wire running
from the street to an internal courtyard, and crossing not only the gallery but also the
ancillary spaces such as offices and storerooms en route; and a floor piece (shown
here) consisting of a regular array of crosses dug in the floor.
148 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
owner, the consequences of these are that the work’s relationship to the
gallery structure (as building and as institution) are uppermost in his mind;
There are two aspects of this observation that warrant further discussion,
relating to architecture’s provision of all hard-shells. Nonas’ realisation
should not really have come as much of a surprise; since antiquity,
architecture has set itself up both as a collector of other disciplines, and as a
measure or regulator of these other fields. Indeed at the very beginning of
Vitruvius’s treatise, he asserts that ‘…it is by [the architect’s] judgement that
all work done by the other arts is put to the test.’34 Speaking for twentieth
century modernism, Giedion renews architecture’s claim for this
overarching status: ‘We have pointed out why architecture reflects the inner
tendencies of the time and therefore may properly serve as a general
index.’35
These various positions expose something assumed to be a truism
regarding architecture, a truism that Nonas repeats, namely that
architecture takes up its role as the enduring hard-shelled discipline par
excellence; not only does the architect assume an Archimedean, quasi-divine
viewpoint on the world when designing architecture, but the discipline of
architecture sets itself up in a similar unassailable extra-worldly location
from where it can issue judgement and put all other disciplines to the test.
But as Nonas hints, and as the Anarchitecture project endeavoured to
demonstrate, this situation is only symbolic, and architecture’s hard-shell is
not all it seems.
The work of architectural theorist Mark Cousins can help get behind
these appearances: exploring the distinction between what he terms ‘strong’
and ‘weak’ disciplines, he emphasises that these terms are not valorised, but
simply a reflection of the differences that exist between different fields.
Strong disciplines are those such as the physical sciences, with their clear
concern for objects (but notably, he also includes law here); weak
disciplines would include such examples as architecture and psychoanalysis.
One important consequence of Cousins’ distinction concerns the
152 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
14 Photographs collected (top row) and taken (bottom row) by the Anarchitecture group,
c.1974
The Anarchitecture show at 112 Greene St (9–22 March 1974), and the subsequent
article in Flash Art (June 1974, pp.70–71) included such material, as well as the
variations and permutations of the name of the discipline cited in the text opposite,
various references to architecture’s long history (such as The Phallus of Delos (c.
300BC) and the Renaissance architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (‘who had not
yet become a famous architect’) tending his sheep on a cold dark night in 1450 when
he receives ‘la divina revelazione’ for the centrally planned church), and images
referring to weather, decay, the recycling of ideas, the horizon, the moon and so on.
154 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
and the profession: in Kennick’s terms, we can either repeat the traditional
mistake and laugh it off, simply dismiss it as that which is conventionally
dismissed, or we can decide how to put it together, and take up the moral,
practical and aesthetic dimensions of this evaluation.
15 Photograph of the Anarchitecture table, which was used as the base for the invitation
to the Anarchitecture show, 112 Greene St, 9–22 March, 1974
156 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
—Gordon Matta-Clark1
We’ve passed through here before, but we haven’t quite finished. Although
Matta-Clark’s work with Anarchitecture, and his œuvre more broadly, called
traditional disciplinary boundaries and propriety into question in ways
already discussed, there is much more at stake in his enduring attention to
boundaries and determination to go passing through them than a simple
challenge to the architectural profession.
All the works discussed already can be approached in terms of their
impact on particular boundary or border relationships: those of the
bounded object (Hair, the building dissections); of bounded space (Reality
Properties: Fake Estates, Open House); of bounded disciplines or institutions
(Reality Properties: Fake Estates, Signs—Cosigns at Galleria Ala), of the
bounded subject (Santiago); the private or the public individual and the
urban and domestic realms (Homesteading, Clockshower, Garbage Wall); the
boundary between artifice and nature (Agar Pieces, Museum); also, the many
boundaries that feature in the exploration projects (the collages of
Underground Paris, or films such as Sous-sols de Paris and Underground Dailies,
which play on the boundaries between above and below, but also between
the archaeological, folkloric and bureaucratic boundaries, between official
history and ‘confronted’ time, between narrative progression and the
blackholes of ‘holey’ space); and so on.
In all these projects, Matta-Clark both acknowledged the need for
boundaries, and the need for their alteration: BETWEEN REDUCTION AND
COLLAPSE. He was uncomfortable with boundaries that were taken for
granted, never acknowledged or challenged; for him, boundaries needed
158 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
TRANSMITTED
TRANSMITTER
FIXED POINT
BEYOND WHICH SPACE IS VARIABLE ACCORDING TO PRESENCE OF
RECEIVERS 5
16 Traffic Game Board Game Centers and Dynamic Bourdies, annotated photographs
from the Anarchitecture period, c.1974
DISCRETE VIOLATIONS 161
162 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
demonstrating not only the establishment of the centred subject but also
offering an alternative understanding. As Matta-Clark himself stressed to
Donald Wall, the maintenance of subjectivity can productively involve its
undoing:
Many own homes, but don’t do anything to maintain them. It’s the
same with their own lives. Maintenance. It’s frightening. People
should at least be aware of the possibility of undoing self,
environment, and so forth.6
—Gordon Matta-Clark9
In order to explore the contribution that such a renovated ‘support’ might
provide for experience, it is helpful to refer to Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘To
Unsense the Subjectile’, in which he examines the artworks of Antonin
Artaud. The ‘subjectile’ of the title can initially be approximated to the
renovated ‘support’ legible across Matta-Clark’s œuvre. Although Derrida
addresses Artaud’s drawings, his discussion ranges across a variety of
terrain, and approaches many of the issues that have been brought into the
previous chapters.
Derrida addresses at length the complexities of the subjectile: of
particular interest here is the way that the subjectile can be understood to
be part of an operation of simultaneous maintenance and undoing: ‘…the
subjectile subjects itself to the surgery…[which] resembles a manual
demiurge at once aggressive and repairing, murderous and loving.’ 10 Linked to
this duality is an account of the subjectile as some sort of membrane or
skin, lying under an artwork, supporting it, and bearing the interrogation
that the work is subjected to: ‘the trajectory of what is thrown upon it
should dynamise this skin by perforating it, traversing it, passing through to
the other side: “after having exploded the wall of the problem,” as [Artaud]
says.’ 11 The trajectories begin on both sides, they come from under the
work and from the interrogations thrown at it: there might even be two
subjectiles,12 which are perforated, altered, in this act of traversal, yet are
again impossible to locate physically, being constantly made, unmade and
164 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
The contrast between this stage-set surface and the dynamic subjectile
highlights issues that are key to Matta-Clark’s relationship with architecture.
In a related criticism of the architectural profession’s mania for
homogenous accessibility, Lefebvre discusses the ‘“pure” and illusionary
transparency’ resulting from attempts to make ‘legible’ space: ‘Someone
who knows only how to see ends up… seeing badly. The reading of a space
that has been manufactured with readability in mind amounts to a sort of
pleonasm…’17 Lefebvre too blames the profession’s devotion to care for this
obsession with transparent, legible space, which he believes had atrophied
human capacity to explore and experiment, leaving room only for passive
experience. ‘The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of
space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places.’18
Lefebvre links these particular criticisms to what he regards as the more
general subordination of space to texts or writing systems. In so doing, he
anticipates Matta-Clark’s juggling, and in particular points to the kind of
irreducible aspect of spatiality that Matta-Clark’s work attempts to valorise.
According to Lefebvre, ‘Non-verbal sets [which include painting, sculpture
and architecture] are… characterised by a spatiality which is in fact
irreducible to the mental realm… To underestimate, ignore and diminish
space amounts to the overestimation of texts, written matter, and writing
DISCRETE VIOLATIONS 167
systems, along with the readable and the visible, to the point of assigning to
these a monopoly on intelligibility.’19
It is the irreducibility that is important here. While Lefebvre was clearly
concerned with contesting the ‘manufacture’ of space as this is conceived
by the architectural profession, in order to encourage the involvement of
those subjected to it in a more active production of space, his assertion
retains the traditional positioning of the subject within architecture
(architecture here as both space and discipline), and his project tends to
reduce the irreducibility to a representation. Paradoxically, Matta-Clark’s
œuvre is more able to sustain this spatial irreducibility, and to do so by
means of using space itself, despite Lefebvre’s (almost) categorical assertion
that this cannot be done because it is an ‘incriminated medium’.20 Indeed,
Matta-Clark’s dynamic volumes addressed the irreducible aspect of space in
such a way as to bring about productive disruption to a visitor’s spatial
experience, and they did this by redeploying parts of ‘readable and visible’
spatial language in the ‘wrong’ place, while simultaneously providing for
that which is legible according to system.
This discrete violation of the visitor’s sense of value offered to shift their
experience from traditional intelligibility to an altered version, an alternative
clarity; this opening onto other modes of intelligibility is brought about
through Matta-Clark’s syntax juggling. Lindsay Smith, whose work has
already been introduced, has discussed the creative role of linguistic games,
of ‘stammering’, grammatical irregularities, evocative pauses, haunting
repetitions, and so on, which she argues introduce a hesitancy of and in
space, between gesture and meaning, that disrupts the assumed monopoly
on intelligibility enjoyed by ‘good speech’. Although her discussion takes
place in the context of the production of photographs, her identification of
the hesitancy produced by such alternative spaces and of the creative role
played by disruptive or ‘defective language’21 is helpful in the present
discussion. From Smith, we could suggest that much of Matta-Clark’s
œuvre operates by actively precipitating such a defective language. His
syntax juggling was not so much concerned with the revelation of hidden
spaces as with the encouragement of searching, and the disruption of the
intellect’s monopoly in the production of meaning. As the various
exploration projects or Open House demonstrate, the searching Matta-Clark
advocated was not intended to recover something lost, but to create new
possibilities; there was no end to what could be found. Matta-Clark’s syntax
juggling, and his continuous, almost obsessive play with language in his
sketchbooks, notecards, project titles and conversation, demonstrate a
similar maintenance and disruption of the establishment of meaning.22 It is
easy to identify what is ‘wrong’ in both the building-based projects and in
his wordplays, though when each alteration is taken in context, it provides a
168 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
productive disruption of norms such that neither recover: both norm and
alteration pre-suppose each other. This does not result in a situation that is
unintelligible, but rather insists on two types of clarity that are different in
kind.
In so doing, Matta-Clark’s œuvre operates both according to intelligible
systems (in various forms), and also with an aspect of understanding that
exceeds the intellect. The consequences of this kind of alteration are multi-
faceted, though some of the most significant opportunities they bring bear
on the relationships between subject and object, and on the traditional
priority of form-idea, as these feature in accounts of human understanding.
This returns us, at last, to Derrida’s observations regarding Artaud and the
drawing principle, and in particular to the relevance of the subjectile for
Matta-Clark’s œuvre. As Derrida writes elsewhere, the underlying danger of
assuming that everything is intelligible, of attempting to give everything a
meaning, lies not in any number of resulting presuppositions (such that the
‘drawing principle’ can act as a guarantor that space be made legible, to use
Lefebvre’s criticism as but one example), but that we become blind to the
‘baselessness of the non-meaning from which the basis of meaning is
drawn’.23 To do this is to take a ‘restricted economy’—the architecture of
our own economy (as common sense) with all the attendant disciplinary
propriety that has been discussed—as the general case.
In contrast, the promise of the subjectile is that it (re)opens our
economy onto a general baselessness: for Derrida, the subjectile is
improper, it has no ‘address’, no place proper to it because of the two way
and reciprocally presupposing trajectories of support and interrogation that
are involved in an encounter with such work. This interrogation could no
longer be considered to be organised so as to involve a subject enquiring of
an object’s form, and expecting to interpret from that form a particular
idea. Rather, the subjectile provides a dynamic and mobile support
associated with a work, which is both altered and altering in the various acts
of traversal involved in the encounter between someone and that work, an
alteration that can bear on both the idea and the form involved. In this way,
as neither form nor content, the subjectile exceeds the form-idea and is
presupposed by it. Unable to be located in a conventional schema, Derrida
finds it necessary to designate it a third genos:
—Gordon Matta-Clark 25
Matta-Clark’s projects set out to establish a complex traffic between the
objects of familiar experience and what he referred to as the real idea,
associated with the conditions of that experience while also pointing to
possibilities that lay beyond. In the case of building dissections such as
Circus, this traffic aimed to produce a ‘clearly new sense of space’ for the
visitors alongside the alterations to their sense of orientation, although
similar traffic can be associated with his entire œuvre. Matta-Clark
emphasised the way in which he might instigate this traffic with a simple
gesture:
The various projects that have been discussed in previous chapters can
all be taken to share this economy of means; Matta-Clark’s gestures operate
very simply to complicate the economy of the familiar. Brian O’Doherty’s
account of gestural artworks is uncannily appropriate in this context:
‘Gestures are… the most instinctive of artworks in that they do not
proceed from full knowledge of what provokes them. Indeed, they are born
out of a desire for knowledge, which time may make available… A gesture
is antiformal…’27 These aspects of the gesture are clearly identifiable across
Matta-Clark’s œuvre, and bear both on considerations of his own artistic
practice, and on the experience within or of his work, and they are worth
dwelling on a little longer. The suggestion that Matta-Clark’s gestures did
not proceed from full knowledge or awareness of their target is somewhat
contentious, as he was able to articulate his motivations clearly. It is more
straightforward to accept O’Doherty’s second assertions into the context of
170 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
…the gesture must snare attention or it will not preserve itself long
enough to gather its content. But there is a hitch in a gesture’s time,
which is its real medium. Its content, as revealed by time and
circumstance, may be out of register with its presenting form. So there
is both an immediate and a remote effect, the first containing the
latter, but imperfectly. The presenting form has its problems. It must
relate to an existing body of accepted ideas, and yet place itself outside
them.28
gesture are linked, and if we recall the earlier discussion of Bergson’s two
types of clarity, they can be understood to be productively caught up in the
broader balance between familiar (easy clarity) and the violation of the
familiar through the second, opaque clarity. As the remote effect returns to
the familiar, the gesture’s time itself splits in two, and returns to experience
as the sequential time of perception (where the gesture snags our attention)
and in so doing acts as an anchor for the real work of the piece which is
undertaken by the other, subjective and non-sequential time of recollection.
Considering Matta-Clark’s gesture as a particular instance of his
expressed interest and extensive application of syntax-juggling can
emphasise the broader occurrence of this strategic approach across his
œuvre. Recalling the terms introduced in the previous section, his œuvre’s
inscription of defective language operates in such as way as to instigate a
variety of events or stammers, the experience of which would open a gap
through which that experience could never be entirely legible according to
the familiar language that surrounds it. This defective language would not
simply introduce a stammer into the otherwise flowing language all around,
but would open up an opportunity for a singular event that could creatively
exceed the expectations and modality underpinning it.
The impact of Matta-Clark’s gestures potentially reach the language of
architecture on two levels, affecting both the experience of a particular
work and also the disciplinary expectations surrounding it; or in a different
register, it would reach the two economies of judgement discussed in the
previous chapter. Matta-Clark himself signalled a desire to bring about an
alteration to the familiar language of architecture, indeed to its very nature,
by valorising the role of intangible events:
(figure 14), or more opaquely in his Anarchitectural notes from the same
time:
either one of these aspects, without modernism is also with (an albeit
renovated) modernism.
One example discussed by Adrian Forty that is here both literally and
metaphorically appropriate for Matta-Clark’s relationship without
modernism is architecture’s use of metaphor. Forty is critical of the way in
which modernist discourse has deployed metaphor in order to allow the lie
to be discussed as if it were truth.34 The important aspect of this
deployment does not concern the particular metaphoric devices used, but
modernism’s underlying assumption that architecture can be given a
rational explanation. This assumption contrasts with an earlier acceptance
of architecture’s ability to be both truthful and deceptive, a situation that
broke down as architecture became influenced by the ideas of the
Enlightenment. This is not to suggest that the relationship between truth
and falsity was straightforward before then, but to point towards a
readiness to accept the boundary transgression inherent in metaphor as an
operation that sustained an epistemology without system. The importance
of the transgressive operations of metaphor lay in their ability to maintain
contingency of judgement by inscribing excess and discordance as central
dimensions of experience, in contrast to the switch made by the
Enlightenment, and adopted by the discourse of modernism which
rationalised the lie as an aberration in the otherwise consistent
understanding of the rational world.
Matta-Clark’s own take on metaphor echoed the potential championed
by Mlle de Gournay, inasmuch as it could exceed measurable accounts of
the world or of experience that occurred within a rationalising
epistemology: ‘ALL MEASURE IS AN ADMINISTRATIVE (FUNCTIONAL) PART
A CONVIENIENT FRA[C]TION OF WHATEVER CONSTANT …
MEASUREMENT WILL ALWAYS BE A FU[N ]CTION OF SOME RULE AND ARE
JUST NOT AS IMPORTANT AS THE SENSE OF SPACE. WHEN A
MEASUREMENT DOESN’T WORK …A MORE INTIMATE NOTION OF SPACE
BEGININGS …’35 He described the Anarchitecture group’s deployment of
metaphor as having a similar intention and sphere of operation, without
function, in order to challenge the epistemological structure assumed and
upheld by modernist discourse. They worked with metaphoric gaps and voids,
‘metaphoric in the sense that their interest or value wasn’t in their possible
use… [but that nevertheless remained] on a functional level that was so
absurd as to ridicule the idea of function’.36 Anarchitecture deployed
metaphor to work without-outside modernism by avoiding its expectations,
particularly towards the ‘uncovering’ of truth, exposing instead the duality
and contingency of architecture’s claims: a grey zone of both truth and lie
that aimed to counter ‘A PRIMARY ARCHITECTURAL FAILING A
178 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Preface
1 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, tr. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1989, p.9.
2 These include Marianne Brouwer, in Corinne Diserens and María Casanova (eds),
Gordon Matta-Clark, IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia, 1993; Pamela M. Lee, Object
to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999; James
Atlee and Lisa Le Feuvre, Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, Nazraeli Press, Tuscon
AZ & Portchester, 2003; Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide,
Zone Books, New York, 1997. Many of these writers approach Bataille through Denis
Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989.
3 John Rajchman, ‘Thinking Big (John Rajchman talks with Rem Koolhaas),' in Artforum,
33, December 1994), p.99. A commensurate, and more substantially argued, instance is
provided by Anthony Vidler’s recent essay, which asserts that ‘Matta-Clark’s actions
developed not out of hatred of architecture but out of profound love and respect for
what might, one day, be.’ Anthony Vidler, ‘“Architecture-to-Be”: Notes on Architecture
in the Work of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark,' in Betti-Sue Hertz (ed), Transmission:
The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, 2006,
p.59.
4 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, on deposit at the
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (hereafter EGMC), Articles & Documents
1942–76, Anarchitecture Period, c.1973.
Introduction
1 Podro notes ‘Either the context-bound quality or the irreducibility of art may be
elevated at the expense of the other. If a writer diminishes the sense of context in his
concern for the irreducibility or autonomy of art, he moves toward formalism. If he
diminishes the sense of irreducibility in order to keep a firm hand on extra-artistic facts,
he runs the risk of treating art as if it were the trace or symptom of those other facts.
The critical historians were constantly treading a tightrope between the two.’ Michael
Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1982,
p.xx.
2 Gordon Matta-Clark, cited in Liza Bear, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting (the Humphrey
Street Building),' in Avalanche, (December 1974). (Reprinted in Diserens and Casanova
(eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., pp.374ff., and in Corinne Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-
Clark, Phaidon Press, London & New York, 2003, p.166.) Anthony Vidler emphasises
182 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
the point: ‘From the outset of his career as an artist, his care with respect to what he
understood to be the true goals of architecture is abundantly evident.’ Vidler,
‘Architecture-to-Be,' op.cit., p.69.
3 Mark Linder has done much to challenge the caricatured version of Greenberg in his
excellent Nothing Less Than Literal: Architecture After Minimalism, MIT Press, 2004.
4 Gordon Matta-Clark, cited in Florent Bex (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, Internationaal
Cultureel Centrum Antwerp, 1977, p.8ff. (Interviewer unknown).
5 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting,' [1961, 1965], in Francis Frascina and Charles
Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Paul Chapman in
association with the Open University, London, 1988, pp.5–6.
6 ibid. See also American Type Painting [1955] in the same collection.
7 Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922,
New York, 1932. see also Hitchcock’s The ‘International Style’ Twenty Years After [1952]
reprinted in the new edition of The International Style in 1966, along with the Foreword,
for a discussion of their original intentions of this term. See also Henry-Russell
Hitchcock Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Penguin Books, 1958, 1977,
Ch.22, n.1, p.621, for a discussion of the difference between the terms International Style
and the ‘vaguer’ modern architecture of the second generation.
8 Gavin Macrae-Gibson, The Secret Life of Buildings: An American Mythology for Modern
Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1985, p.170.
9 Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth Century Culture, Verso, London,
1993, p.114.
10 Michael Fried, ‘How modernism Works: A Reply to T. J. Clark,’ in Critical Inquiry
(September 1982), p.227.
11 William Lethaby, The Architecture of Adventure, in ‘Form and Civilisation’ [1922] OUP,
p.95, cited in Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture,
Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, p.130.
12 R. H. Wilenski, ‘Ruminations of Sculpture and the Work of Henry Moore,’ in Apollo,
December 1930, vol.12, pp.409–13. cited in Sue Malvern, ‘The Identity of the Sculpture,
1925–1950,’ in Penelope Curtis, Denise Raine, Meatthew Withey, Jon Wood and
Victoria Worsley (eds), Sculpture in 20th-Century Britain, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds,
2004, p.81. Wilenski’s The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, Faber & Faber, London, 1932,
advocates the disposition to study from ‘first principles and general laws’, in common
with much of contemporary culture.
13 Panofsky’s system attempted to establish an absolute viewpoint from which to regard
the art of the past, and was framed explicitly as an attempt to overcome ‘merely
historical’ approaches, which were unable to ‘fix it [an artwork] in its absolute place and
meaning related to an Archimedean point outside of its own sphere of being…’ Erwin
Panofsky, Der Begriff des Kunstwollens, [1920] Aufsätze, p.33, translated in Podro, The
Critical Historians of Art, op.cit., p.180.
14 Greenberg, Modern Painting, op.cit., p.8.
15 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition, [1941],
Harvard University Press, London and Cambridge, MA, 1967, p.581.
16 Despite their affirmed ‘unity of viewpoint’, the CIAM declaration at Sarraz involved
extensive negotiations both prior to and during the congress, and effectively required
the signatories to support Le Corbusier’s vision for the organisation as ‘an exclusive
cadre of architects providing built solutions to problems defined by the business elite
and international experts’. Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960,
MIT Press, 2000, p.27. Mumford’s account highlights several serious conflicts in the
background of the CIAM declaration; in our context, the various drives to ‘purify’
NOTES 183
(Mies, Gropius) and to ‘clean up’ (Giedion) modern architecture are of particular
interest; see Ch.1, esp. pp.10–11.
17 For an examination of the relationship between avant-garde modernism and the
institutionalised, orthodox pedagogy it spawned in the United States, see Simon Sadler,
An Avant-garde Academy, in Andrew Ballantyne (ed), Architectures: Modernism and After,
Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2004, pp.33–56. Vidler also discusses the connections
between Greenbergian modernism, art and architecture, and architectural education
(and particularly the development of a formalist architectural pedagogy by the so-called
‘Texas Rangers’ grouped around Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky that structured Matta-
Clark’s education at Cornell): see particularly Vidler, ‘Architecture-to-Be,' op.cit., pp.66–
70.
18 Robert A.M. Stern, Toward a Modern Architecture After Modernism, Rizzoli, New York,
1981, p.8. Stern’s alternative terminology is more telling: he groups the first two
generations together as the ‘exclusives’, referring to aspects of their design process that
clearly echo the purifying drives of modernism raised above. In contrast, his initial
definition of the third generation acknowledged their ‘inclusive’ approach.
19 A significant publication, on the back of a 1969 conference, is Five Architects, Oxford
University Press, [1972] 1975. Includes, significantly in our context, an introduction by
Colin Rowe, and a postscript by Philip Johnson. In his Preface, Arthur Drexler
explicitly positions these architects picking up ‘…where the thirties left off…’
20 Andrew MacNair, interviewed by Joan Simon, in Mary Jane Jacob (ed), Gordon Matta-
Clark: A Retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 1985, p.96. MacNair was
the curator of the ‘Idea as Model’ exhibition at the Institute for Architecture and Urban
Studies in New York (December 1976), occasion of Matta-Clark’s now infamous
‘Window Blow-Out’ piece. On this project and its relationship to the ‘New York Five’,
see David Cohn’s excellent essay ‘Blow-out: Gordon Matta-Clark y los cinco de Nueva
York’, in Darío Corbeira (ed), ¿Construir.o deconstruir? Textos sobre Gordon Matta-Clark,
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, 2000, pp.77–90.
Matta-Clark remarked to Donald Wall: ‘Incidentally, the only professional architect I
have any empathy with is Robert Venturi. His contradictory, complex layering of space
and surfaces have a modicum of interest, obviously for self-justificating reasons. But
then he has to verify, to “pedigree”, what he does in terms of some historical review,
and then he applies it all to functional programs. Complexity/contradiction justifies
itself. It serves no purpose other than just being.’ Gordon Matta-Clark, Transcript:
Interview Between Wall and Matta-Clark: Rough Draft, EGMC, Articles and Documents 1942–
76, circa late 1975/early 1976, #11a.
21 ‘I grew up in New York in this kind of [totally unattractive and derelict ] environment.
As the City evolved in the Fifties and Sixties into a completely architectured
International Style steel and glass megalopolis, by contrast, great areas of what had been
residential were being abandoned. These areas were being left as demoralising
reminders of “Eploit it or Leave it.” It is the prevalence of this wasteland phenomena
that drew me to it.’ Gordon Matta-Clark. Interview from Bex (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark,
op.cit., p.8ff.
22 Gordon Matta-Clark, Loose-leaf notes drafting the Anarchitecture exhibition, EGMC,
Articles & Documents 1942–76, Anarchitecture Period, c.1973.
23 Thomas Schumacher, ‘Contextualism: Urban Ideals + Deformations,’ in Casabella,
#359/60, 1971, p.84. For Rowe’s own account, see for example Colin Rowe and Fred
Koetter, Collage City, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1978. For a brief overview, see
Grahame Shane, Contextualism, in AD vol.46, November 1976, pp.676–679.
24 Forty, Words and Buildings, op.cit., pp.134–5. Forty follows the Italian interest in context
and ambiente via Aldo Rossi (The Architecture of the City), where Rogers is criticised for the
184 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Chapter 1
1 Gordon Matta-Clark, interviewed by Judith Russi Kirshner, Chicago, February 13th
1978, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.392.
2 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #15.
3 Most obviously, it needs to be distinguished from Surrealist juxtapositions, which
transposed familiar objects and contexts to produce defamiliarising or surreal effects.
There are certain biographical links to Surrealism that were sketched out at the
beginning of the previous chapter, but which are beyond the concern of the present
work.
4 Judith Russi Kirshner, Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, in Diserens and Casanova (eds),
Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.391.
5 Gordon Matta-Clark, ‘Proposal to the Workers of Sesto San Giovanni, Milan,’
typewritten letter, EGMC, Letters 1975.
6 Richard Nonas, in conversation with the author, David Zwimmer Gallery, NY, 10th
January 2002.
7 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1330 (the same text appears on Notecard
#1178).
8 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L. Andison, F. Hobner & Co., New York,
1946, pp.58–9. For Bergson, the ability to create novelty had ethical and political
implications: on the nature of the free act, see ibid., p.17.
9 Gordon Matta-Clark, Loose leaf notes, EGMC, Articles & Documents 1942–76,
Anarchitecture Period c.1973.
10 Richard Nonas, in conversation with the author, David Zwimmer Gallery, NY, 10th
January 2002. He makes a similar point in Gordon’s Now, Now in Diserens and Casanova
(eds), Gordon Matta-Clark,.
11 Matta-Clark expands on possible other spaces, ‘the kinds of space we all, all of us, have
stored in our memory…spaces that are detailed and precise, or very general, at all levels
NOTES 185
of reminiscing. And of course once you get into reminiscence an infinite number of
associations surface emerge concerning real space, desired space, imagined space, false
amorphic space, grotesque space, nostalgia enters space perception, sentimentality…’
(This list emerges in the context of a discussion of the differences between the work of
Roger Welch and Keith Sonnier.) Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #11a
12 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell, Macmillan and Co., London, 1911,
p.31.
13 ibid., p.149.
14 Bergson, The Creative Mind, op.cit., p.21. Emphasis added.
15 ibid., p.28. He stresses the point: ‘Thought ordinarily pictures to itself the new as a new
arrangement of pre-existing elements; nothing is ever lost for it, nothing is ever created.’
pp.38.
16 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1153, Anarchitecture Period c.1973.
17 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1208, Anarchitecture Period c.1973.
18 ‘ANARCHITECTURE—————WORKING IN SEVERAL DIMENTIONS MAKING THE
DISCUSSIONS THE SHOW AND THE WORK.—KEEPING IT AN ONGOING OPEN PROCESS
NOT FINISHING JUST KEEPING GOING AND STARTING OVER & OVER’ Matta-Clark,
Notecard, EGMC, #1218, Anarchitecture Period c.1973.
19 Bergson, The Creative Mind, op.cit., pp.38–9.
20 ibid., pp.38–9. Emphasis added.
21 ibid., pp.38–9.
22 ibid., pp.40–1.
23 Jeffrey Lew, Letter to IVAM, October 1992, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon
Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.370.
24 Jeffrey Lew, Letter to IVAM, October 1992, in ibid., p.370.
25 ‘Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut… Simple gestures spatial
complexities and admitting new light.’ Gordon Matta-Clark, catalogue entry by Margery
Salter. Double Doors, EGMC, Articles and Documents 42–76, August 1973.
26 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,
MIT Press, 1990 p.40. Italics in the original.
27 ibid., p.41.
28 G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding [1765], tr. Peter Remnant & Jonathan
Bennett, Cambridge, 1981, (Book II, Ch.xi) p.144.
29 Leibniz, New Essays, op.cit., Bk.II, Ch.xi, p.145.
Chapter 2
1 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #1.
2 ibid., #4.
3 According to Greenberg’s definition of modernism, the particulars of painting were flat
surface, shape of support, and properties of pigment, though ‘flatness alone was unique
and exclusive to that art’ Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting,’ op.cit., p.6.
Henri Lefebvre criticises pure surface, especially in architecture; see Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space, [1974], tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford
UK & Cambridge MA, 1991, Ch.2,§XII.
4 ‘… Asher and Nauman have done strictly sculptural impingements on architecture: that
is, the space as a whole is never altered to its roots… they always dealt with aspects of
interior space, but I don’t think they penetrated the surface, which would seem to be
the logical next step. Of course, this kind of treatment has been given to canvas, to
conventional art materials.’ Gordon Matta-Clark, cited in Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit.,
pp.34–7. Lucio Fontano was producing cut canvases during the 1940s. Anthony Vidler
discusses the complexity of what Matta-Clark might have meant by surface formalism
186 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
by exploring the context of Colin Rowe’s lectures that Matta-Clark attended at Cornell:
see Vidler, “Architecture-to-Be, ” op.cit., pp.68–9.
5 Gordon Matta-Clark, EGMC, uncatalogued Anarchitecture Notecard, c.1972.
6 Gordon Matta-Clark, interviewed by Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit. p.35.
7 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #6, which appears in somewhat edited form in the
published version; see Donald Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections, ’ in
Arts Magazine, 50, 9 (May 1976), p.77.
8 Plato, Phædrus, 265E.
9 Timæus, 28. (§3: Prelude).
10 On the transposition of Rowe’s ‘signature motif’ (nine-square) from analysis onto the
façade of the building, see Thomas Crow, 'Survey,' in Corinne Diserens (ed), Gordon
Matta-Clark, Phaidon, 2003 op.cit., p.86, 92.) Although these building dissections can be
grouped together because of this similarity in the approach used to generate the cut, this
should not be taken to distinguish them from Matta-Clark’s broader explorations of
cutting. Buildings available for cutting were in short supply, as he intimated in a letter
sent from Paris to Jerald ‘Jerry’ Ordover, 4th December 1975, where he states that ‘If
anything emerges to cut up, I’ll go anywhere anytime.’ EGMC, Articles & Documents
1942–78. Brinoy Fer has discussed Matta-Clark’s own description of his cuts as ‘Spatial
Drawing’; see Briony Fer, 'Networks: Graphic Strategies from Matta to Matta-Clark,' in
Betti-Sue Hertz (ed), Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark, San Diego
Museum of Art, San Diego, 2006.
11 Giorgio Vasari, On Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design,
Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, [1550, second edition 1568, when §§74–5 were
added], tr. Louisa S. Maclehose [1907], Dover Publications, New York 1960, §74 ‘The
Nature and Materials of Design or Drawing.’
12 Vasari, On Technique, op.cit., §74 The Nature and Materials of Design or Drawing. See also
Karen-edis Barzman, ‘Perception, Knowledge and the Theory of Disegno in Sixteenth-
Century Florence,’ in L. Feinberg, ‘From Studio to Studiolo,’ (Ex.Cat.) Seattle,
University of Washington Press, 1991. Cited in Lee, ‘Drawing In Between,’ in Sabine
Breitwieser (ed), Reorganizing Structure by Drawing Through It: Zeichnung Bei Gordon Matta-
Clark, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1997, p.28.
13 Vasari, On Technique, op.cit., §75 Use of Design (or Drawing) [disegno] in the Various
Arts, emphasis added.
14 Gordon Matta-Clark. The full comment is as follows: ‘A simple cut or series of cuts act
as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural
components. What is invisible at play behind a wall or floor, once exposed, becomes an
active participant in a spatial drawing of the building’s inner life.’ #5, cited in Bex (ed),
Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.8ff.
15 Gordon Matta-Clark, in Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit., p.35.
16 Gordon Matta-Clark, sketchbook, EGMC, 1975.
17 Gordon Matta-Clark, in Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit., p.35.
18 For discussions of his relationship with Matta, his father, there are three pointers: Jane
Crawford, ‘Crossover references in the Work of Roberto Matta and Gordon Matta-
Clark,’ conference address, ‘Matta in America,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
October 2002, partly reproduced in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., pp.214–
217; Pamela M. Lee’s first chapter, ‘The First Place’, and in particular ‘Homeliness and
Absenteeism: Matta’s Place for Matta-Clark,’ in Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, op.cit., pp.3–
11; and the catalogue to the 2006 exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art on the
subject of this relationship: Betti-Sue Hertz (ed), Transmission: The Art of Matta and
Gordon Matta-Clark, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, 2006.
NOTES 187
Chapter 3
1 Gordon Matta-Clark, MEASUREMENT AND THE PLAN, c.1972, EGMC, Articles &
Documents 1942–76.
2 Gordon Matta-Clark, cited by Judith Russi Kirshner, ‘Interview with Gordon Matta-
Clark,’ in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.394.
3 ‘Is space a social relationship? Certainly…here we see the polyvalence of social space,
its ‘reality’ at once formal and material.’ Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.85.
4 ibid., p.71.
5 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #6
6 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit. p.28.
NOTES 189
right.’ Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness,’ in Yale French Studies #73,
1987, p.10.
29 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.203.
30 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.102.
31 ibid., p.103.
32 Gordon Matta-Clark, cited in Judith Russi Kirshner, ‘Non-Uments,’ in Artforum, 24, 2
(October 1985), p.108.
33 Stephen Kern, for example, has surveyed the European and North-American
experiences of the changes that occurred during the early years of modernism, noting
the ‘affirmation of a plurality of times and spaces.’ Kern, The Culture of Time and Space
1880–1918, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1983 p.8. Among these changes, Kern
lists psychoanalysis, Cubism, World Standard Time, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the
wireless, telephone, X-ray, cinema, the bicycle, car and aeroplane. His conclusion draws
on the possibilities of the new times and spaces emerging then, and states that it was the
present that was most acutely felt, most ‘distinctively new, thickened temporally with
retentents and pro-tensions of past and future, and, most important, expanded spatially
to create the vast, shared experience of simultaneity.’ Kern, The Culture of Time and Space,
p.314.
34 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., pp.95–6.
35 ‘There is, as it were… a gap between rule and application, and a gap between code and
execution. This gap must, I shall suggest, be reclaimed by a theory of habitual practice,
and, therefore, of habit-memory.’ Connerton, How Societies Remember, op.cit., p.34.
36 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #11a
37 Gordon Matta-Clark, loose leaf notes, EGMC, Articles and Documents 1942–76,
Anarchitecture period, c.1972.
38 Gordon Matta-Clark, Kirshner Interview, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-
Clark, op.cit., p.393.
39 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, [1976, 1986],
University of California Press, 1999, p.88.
40 Gordon Matta-Clark, Kirshner Interview, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-
Clark, op.cit., p.393. Emphasis added.
41 Briony Fer discusses ‘the space of the bodily encounter with the image’ produced and
sustained by the photocollages, and that they operate at two scales simultaneously; big
and small: see Fer, ‘Celluloid Circus,’ op.cit., p.140.
42 Gordon Matta-Clark, interviewed by Judith Russi Kirshner, ‘Interview with Gordon
Matta-Clark’, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.390. He is
here referring to the dissections themselves.
43 Jonathan Hill, The Illegal Architect, Black Dog Publishing, London, 1998, p.46.
44 Yves-Alain Bois, ‘A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara,’ in October 29, (Summer
1984), p.34.
45 ibid., p.54.
46 Gordon Matta-Clark, Kirshner Interview, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-
Clark, op.cit., p.393.
47 Gordon Matta-Clark, Loose notes, EGMC, Articles & Documents 1942–76, #1340.
48 Gordon Matta-Clark to Donald Wall, in Wall, 'Gordon Matta-Clark's Building
Dissections,' op.cit., p.79.
49 Dan Graham, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark,’ in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.201.
50 Judith Russi Kirshner, Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, in Diserens and Casanova (eds),
Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.391.
51 Matta-Clark refers to ‘living archaeology’ in documentation associated with Substrait: for
example, a letter to Dennis Wendling (EGMC, Letters 1976, April 20th, 1976) and again
NOTES 191
Chapter 4
1 Gordon Matta-Clark, cited in Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark's Building Dissections,’ op.cit.,
p.79.
2 Matta-Clark, Kirshner interview in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark,
op.cit., p.390. see also Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,’ op.cit., p.77.
3 Pipes was part of the Changing Terms exhibition, Boston School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, December 1971–January 1972. In his own words, ‘I extended one of the gas lines
from behind a wall out into the exhibition space and then returned it back into the wall,
accompanied by a photographic documentation of the pipe’s journey from the street
into and through the building. The pipe led two lives: it had both physical as well as
photographic extension, and dealt with the building as a mechanical system rather than
as a series of discrete spaces.’ in Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,’
op.cit., pp.74–9.
4 Gordon Matta-Clark ‘ANARCHITECTURE 4,’ EGMC, Articles & Documents 1942–76,
c.1972.
5 Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Centre: The Spaces of Installation Art, MIT Press, 1999, p.xiii.
6 ‘Rowe, in “Composition and Character,” confirmed ‘a particular, high modernist
view…that the meaning of architecture lay solely in the immanence of its perception,
and that architecture could represent nothing beyond its own immediate presence.’
Forty, Words and Buildings, op.cit., p.120.
7 Just for clarity, this chapter takes the White Cube from O’Doherty’s essays ‘Inside the
White Cube’ where this stands as an unrealised archetype for the relationship between
viewer and work, and not the family of ‘White Cube’ galleries in London.
8 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.28.
9 Gordon Matta-Clark, cited in Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,’ op.cit.,
p.79.
10 Le Corbusier, ‘If I Had to Teach You Architecture,’ in Nikolaus Pevsner, J. M. Richards
and Dennis Sharp (eds), The Anti-Rationalists and the Rationalists, [First published
separately as The Anti-Rationalist (1973) and The Rationalists (1978)] The Architectural
Press, London, 2000, p.83.
11 Gordon Matta-Clark, ANARCHITECTURE 4, EGMC, Articles & Documents, 1942–76.
12 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1158, Anarchitecture Period, c.1973.
13 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1208, Anarchitecture Period, c.1973.
192 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
14 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #17. This appears in a somewhat edited form in
Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,’ op.cit., p.79.
15 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, c.1973. Ellipsis in the original.
16 Bergson, Creative Evolution, op.cit., p.202.
17 ibid., p.201. ‘…you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of
intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get
something more complex, but not something higher nor even different.’ Bergson,
Creative Evolution, op.cit., p.204.
18 William James, ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’ in The Works of William James, [c.1907],
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1976, p.7.
All references are to the Works of William James, not to Essays in Radical Empiricism,
Longmans, Green New York, 1912; for a lengthy exposition of this confusing situation,
see ‘A Note on the Editorial Method,’ pp.191–253. James, it should be noted, was an
important influence on Bergson.
19 Gordon Matta-Clark, Anarchitecture notes, EGMC, Articles & Documents 1942–76,
c.1974.
20 Connerton, How Societies Remember, op.cit., p.101. O’Doherty suggests this Cartesian
dualism demonstrates the underlying logic of the gallery: ‘The space [of the gallery]
offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are
not—or are tolerated only as kinaesthetic mannequins for further study. This Cartesian
paradox is reinforced by one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, sans
figures. Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being
there… The installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space.’ O’Doherty, Inside the
White Cube, op.cit., p.15.
21 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, op.cit., p.36.
22 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1225, c.1973.
23 James, ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism,’ op.cit., pp.17–18.
24 In a footnote, James concedes that ‘Of course, the mind’s free play is restricted when it
seeks to copy real things in real space.’ William James, ‘Does “Consciousness” Exist?’,
in ibid., n15, p.16.
25 Gordon Matta-Clark, Bear interview Gordon Matta-Clark: Dilemmas WBAI-FM (NY)
March 1976, in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, p.177.
26 Matta-Clark’s œuvre is run through with specific instances of this preoccupation, from
his earliest projects such as Rope Bridge [1968, Ithaca Reservoir, NY], through to Jacob’s
Ladder [1977, Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany] (on which he remarked to his mother ‘I
can’t wait to play with it once it has been installed’ Gordon Matta-Clark, in a letter to
his mother, EGMC, Letters 1976, 7th June 1976). His sketchbooks were similarly full of
ideas regarding balloons, and Balloon Building. On this impulse in Matta-Clark’s work,
see James Attlee in Atlee and Le Feuvre, The Space Between, pp.62–67, and Peter Fend,
‘New Architecture from Matta-Clark’ in Sabine Breitwieser (ed), Reorganizing Structure by
Drawing Through It, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1997, pp.46–55. Briony Fer makes a
related point regarding the removal of vertical and horizontal coordinates that Matta-
Clark’s work introduces in a variety of situations, and similarly links, and similarly makes
links to Trisha Brown’s own work in this context; see Fer, ‘Celluloid Circus,’ op.cit.,
p.140.
27 Corinne Diserens, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: The Reel World,’ in Corbeira (ed), ¿Construir.o
deconstruir? op.cit., pp.48–9. My translation.
28 Indeed, several anecdotal accounts of visiting Matta-Clark’s projects describe the
experience with reference to vertigo; for example, Yve-Alain Bois notes that ‘to visit his
final works was to be seized with vertigo, as one suddenly realised that one could not
differentiate between the vertical section and the horizontal plan… as if in order to
NOTES 193
learn “what space is”, it was first necessary that we lose our grip as erect beings.’ Bois,
‘Threshole,’ in Bois and Krauss, Formless, op.cit., p.191. Pamela M. Lee makes the
connection much more forcefully, arguing that vertigo is integral to human experience:
‘[Matta-Clark’s projects] reveal that our experience as contingent beings guarantees that
we are always already subjected to a state of perpetual vertigo.’ Lee, Object to Be Destroyed,
op.cit., p.160.
Chapter 5
1 Gordon Matta-Clark, Interviewed by Florent Bex, in Bex (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark,
op.cit., p.8ff.
2 Willoughby Sharp, ‘Air Art,’ in Studio International, May 1968, vol.175, no.900, pp. 262–3.
3 Gordon Matta-Clark, Bear interview Gordon Matta-Clark: Dilemmas WBAI-FM (NY)
March 1976, in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.176.
4 For example, ‘…the edge is what I work through, try to preserve, spend this energy to
complete, and at the same time what is read…’ Matta-Clark, cited in Kirshner, ‘Non-
Uments,’ in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.391.
5 Richard Nonas, ‘Gordon’s Now, Now,’ in ibid., p.400.
6 Gordon Matta-Clark, interviewed by Liza Bear: Bear, ‘Splitting,’ reproduced in Diserens
and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.375.
7 For a full catalogue and reproductions of Matta-Clark’s ‘Cut Drawings,’ see Breitwieser
(ed), Reorganizing Structure, op.cit., pp.158–186. Pamela M. Lee’s essay for this catalogue,
‘Drawing In Between,’ discusses the cut drawings, particularly the later, more
geometrically complex ones, in the context of his extensive drawn work; pp.26–32,
particularly p.27.
8 See catalogue raisonné, ibid., pp.162–5.
9 Gordon Matta-Clark interviewed by Kirshner; see Kirshner ‘Non-Uments,’ in Diserens
and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.393.
10 Their restoration, undertaken by Jane Crawford, Bob Fiore, and Corinne Diserens,
required this ‘useless’ raw material be separated out and recombined in a format that
would permit projection and distribution.
11 Gordon Matta-Clark in an interview with Donald Wall: see Wall, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s
Building Dissections,’ op.cit., p.79.
12 Richard Nonas, interviewed by Richard Armstrong NYC, October 14th 1980, in
Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.399.
13 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC. #1218, Anarchitecture Period, c.1973.
14 Georges Bataille, L’art primitif, first published in Documents, N°7, Deuxième Année,
1930, pp.389–397. (Reviewing G. H. Lucquet, L’Art primitif, G. Doin, Paris, 1930.)
Reprinted in Œuvres complètes de G. Bataille, Volume I: Premièrs écrits, 1922–1940
(Gallimard, Paris, 1970) pp.247–254. Further references to this essay will be to the
Œuvres complètes.
15 ‘Simplement charactérisé par l’altération des formes présentées,’ L’art primitif, op.cit.,
vol. I, p.251.
16 ‘L’art, puisque art il y a incontestablement, procède dans ce sens par destructions
successives.’ Bataille, L’art primitive, op.cit., vol. I, p. 253.
17 ‘Il est vrai que l’altération principale n’est pas celle que subit le support du dessin. Le
dessin lui-même se développe et s’enrichit en variétés, en accentuant dans tous les sens
la déformation de l’objet représenté.’ Bataille, L’art primitive, op.cit., vol. I, pp. 252–253.
18 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.361.
19 In his book on Manet, Bataille criticises the ‘gradual, regular evolution comparable to
vegetable growth’ that Gautier used to describe the development of art over time.
194 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Georges Bataille, Manet: Biographical and Critical Survey, tr. Austryn Wainhouse and James
Emmons, Skira, Lausanne, 1955, p.63.
20 The issues of theatricality were intimately linked to the disputes between minimalism
and orthodox high modernism. Indeed, Fried’s principal worry about Objecthood
extended logically from his concern over minimalism’s violation of framing conventions
to its ‘already theatrical’ sensibility, explaining its corrupting or perverting characteristic:
because minimalism had shifted attention to the process of perceiving an art-work,
involving the conditions of its situation or staging, Fried feared a distance would emerge
separating viewer from work, threatening the latter’s special categorisation (and
presumably the former’s status). See Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ in Harrison
and Wood (eds), Art in Theory, [1967] op.cit.
21 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, op.cit, p.47.
22 Matta-Clark, draft letter, addressed Dear Steve, and regarding a conversation with Larry
Fagin, ‘Compositions #1’ in Notebook, EGMC, #829, c.1970.
23 Matta-Clark to Bear, in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.168. Significantly,
the interview originally appeared in Avalanche, a magazine started in 1968 by Willoughby
Sharp and Liza Bear to cover the emerging conceptual and performance art scene.
24 Gordon Matta-Clark, Interviewed by Florent Bex, in Bex (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark,
op.cit, p.8ff.
25 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #11b.
26 Gordon Matta-Clark, letter to Helga Retzer (Berlin), EGMC, Letters 1975.
27 ‘I have had the greatest personal satisfaction in my more renegade efforts but find it
extreemly hard to exicute or sustain in truely public or even easily accessible places
except once miraculously in paris where it was truley visible to the public.’ Gordon
Matta-Clark, Notecard #5, EGMC, accessioned in Letters 78–80.
28 Gordon Matta-Clark, from the more extensive hand written draft accompanied type
written notes: ETANT D’ART POUR LOCATAIRE) OR/ CONICAL INTERSECT,
PARIS, ’75, EGMC, Articles & Documents, 1942–76.
29 Gordon Matta-Clark, Bear interview, transcribed as Gordon Matta-Clark: Dilemmas
WBAI-FM (NY) March 1976, in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.175.
30 Gordon Matta-Clark, letter from Paris to Jerald ‘Jerry’ Ordover, EGMC, Letters 1975,
dated by hand 12/4/75, that is, 4th December. (American usage places the month first.)
31 Matta-Clark, Draft letter, addressed Dear Steve, and regarding a conversation with Larry
Fagin, ‘Compositions #1’ in Notebook, EGMC, #829, c.1970.
32 See Frazer Ward, ‘Grey Zone: Watching Shoot, ’ in October 95, Winter, 2001. Burden
and Matta-Clark were good friends: however little Burden’s piece shares with Matta-
Clark’s work by way of passing similarity, Burden stressed that their working processes
were ‘very similar’: ‘We differed in the details—in the finished work—but the process
was very similar. In some ways, we shared a sensibility, a spirit of adventure, a dreaming
the impossible and doing it.’ Chris Burden, interviewed by Joan Simon, in Jacob (ed),
Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, op.cit., p.91.
When the legality of Shoot came to be questioned, because Burden needed to account
for his gunshot wound in order to receive officially sanctioned medical treatment,
private and public explanations were offered to the doctors attending to Burden—
according to which he was variously shot by his wife during a domestic argument, or
shot by accident while hunting.
33 Gordon Matta-Clark, letter from Paris to Jerald ‘Jerry’ Ordover, EGMC, Letters 1975,
dated by hand 12/4/75.
34 Matta-Clark, ‘Reserved Space,’ EGMC, Articles & Documents 1942–76, c.1972. Continues
‘THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD— THE ABSENCE OF FORM AND FUNCTION—THE USE
LEAVES IT VOID— SECRET PLACES BREAKS IN THE ORDERED TEXTURE HIDE/OUTS.’
NOTES 195
35 Peter Collins, Architectural Judgement, Faber & Faber, London, 1971, p.76.
36 ibid., pp.34–5.
37 ibid., p.170.
38 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #8.
39 Maud Lavin, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark and Individualism,’ in Arts Magazine, 58, 5 (January
1984), p.140. Lavin’s argument is, coincidentally, based on many of the factors that have
formed the basis for the sections above: the artistic process and its relationship to the
art-object, notions of theatricality, public and private codings for space, the
establishment of the individual, and violence.
40 ibid., p.139.
41 ibid., p.141.
42 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, c.1973. Original ellipsis.
43 See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, op.cit., pp.42–3.
44 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1995, p.62.
Chapter 6
1 The Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, pt.III, section 1, cited in Ernst
Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Beacon Press, Boston, 1951, p.332.
2 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1236, c.1973.
3 From Jacob (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, op.cit., ‘Chronology,’ more or less
reprinted in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.372.
4 Caroline Yorke Goodden, interviewed by Joan Simon, in Jacob (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark:
A Retrospective, op.cit., p.39.
5 Georges Bataille, ‘The Deviations of Nature,’ in Bataille, Visions of Excess, op.cit., p.55.
6 ibid., p.55.
7 Caroline Yorke Goodden, interviewed by Joan Simon, in Jacob (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark:
A Retrospective, op.cit., p.39.
8 Connerton, How Societies Remember, op.cit., p.34.
9 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983, p.139. Alpers explains the difference between these
systems: ‘Although the grid that Ptolemy proposed, and those that Mercator later
imposed, share the mathematical uniformity of the Renaissance perspective grid, they
do not share the positioned viewer, the frame, and the definition of the picture as
window through which an external viewer looks. On these accounts the Ptolemaic grid,
indeed cartographical grids in general, must be distinguished from, not confused with,
the perspectival grid. The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor is it
to be looked through. It assumes a flat working surface.’ p.138.
10 See ibid., Ch.4 ‘The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,’ and esp. section III.
11 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.285. Lefebvre discusses what he calls the three
‘formants’ of abstract space, which in addition to the referential space of geometry, also
pre-supposes the dominance of the sense of vision, and certain socio-political power
relations. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.318. The three formants are
introduced and discussed on pp.285.ff.
12 Gordon Matta-Clark, in Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit., p.35. He made a related to observation
to the journalist Dan Calinsky; ‘[A] piece I bought I understand from the auction
catalog I can’t even get to. There’s no access to it, which is fine with me. That’s an
interesting quality: something that can be owned but never experienced. That’s an
experience in itself.’ Dan Carlinsky, ‘Sliver Buyers Have a Field Day at City Sales,’ in
New York Times (14 October 1973), Real Estate Section, p.1, 12.
196 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
13 Although the relationship between these phases of Reality Properties: Fake Estates is
different from the sequence in Hair, the issues it allows us to point towards are relevant
to both, as the commonly accepted progression from drawings to ‘reality’ is complicated
by both projects. For a fuller discussion of the first phase of Reality Properties: Fake
Estates, which examines the relationship between space, economy, ‘usefulness’ and
drawing, see my ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Drawing on Architecture,’ op.cit.
14 Gordon Matta-Clark interviewed by Liza Bear. Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit., p.35.
15 Gordon Matta-Clark, EGMC, Articles and Documents 1942–76, c.1974.
16 ‘One of the most powerful forces that architecture exerts on culture is the maintenance
of certain proprieties: how space is lived in and named’ and so on. Catherine Ingraham,
Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity, Yale University Press, New Haven & London,
1998 p.30.
17 ibid., p.10.
18 ibid., pp.10–12.
19 Gordon Matta-Clark, interviewed by Liza Bear, see Bear, ‘Splitting,’ op.cit., p.35.
20 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #8.
21 David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History
and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977,
p.14.
22 Collins, Architectural Judgement, op.cit., p.191.
23 ibid., p.33.
24 Karl N. Llewellyn, ‘On the Good, the True, the Beautiful in Law,’ in The University of
Chicago Law Review, vol.ix, 1942, p.230.
25 Collins, Architectural Judgement, op.cit., p.141.
26 Anne M. Wagner, 'Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of
Sculpture,' in Grey Room, 14, Winter 2004, p.42.
27 For a discussion of this important qualification of Matta-Clark’s ‘sacrifice’, see my
‘Sacrificing Architecture? Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,’ in Ballantyne
(ed), Architectures, op.cit., pp. 118–141.
28 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #2–3.
29 Gordon Matta-Clark, loose leaf notes, EGMC, Articles & Documents 1942–76, 1975.
30 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, op.cit., p.14.
31 W. E. Kennick, ‘Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?’ in Cyril Barrett (ed),
Collected Papers on Aesthetics, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1965, p.18.
32 ibid., p.19. Original emphasis.
33 Richard Nonas, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.374.
34 Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, [c. C1st BC] tr. Morris Hicky Morgan [1914],
Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1960, p.5.
35 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, op.cit., p.581.
36 Mark Cousins, ‘Building an Architect,’ in Jonathan Hill (ed), Occupying Architecture:
Between the Architect and the User, Routledge, 1998, Ch.1, pp.14–21.
37 This was one of the panels in the Anarchitecture show, 112 Greene St, March 9th–22nd
1974, subsequently reproduced as an article in Flash Art, June 1974, pp.70–71.
38 Cousins, ‘Occupying Architecture,’ op.cit., p.21.
39 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notebook, EGMC, #829, 1970.
40 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, c.1974, EGMC, Articles & Documents, 1942–76,
Anarchitecture period, c.1973.
41 Gordon Matta-Clark, Letter to Carol Goodden from Amsterdam, EGMC, Letters, 1973,
Monday Dec 3rd 1973.
NOTES 197
Chapter 7
1 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notebook, EGMC, #829, 1970.
2 Matta-Clark, Kirshner Interview, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-Clark,
op.cit., p.391.
3 Bergson, Creative Evolution, op.cit., p.204.
4 James, ‘A World of Pure Experience,’ in James, ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism,’ op.cit.,
p.34.
5 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1182, Anarchitecture Period, c.1973.
6 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #11b.
7 Gordon Matta-Clark, Letter to Carol Goodden from Amsterdam, EGMC, Letters, 1973,
Monday December 3rd 1973.
8 ‘Il est vrai que l’altération principale n’est pas celle que subit le support du dessin. Le
dessin lui-même se développe et s’enrichit en variétés, en accentuant dans tous les sens
la déformation de l’objet représenté.’ Bataille, L’art primitive, op.cit., vol. I, pp. 252–253.
9 Gordon Matta-Clark, invite card for A W-Hole House, EGMC, Articles & Documents,
1942–76, 1973.
10 Jacques Derrida, To Unsense the Subjectile, in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The
Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, [1986], tr. Mary Ann Caws, MIT Press, 1998, p.138. Original
emphasis.
11 ibid., p.76.
12 ibid., p.124.
13 ibid., p.105.
14 ibid., p.105.
15 Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, in Diserens and Casanova (eds), Gordon Matta-
Clark, op.cit., p.391.
16 Gordon Matta-Clark, ‘Edges; City Edges Project,’ Notebook, EGMC, #829 c.1970.
17 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, op.cit., p.313. Pleonasm is, coincidentally, a rhetorical
device involving the use of more words than are necessary, or the redundant use of
words.
18 ibid., p.28.
19 ibid., p.62.
20 ibid., p.97. For a fuller discussion of the relationships and differences between
Lefebvre’s work on representation and the creative role of drawing in Matta-Clark’s
œuvre, see my ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Drawing on Architecture,’ op.cit.
21 See Lindsay Smith’s discussion of aspects of ‘defective language’ in JVC, 3(1), April
2004, pp.95–105, on the hesitancy of spaces between visual and verbal forms of
representation. We have already touched on Smith’s essay in Chapter 3, Space (& Time)
above.
22 ‘Gordon’s mind worked in forward-revolving circles. And that’s how he talked –
skipping words and whole sentences as he cometed forward until something would
bring him back and he’d pick up a thought that he’d left behind. It took me a year
before I knew what he was talking about.’ Carol Goodden, interview with Joan Simon,
in Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, op.cit., p.195.
23 Jacques Derrida, ‘From a Restricted to a General Economy,’ in Jacques Derrida, Writing
and Difference, [1967], tr. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978, p.257.
24 Derrida and Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, op.cit., pp.134–5.
25 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notebook, EGMC, #829, 1970.
26 Matta-Clark, Wall Transcript, op.cit., #15.
27 O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, op.cit., p.106.
28 ibid., p.105.
29 Gordon Matta-Clark, Notecard, EGMC, #1232, Anarchitecture period, c.1973.
198 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983.
Atlee, James and Lisa Le Feuvre, Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, Nazraeli
Press, Tuscon AZ & Portchester, 2003.
Ballantyne, Andrew (ed), Architectures: Modernism and After, Blackwell Publishing,
Oxford, 2004.
Bataille, Georges, Manet: Biographical and Critical Survey, tr. Austryn Wainhouse and
James Emmons, Skira, Lausanne, 1955.
Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, tr. Allan Stoekl,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985.
Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion, tr. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York,
1989.
Bear, Liza, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting (the Humphrey Street Building),’ in
Avalanche (December 1974), pp. 34–37.
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell, Macmillan and Co., London,
1911.
Bergson, Henri, The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L. Andison, F. Hobner & Co., New
York, 1946.
Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, [1908] tr. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, Zone
Books, New York, 1988.
Bex, Florent (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum Antwerp,
1977.
Bois, Yves-Alain, ‘A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,’ in October #29
(Summer 1984), pp. 32–62.
Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, Zone Books, New
York, 1997.
Breitwieser, Sabine (ed), Reorganizing Structure by Drawing through It: Zeichnung Bei
Gordon Matta-Clark, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1997.
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Stoddart, Stuart & Watkins, London, 1967.
Carlinsky, Dan, ‘“Sliver” Buyers Have a Field Day at City Sales,’ in New York Times
Issue (14th October 1973), sec. Real Estate, pp. 1, 12.
200 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Hollier, Denis, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, MIT Press,
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London, 1983.
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108.
Lavin, Maud, ‘Gordon Matta-Clark and Individualism,’ in Arts Magazine #58, 5
(January 1984), pp. 38–41.
Le Grice, Malcolm, ‘Mapping in Multi-Space, Expanded Cinema to Virtuality,’ in S.
Breitwieser (ed), White Cube/Black Box, EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1996,
pp. 261–280.
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Cambridge, 2000.
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Nemser, Cindy, ‘The Alchemist and the Phenomenologist,’ in Art in America #59
(March/April 1971), pp. 100–103.
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the Rationalists, [First published separately as The Anti-Rationalist (1973) and The
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Podro, Michael, The Critical Historians of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven &
London, 1982.
Rajchman, John, The Deleuze Connections, MIT Press, 2000.
Rajchman, John, ‘Thinking Big (John Rajchman Talks with Rem Koolhaas),’ in
Artforum #33, December (1994), pp. 46–55, resumes 99.
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202 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
A W-Hole House, vii, 35, 39, 107 Bergson, Henri, i, 16, 18, 20, 21, 26,
aesthetic phase (of a discipline), 144, 27, 43, 52, 53, 56, 65, 93, 158,
145 159, 164, 171, 184, 185, 187, 188,
Agar pieces, vii, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 157 189, 192, 197
alchemy, 50, 51, 188 Bingo, 39
Alpers, Svetlana, 133, 134, 195 bodily memory 66, 67, 68, 69, 70; see
altération, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, also incorporated memory
115, 116, 120, 123, 127, 158, 163, Bois, Yve-Alain, 73, 74, 181, 190,
164, 193, 197 192
Anarchitecture, vii, 19, 20, 54, 65, 108, Bronx Floors, vii, 33, 34
109, 140, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, Brown, Trisha, 98, 192
155, 157, 158, 159, 171, 174, 175, Burckhardt, Titus, 51, 188
177, 178, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, Burden, Chris, 119, 194
188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, Bykert Gallery, 50; see also Agar
198 pieces
archaeology, 76, 85, 89, 97, 132
architectural drawing, 63, 127, 137, camera obscura, 85, 92, 98, 99, 116,
138, 143, 165 120, 125
architectural judgement, 121, 144, Cartesian, 59, 64, 75, 94, 98, 100,
146 102, 162, 192
Artaud, Antonin, 163, 164, 168, 197 cartography, 83, 134, 135
Casabella, 8, 183, 202
Bataille, Georges, xi, xii, xiii, 63, 64, Circus: Caribbean Orange, vii, 13, 14,
109, 110, 111, 113, 132, 133, 162, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 32, 33,
181, 189, 193, 195, 197 39, 40, 42, 48, 165, 169, 178, 189,
Bear, Liza, 2, 33, 41, 66, 107, 114, 190, 192, 200
115, 138, 146, 172, 181, 184, 185, City Slivers, 101, 108, 113, 191
186, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, Clockshower, vii, 117, 118, 119, 157
198 clumsy butcher, 38, 39, 53, 54
Benjamin, Walter, i, ii, ix, 187
204 GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Collins, Peter, 121, 143, 145, 149, ‘fine memory device’, the, 66, 67, 68,
195, 196 69, 76
common sense, 143, 144, 150, 159, Food, New York, 108, 112
164, 165, 168, 174 form, iv, 6, 8, 10, 17, 18, 27, 31–54,
Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 66, 75, 84, 89,
Moderne (CIAM), 6, 142, 182, 201 93, 96, 105, 113, 115, 122, 127,
Conical Intersect, 97, 99, 115 132, 145, 150, 168, 170, 176, 178,
Connerton, Paul, 67, 68, 69, 94, 133, 186, 192, 198
139, 190, 192, 195 'forms without plans', 54
Cordova, Spain (Mezquita), 62 Forty, Adrian, 8, 9, 10, 27, 176, 177,
Cornell University, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 38, 182, 183, 184, 191, 198
183, 186 Fried, Michael, 3, 5, 32, 182, 194
Cousins, Mark, 151, 152, 196
'covert and durational complexity', Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, vii, 90,
56, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 70, 94; see 146, 147
also 'overt and immediate Garbage Wall, vii, 45, 46, 48, 50, 157
complexity' Giedeon, Sigfried, 5
creative judges, 121 Goodden, Carol, 129, 132, 133, 156,
creative process, 103, 105, 106, 144 162, 195, 196, 197
creative question, i, 18, 19, 20, 21, Graham, Dan, ix, 45, 48, 76, 187,
26, 27, 39, 42, 53, 54, 56, 85, 125, 190
159, 164, 170, 172, 174, 178 gravity, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101
cut drawings, 107, 193 Greenberg, Clement, 3, 4, 5, 27, 32,
182, 184, 185
Daedalus, 63, 64, 70 Greene Street, New York City, 59,
Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari, i, 75, 189, 196
58, 189 Greenwald, Ted, 59, 189
Derrida, Jacques, 163, 164, 165, 168, 'Grey Zone', 119, 120, 123, 124, 125,
187, 197 172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 194
Directional Law, 120, 121, 122, 124,
150 habit, 69, 89, 97, 108, 173, 174
disegno, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 49, 54, 63, Hair, vii, 129, 130–1, 132, 133, 134,
71, 186 135, 139, 140, 144, 148, 154, 157,
drawing, 39, 41, 70, 71, 110, 133, 196
134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 164, Harvard, 6, 182, 192
165, 166, 168, 186, 196, 197 Hill, Jonathan, 72, 190, 196
Duchamp, Marcel, 1 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell & Philip
Johnson, 4, 6, 7, 32, 146, 182, 183
eidos (), 38, 42, 93; see also form Holly Solomon Gallery, New York,
Eisenman, Peter, 6 108
Evans, Robin, 126, 195 Homesteading: An Exercise in Curbside
expanded cinema, 84, 108 Survival, 112, 115, 117, 119, 157,
expanded experience, 55, 67, 69, 85, 187
90, 97, 171, 176
'experience-optics', 83, 84, 99, 191 Incendiary Wafers, vii, 43
INDEX 205
incorporated memory, 67, 69, 72; see memory, 52, 57, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70,
also bodily memory 74, 75, 102, 174, 184
Ingraham, Catherine, 140, 196 metaphor, 22, 23, 26, 85, 102, 125,
‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ spatiality, 148, 156, 177, 178, 192
32, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, Museo Nácional de Bellas Artes,
69, 70, 72, 74, 83, 92, 124, 152, Santiago, vii, 22, 23, 24-5, 26, 33,
171, 174, 182, 193, 194 84, 99, 116, 117, 119, 125, 157