The Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art should be required viewing for any architect born in the age of the computer screen. Few artists could match his ability to extract raw beauty from the dark, decrepit corners of a crumbling city. Fewer still haunt the architectural imagination with such force.
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| Day's end, 1975 |
A trained architect and the son of the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark occupied the uneasy territory between the two professions when architecture was searching for a way out of its late Modernist doldrums. His best-known works of the ’70s, including abandoned warehouses and empty suburban houses that he carved up with a power saw, offered potent commentary on both the decay of the American city and the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating. The fleeting and temporal nature of that work - many projects were demolished weeks after completion - only added to his cult status after an early death in 1978, from cancer, at 35.
Four decades later, however, what stands out is not so much Matta-Clark's somewhat naive ideological stance as the wonderfully raw quality of the work itself. One of the most entrancing pieces at the Whitney is the crude homemade video "Splitting" (1974), which shows the artist carving through the various floors of a quintessential suburban American home, literally splitting it in two. The act evokes the disintegration of the American family, as well as more personal trauma. (The old Matta, a less than supportive father, once spat on one of his son's artworks.)
Yet its strength lies in the way it conveys the act of building, especially the violence. The physical process becomes more important than the final perfected vision. Shirtless and sweaty, Matta-Clark and a laborer rhythmically hammering away at the house's foundation and straining at the lever of a jack. As one side of the house is gently lowered, a splitting appears down its centre, pierced by a narrow beam of light.
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| Conical Intersect, 1975 |
Four decades later, however, what stands out is not so much Matta-Clark's somewhat naive ideological stance as the wonderfully raw quality of the work itself. One of the most entrancing pieces at the Whitney is the crude homemade video "Splitting" (1974), which shows the artist carving through the various floors of a quintessential suburban American home, literally splitting it in two. The act evokes the disintegration of the American family, as well as more personal trauma. (The old Matta, a less than supportive father, once spat on one of his son's artworks.)
Yet its strength lies in the way it conveys the act of building, especially the violence. The physical process becomes more important than the final perfected vision. Shirtless and sweaty, Matta-Clark and a laborer rhythmically hammering away at the house's foundation and straining at the lever of a jack. As one side of the house is gently lowered, a splitting appears down its centre, pierced by a narrow beam of light.
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| Splitting, 1974 |
"Completion through removal. Abstractions of surfaces. Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space. Creating spatial complexity, reading new openings against old surfaces. Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. Breaking and entering. Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point of collapse" - Gordon Matta-Clark, 1971
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