Splitting the difference: Anthony Vidler on Gordon Matta-Clark - Book Review

Gordon Matta-Clark, edited by Carinne Diserens; survey by Thomas Crow; essays by Judith Russi Kirshner and Christian Kravagna. London and New York: Phaidon Press. 240 pages. $75.

Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, by James Attlee and Lisa Le Feuvre. Porchester, UK: Nazraeli Press. 112 pages. $35.

THE "DILEMMAS" OF Gordon Matta-Clark, to cite the title of Liza Bear's celebrated 1976 interview with the artist, were not entirely of his own making. They were more the result of an increasingly specialized world of art criticism and practice, a world that was, despite the attempts of successive avant-gardes since the Futurists, still more or less divided along traditional lines. It was Matta-Clark's apparent indifference to these divisions--between sculpture and architecture, photography and film, performance and installation, and above all the permanent and the transitory--that has given rise to so many "Matta-Clarks" over the years since his tragically early death in 1978: the enraged James Dean of the art scene; the violent anti-architect and inventor of "anarchitecture"; cult hero of the Downtown '70s; earnest follower of the Land artists (or, alternatively, strict formalist of the informe). All these personae--and many more--can, of course, be found in his work and have provoked more than their share o f critical debates.

Such a state of critical ambiguity should not be surprising. The son of the Surrealist Matta (Roberto Matta-Echaurren) and the artist Anne Clark and godchild of Marcel Duchamp, with whom he played a regular game of chess in the Village, and onetime assistant to Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, Matta-Clark was nothing if not mercurial. Little was left untouched, from the buildings that he cut up, Polaroids he baked to a crisp, pigs he roasted, food he gave away, junk that he built into walls, windows that he shot out, language that he disassembled, and, in the recollection of a friend, Joan Simon, hearts that he broke.

Recently, however, some twenty-five years after his death, with the finished restoration of his films and the gradual opening of Matta-Clark's archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, scholars have taken the opportunity to make a more comprehensive study of the life and work. There were recent Matta-Clark exhibitions in Glasgow and London. Art historian Pamela M. Lee's Object to Be Destroyed (MIT Press) was published in 2000, and it is now followed by the two books under review.

Lee's book was the first full scholarly and critical look at Matta-Clark's entire career in the context of the post-Surrealist avant-garde and the American movements of the '70s: Minimalism, site-specific art, Conceptualism. It also developed important analyses of his "architectural" projects in light of his Cornell architecture school education and the prevailing theories of the time. Lee accurately identified one of the most difficult problems of Matta-Clark interpretation as that of approaching "an artist whose principal mode of production is bound up with the work's destruction." Such an unstable and insecure work has naturally challenged all the commonplaces of what she terms the teleological and Hegelian roots of art history. (This is also, of course, a problem endemic to the scholarly monograph that has to rely on rhetoric and reminiscence to evoke the intense and unruly character of artist and practice. The present books have attempted to address this question not only by reference to the memories of friends and relatives but also by their graphic design--Lee with its untreated gray board covers, the Phaidon monograph by an overcute cut in its spine, and the Nazraeli by presenting its illustrations as "documents"--photographs applied to the pages as if in an album.)

The Phaidon and Nazraeli publications build on Lee's work and develop novel interpretations based on archival finds and new interviews, as well as differing critical stances. Thomas Crow's study in the Phaidon monograph embeds his incisive formal analysis in a biographical tour de force that points to the hitherto neglected influence of alchemy as a trope and practice for Matta-Clark. Building on the contents of Matta-Clark's library, assembled during his early years at Cornell, Crow reveals another side to the artist than that generally categorized under the label informe. He finds a real link between the "process-oriented" Photo-Fry, 1969--for which Matta-Clark literally cooked a series of photographs while throwing into the grease pan thin sheets of gold leaf--and alchemical theories of the relations among the elements. This theme, in parallel to that of Matta-Clark's more precise geometrical and architectural interventions, continues throughout his career, and Crow identifies the uneasy treaty between mag ic and rationality that underlies the entire oeuvre. Crow indeed proposes that this may not be the contradiction it seems, both preoccupations joining in the endless search for material transformation, whether of chemical elements or traditional architectural forms. Crow's groundbreaking essay is followed by Christian Kravagna's discussion of Matta-Clark's use of photography and film and Judith Russi Kirshner's essay on the artist's urban sensibility. The smaller Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between takes the form of a critical essay by James Attlee, who treats the work in a more general European context. The two books, plus Lee's volume, complement one another. The large format of the Phaidon monograph allows for a quality and extensiveness of illustration denied to the others and forms an invaluable visual companion to Lee, while Attlee's European emphasis, with its exposition of Situationist influences (dismissed by Kirshner as "speculative" but documented by Attlee through conversations with Gerry Hovagi myan, an artist who worked with Matta-Clark), nicely balances Crow's investigation of alchemy.