Matta-Clark’s works challenged traditional perceptions of artistic production rather than creating objects, he perused visual and conceptual experiences in the form of large-scale architectural intervention, installations and ideas. His catalysing visions raised questions drawing attention to vital social concerns regarding architecture social space, and public space. In the process, Matta-Clark was redefining boundaries of artistic practices, by using an architectural language to visualise and contextualise his work in the liminal space that exists between the disciplines.
Matta-Clark’s rhetoric is a creative art of practice that acts across established discursive formations and prescribed territories.Thus blurring the boundaries between art and architecture. Gordon Matta-Clark’s most recognised work is possibly splitting (1974). 1
fig 1 : Splitting 1974
Splitting comprised of radically intervening in the internal structure of a small suburban house right down the middle, dramatically revealing it in section. Notably, splitting reflects the multiplicity of Matta-Clark’s work. Splitting was an Anarchitectural deconstruction of architecture. It was simultaneously a theoretical performance and a work of sculpture. The implementations of a project like splitting as of Matta-Clark’s work as a whole are the questions posed. Such as what constitutes a work of art? And are the boundaries between art and architecture of any real significance?
Fig 2 : Splitting 1974
Fig 3 : Splitting 1974
Matta-Clark’s destructive antagonism toward architects and architecture had already led to one magnificent achievement, Conical Intersect (1975), 2 Which challenged architectural conventions in a way that no other recent work had done. It challenged them not by provocation, but by producing a miraculous result on site.
Fig 4 : Conical Intersect 1975
A house due for demolition to make way for the Pompidou centre was used, as a sort of raw material. A conical formation was made visible by cutting its elliptical traces through the masonry. The cone a relatively sophisticated form in unsophisticated surroundings. A space subtracted from other spaces exposed the rough solidity of walls and floors, whose thicknesses then became markers for a skewed bodiless object around which the rest of the house seemed to have formed afterwards. ‘Conical Intersect’ demonstrates that Matta-Clark’s work was constructively engaged with architecture, and sought to question architecture’s disciplinary limits. ‘Conical Intersect’ sets up a dialogue between art and architecture within the territory of architecture. His work can then be used as grounds to expose architectures equivocation, pointing to the importance of considering architecture as polyvalent, and able to occupy an uncertain territory that can be simultaneously real, political and theoretical. While there have evidently been significant socio-cultural changes in the years subsequent to Matta-Clark, the legacy of modernism continues to bear on many areas of our contemporary situation, 3 and it is arguably, here that the endurance of his oeuvre can be encountered and its continued relevance explored. Matta Clark’s oeuvre disrupts the tendency for each discipline to set itself up as both independent and imposing. A position which becomes undermined, for example in Matta-Clark’s project; ‘Reality Properties: fake estates’ which went about highlighting the cultural contradictions. This project was conducted as part of the Anarchitecture group. Richard Nonas (a member of the group) explained their interest in the contradictions encompassing architecture, led them to the realisation that architecture was not simply one discipline among numerous, but rather; the discipline of architecture itself assumed a general condition. This revelation asserts that architecture set itself up, both as an accumulator of other disciplines and as a measure or regulator of these other fields. Architecture is seen by Nonas to take up a role as the enduring absolute discipline. Yet, as the Anarchitecture group aimed to prove this was not the case. By providing physical examples of the ‘weakness’ of the architectural discipline, examples that demonstrated a lack of clarity occurring in the connection between architectural technique or knowledge through the architectural process towards the architectural object. Despite the assumption of the totality, there are as many kinds of architecture as you want there to be. In contrast to the prevailing situation that accepted boundaries as static or limited. Matta-Clark’s interest was in the possibilities that emerge when particular boundaries are considered to be porous. Anarchitecture and Matta-Clark offered to renovate the relationships that exist across these boundaries, working both literally and metaphorically between the reduction and collapse of architecture’s rigidity, by highlighting and experiencing the actual ‘weakness’ of the discipline. Demonstrating that it is not apparent to anyone where architecture’s disciplinary boundaries are to be drawn. Thus Matta-Clark pushed architecture both as a discipline and as an object to consider it as a porous field rather than a rigid node. Matta-Clark’s work with Anarchitecture, along with his own oeuvre, broadly called traditional disciplinary boundaries into question. Nevertheless, his work doesn’t simply challenge the architectural profession with his persistent attention to boundaries and determination to go passing through them. In all of his projects, Matta-Clark both acknowledged the need for boundaries and the need for alteration. He was uncomfortable with boundaries that were taken for granted, never acknowledged or challenged; for him, boundaries needed energy to be sustained, and his oeuvre can be considered to have opened up a series of more fluid boundaries operating across the various disciplines. 4
His concern was to broaden the possibilities for human experience, beyond that which is taken for granted. It was not sufficient for him to replace one kind of object with another; his oeuvre was directed at how people might forge new, dynamic relationships with their social and physical environment. Matta-Clark’s oeuvre enacts an altered process and passes this on to the user; encouraging an experience that involves experimentation. Which in itself constituted or maintained some sort of violence, but what must be understood here as productive violence against contractual, systematic judgement. Matta-Clark demonstrated that the boundaries carefully policed by modernist art and architecture were actually porous and unstable. Thus his oeuvre opened up the criteria for both production and evaluation of work from such disciplines. One of Matta-Clark’s most enduring complaints was against any tendency to systematise understanding or experience of the world. The Anarchitecture group offered an alternative model for architectural discipline and practice. In their own ways, Matta-Clark and Anarchitecture both operated within the rules and according to the strict logic of systems in order to point out their shortcomings, and the tendency to systematise in general.
Matta-Clark focused on the human experience within space, going beyond that which could be measured. A lasting characteristic of his oeuvre consisted of his reinterpretation of the convention of architectural drawing particularly orthographic drawing which usually epitomises an architect’s activity. Closely associated with this method is the abstract space the mental construct of the architect that informs the drawing of plans and sections.
Matta-Clark considered his interventions in architecture as “Metaphoric voids, Gaps, leftover spaces, places that were not developed […] Metaphoric in the sense that their interest or value wasn’t in their possible use”. 5
This acknowledgement of architecture’s inconsistencies permitted Matta-Clark to rebuke any spatial totality. Cutting through and depriving his audience of all forms of reference he was able to address his interest in the conception of a critical incision opposed to a systematised absolute. He redefined our perception of architecture by reinterpreting the architecture of the everyday. Managing through the interpretation of the existing (either as physical structure or a static thought) to address important architectural issues.
Architecture became for him a liberating form of expression in which the boundaries could be manipulated to critique the contradictory elements within the field of architecture.
The void is normally associated with nothingness, emptiness and absence. The void can be perceived as the leftover space or useless space. In various instances, a void has negative connotations illustrated as forgotten, unacknowledged and place-less. These vacant spaces are prominent entities existing on both architectural and urban scales, but their unconscious relation to nothingness is an error in judgement. A void is not a space of negation or absence, but a space of action and dynamic multiplicity. It is a space shaped by its surroundings, a meeting of form and space, located between the visible and articulated. Its undefined ambiguousness allows for the opportunity and wealth of perception, emancipating a multiplicity of associations and meanings from its existence. The result is various overlapping interpretations of space. The utilisation of void as a technique is used in copious art approaches where the purpose becomes that of imparting the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. 6 Through the process of making forms unfamiliar, the length of perception is prolonged, causing the contemplation of compositional and spatial attributes. This approach was abundantly explored through the works of Gordon Matta-Clark who investigated the idea of completion through removal. His methods focused on the void, on opposites and the between space. He formulated a critical approach that viewed the open element of space as both disorienting and reorienting. He saw the void as a container full of potential, traversed by energy and complexity. His uncomfortableness with boundaries has led to him creating art of alterations. His works walk the fine line between reduction and collapse as they challenge the familiarity of habitual perceptions and interpretations through the use of void creation. 7 The void displays the dynamics of its accommodating structure, of the elements that make it the in-between.8 It becomes a place of overlapping signs and traces as his cuts and dissections allow for light to be admitted beyond visual surfaces and onto the issues occurring within the urban fabric of the city. Matta-Clark was able to expose the everyday through rupturing it. His acts of segmenting existing structures function as primary acts of alteration of the consciousness. Through the act of disorientation; one was enabled to reorient themselves based on different conditions and perceptions. His work focused on constructing different states of mind through the means of liberating architectural structures from the straight-jacket of their maker’s intentions and recycling them as consciousness-altering artworks. Matta-Clark utilises the void to activate the affordance of new passageways and views through the process of disintegration and undoing of the building. The void within his work 'Splitting' , becomes a representation of disconnected otherness, of undefined and ‘empty’ space, and a mirroring of the hidden reality. It is characterised by elusive and ineffable qualities that enable ‘emptiness’ to be linked to issues far beyond that of structural assemblage. His gravity disorienting structures allow the void to manifest into a concrete material, bridging gaps and acting as an osmotic membrane between what exists and what is missing, between certainty and possibility. His works take on the city in all of its disorder and variety in order to reveal the hidden story of its situation. The void becomes a place of substance, of complex spatial relations and, he championed the importance of the ordinary body, emphasising its central role predicating measure within the experience, the experience that acknowledged and enjoyed this contradiction.
#gordonmattaclark #architecture #art #splitting #conicalintersect #sculpture #conceptualart #space #anarchitecture #void #mattaclark
1 Gordon Matta Clark, Gordon Matta clark:You are the measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American art, 2007), 9.
2 Peter Muir , Gordon Matta Clark’s Conical intersect: sculpture, Space, and the cultural value of urban imagery (Farnham surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 3.
3, 4 Stephen Walker, Major and miner architectural issues in the work of Gordon Matta Clark (Sheffield: university of Sheffield school of architecture, 2008), 247-263.
5 Gloria Moure, Gordon Matta Clark: works and collected writings (Barcelona: Edicones poligrafa, 2006),25.
6 Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 2.
7, 8 Kristen Van Haeren, “ Philosophy of the Image and Architecture, Nothing Works: Negotiating the Ineffable Void through the works of Gordon Matta-Clark” (diss,academia.edu, 2014).
Comments