Gordon Matta-Clark: The Aesthetic of Mutilated Social Space

At the time when architectural modernism was coming under fire, one artist working in the ‘seventies approached the ‘splitting’ of modern dwelling in a distinctive way. His art strikes me as a compelling visual metaphor for the mutilation of social space, of which our current foreclosure crisis is a variant (be sure to check out the Matta-Clark videos in my VodPod widget, left column, at the bottom).

Gordon Matta-Clark was the son of a surrealist painter whose acquaintances were Duchamp and prominent DaDaists and surrealists. He studied at Cornell and the Sorbonne (where he encountered deconstruction) and was in Paris and participated in the student protests of May 1968. Although he was a Cornell-educated architect, to the dismay of his modernist mentors he became best known for the artful misuse of his skills by photographing buildings that he first destroyed.

In ‘Splitting’ (1974), Matta-Clark purchased a two-story house and cut it in half with a large laceration beginning at the roof, running down the middle of the house to its base. In other works, he purchased abandoned factories and warehouses and carved gaping holes and spiral cuts through walls, ceilings, and floors.

Matta-Clark’s subjects tended to be abandoned relics of commercial and residential space; friends recall excursions into foreclosed homes and buildings where it appeared that families had left in the night, leaving most of their things. They remember Matta-Clark’s characterization of the installation (cutting) process as a kind of archaeological work, peeling back or cutting through layers of linoleum, surrounded by the artefacts of a once-secure home.

In the works collected in the exhibit ‘Real Properties, Fake Estates’, he purchased at auction fifteen or so small lots of New York City land that had been produced as the remainders of awkward zoning distributions: a 5’ by 5’ chunk of sidewalk, a 1’ by 350’ strip of alleyway. He obsessively photographed, drew and diagrammed these properties and apparently viewed them as commentaries on disuse, on the between-spaces and remainders left behind by the contradictions of property and social exchange.

In 1978, at the age of 35, he died before following through with whatever plans he had for them.

By naming one of his works ‘Anarchitecture’, which led to subsequent collaborations among artists and architects, Matta-Clark glanced, tongue in cheek, at Le Courbusier’s Vers Une Architecture (Towards A New Architecture).

To Le Corbusier’s remark, ‘Do not forget the problem of architecture!’ (which for Le Corbusier meant pure function), Matta-Clark responded ‘Anarchitecture attempts to solve no problem’, and in another place (in response to Corbusier’s call for houses as ‘machines for living’) he described the aspiration for one of his works as that of creating ‘a machine for not living’.

I am particularly attracted to a shot from inside one of Matta-Clark’s slashed buildings. A gaping slit opens at the top of the room and runs down to the floor between two windows, narrowing almost to a point. External light enters from the cut, filtering the room with a blue-green hue. The room’s interior is mutilated, exposed and intruded upon.

This image is reminiscent of another photograph that I know as the frontispiece to Roland Barthes’ last book, Camera Lucida. There, one is spectatorially inside a bedroom filtered with the same blue-green hue, but instead of a slit wall one sees a panel of sheer curtains with a sliver of an opening.

Barthes’ image insinuates something either erotic or esoteric, or both. One is drawn to the mysterious light behind the veil, or one is attracted to the rim of the cut itself.

What is aesthetic about ‘Splitting’ may not be its street-art style vandalism of the urban fabric as much as its permission of the gaze to migrate towards the vantage point of reconstituted interior spaces. There, as the result of demolition, a new sense of spatial orientation is attained, as well as a new kind of desire.

The questions sometimes brought to these works⎯What is the work? Is it the buildings? Is it the photographs installed in museums and art books?⎯prove interesting only when they allow us to wonder about whether it is in fact the case that exterior shots of slashed buildings adequately encompass the works’ significance.

What may be even more visually provocative about Matta-Clark’s art is less the hubris of its architectural auto-destruction than the way its interiors achieve the misproduction of space, there where light intrudes and where new spatial configurations of the interior emerge at the site of conical cuts through walls, floors and ceilings.

To what extent was Matta-Clark’s aesthetic intervention about the capacity to alter, through destruction, the sense of dwelling that can be experienced within the spatial logic of the post-‘fifties modern city?

It is a question of how to live wrong life wrongly.

Matta-Clark’s gesture was not just negative and destructive, but neither did it aspire to anything as grand as the many manifestos his modernist mentors promoted in the decades before. Rather, its strategy was the insurrection of mutilated social spaces, the misproduction of derelict interiors.

Matta-Clark envisioned what the philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno once called, in a description of Kafka’s achievement of the same thing, salvation in the auto-graveyards.

Don’t just scratch the surface: Transmission: The Art of Matta And Gordon Matta-Clark

Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark

Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates

Gordon Matta-Clark:

KudoSurf Me!

Stumble It!

~ by Shane Waggoner on December 13, 2008.