In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Pamela M. Lee
considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s--particularly
site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices--and its
confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of
urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress
that have defined modern building programs.
Although highly regarded during his short life--and honored by artists
and architects today--the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78)
has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best
remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts."
Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts
into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as
sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations.
Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of
SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the
exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food,
he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space.
Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because
of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its
historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity
of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction--suggest
about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the
1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making--that
the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do
these projects address the very writing of history, a history that
imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of
progress?
In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it
in the context of the art of the 1970s--particularly site-specific,
conceptual, and minimalist practices--and its confrontation with issues
of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the
city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building
programs.
