A sign at the entrance of the Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit read, “No photography.” I took three photos on my phone, and I think Matta-Clark would have given me a pat on the back.
Matta-Clark became famous for breaking the rules of architecture by destroying buildings. His most famous works usually involved abandoned buildings that were soon to be demolished. One of the most striking, Splitting (1974), is a 10 minute, 50 second long home-video of him and a worker literally splitting a house into two. The artist, bare-chested and sweaty, wields chainsaws and other power tools as he works down the house’s foundation. Eventually, a sliver of sunlight shines from between the house. Three months after Splitting was completed, the house was torn down.
Photo by jmacorreia on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.
He felt architects and other intellectuals were too removed from the reality of the everyday and used his work to point out failed social policies. For a 1976 show in Manhattan, meant to celebrate the architectural visionaries of the time, he created “Window Blow Out,” a series of black and white photographs of vandalized buildings. Late one night, he snuck into the gallery and blew out a window with an air rifle.
A retrospective of the artist, who died in 1978 at the age of 35, is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art through May 4.
Three hundred people crowded into the sold-out theater on the museum’s first floor to hear about Matta-Clark and his legacy Feb 2. Chic, plastic glasses adorned the faces of art school students and Burberry scarves clung to the necks of businessmen and haute housewives. Sitting in front of a black velvet curtain, a panel of art experts began to talk about cracking a house in half, blowing out windows and revealing what our world is made of.
“How do you make people see those things that have just been invisible to them?” asked Walter Hood. Hood, the landscape architect behind the new grounds of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, was part of the panel discussing Matta-Clark’s work at the museum. He said the artist’s ability to point out the easily missed aspects of life were his greatest strength.
In “Fake Estates,” a collection of photographs depicting the odd shaped alleys and back lots of New York City, Matta-Clark made unwanted corners into art. Poverty, crime and other forgotten or hidden aspects of city life are revealed in the documentary-like work.
But photography cannot capture art as Matta-Clark created it, sawing into highrise walls. The lots that Matta-Clark depicted no longer exist in their 1970s state. All the buildings that he cut have been destroyed, leaving only photographs. “A W-hole house,” a house with jagged cut-outs through the walls, is portrayed in the exhibit through photographs, artfully lined up to appear panoramic. “The artwork feels absent, but at the same time is present in those photographs,” said Sarah Oppenheimer, another artist on the panel whose works create holes in architecture of a different sort.
“There’s this construction of him as a person that fights the possibility of his work just disappearing,” Oppenheimer said. She said Matta-Clark’s architectural impermanence has often caused him to be portrayed as a “just do it” sort of person who was free, open and spontaneous.
Food, once a restaurant in SoHo staffed by artists and co-founded by Matta-Clark, has become legend. A dive for many artists of the time, it was a place where art, often viewed as solitary, became social. “He made his process a social process,” said Rirkrit Tiravanija, an artist. Tiravanija creates meals as a form of art, including a lunch downtown last Friday. Art must be felt from the “tummy,” he said as he sat cross-legged and relaxed behind pink-lensed aviators.
Perhaps Matta-Clark’s own efforts to create lasting work are one’s best hope to understanding the scope of this art. An aspiring filmmaker, the artist took video footage of much of his work. Watching the video of Splitting, one gets a sense of Matta-Clark’s yearning to make his inherently transient work something lasting. “One could see this film almost happening… it is contextualized. It is framed. It is in a specific place,” Tiravanija said.
Or, perhaps, Matta-Clark’s legacy is no piece of work. Rather, it’s an idea. In discussing Oppenheimer’s work, Hood said, “I’m not looking at it as something to walk around and admire. I’m intrigued by that process and to me that’s Matta-Clark in play in my head.”
The reasons behind taking grainy pictures of photography depicting torn walls on a cellphone were more important than the little act of rebellion itself. That thought process, maybe, was Matta-Clark playing in my head.