I caught the Gordon Matta-Clark show at the Whitney just before it closed over the weekend (it heads to Moca in LA next, 11 July-29 Oct), and it made me realise two things: Matta-Clark's revolutionary concern for spatiality might have more resonance now than ever, in our post 9/11 times and increasingly fearful perspective on architecture for one, but I'm not sure I need to see any more relics of his life, whether they be his dreadlocks or chunks of his signature building 'cuts', to feel closer to the spirit of his project. The curators of the show seem to have titled it 'You are the measure' not fully metaphorically, as a sideways allusion to 'man is the measure of all things', the ancient Greek maxim, but rather more concretely, guiding the visitor slightly awkwardly through fragments of the artist's works, as if expecting an audience that would demand to see material proof of his ideas and actual existence. Is the artist's own choice for conceptual documentation not enough these days?
Matta-Clark, the son of surrealist painter Roberto Matta and the godson of Andre Breton, trained as an architect and quickly focused his interest not on the construction of new buildings but rather on the exploration and subversion of what 'built' actually means. It's well known he had a tendency toward the subversive possibilities of word-play; none of his puns seems more perfect than his coinage of 'anarchitecture', half anarchy half systematic plan, to describe what it is he endeavoured to create in his treatment of space. By exploration we're talking deep surgical - he hacked, sawed, cut and demolished abandoned loft spaces, country houses, 17th century Parisian apartments and even a pier on the Hudson River in order to rather literally open up ideas on spatial subjectivity. His projects were customarily demolished soon after his interventions. His career was brief but incredibly prolific and as influential as any artist's from his day, specially after his death - his cosmic politics, all in one hybrid minimalist-conceptual performance and architecto-sculptural practice, and an early death at age 35 guaranteed his immediate canonisation in the art world's eternal pantheon.
The show covers aspects of most of his work, from his earliest artistic ventures while working at the artist-run Food restaurant in soho, to his gently poetic 'Tree Dancing', a choreography of people dangling from tall branches and one of the last projects he realised by 1974. One of the highlights of the exhibition was definitely all the documentation, on paper, photographs and film, of Matta-Clark's 'Splitting', the artist's temporary vertical cut through a house. In the podcast accompanying the exhibition, Elizabeth Sussmann the curator mentions the artist's emphasis on subverting the ordinary, showing how buildings and objects are 'pieces of archaeology of our lives', what we see every day and yet not think about, and this is as relevant today as it was in Matta-Clark's time - the erosion and disappearance of our daily experience of life.
'Splitting'.
As I mentioned earlier it the exhibition's wide scope and attempt to serve as concentrated introduction to the artist's oeuvre prioritises a sort of strangely too archaeological, reliquary sense of display in the cabinets that seems awkward at times, slightly at odds with the artist's ideas. Reading about Matta-Clark's iconic project not to cut his hair for a year and seeing the remains of his hair in a cabinet (only the votive candles missing) is certainly interesting for what the insight it gives us to the artist's 360 degree artistic project, ranging fluidly from land to body politics and so on. It's like getting an archaeological exploration of the artist's life along with his work. Most of all, it is this other body, the fragments of his building cuts that seem actually, strangely, like superfluous objects in a show about an artist whose practice was so much about fleshing out ideas, not objects.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
This show will be heading to Moca in LA 11 July - 29 Oct. Click here for Ned Smyth's own portrait of Matta-Clark on artnet.
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