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Gordon Matta-Clark: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
ArtForum, May, 2007 by Anthony Vidler
But what a careful study of the exhibits at the Whitney reveals is exactly the opposite. Not that Matta-Clark wasn't passionate, maverick, contrary, and committed to overturning conventions in architecture and in art. It is obvious that he was influenced strongly by his contact with the artists involved with the "Earth Art" exhibition at Cornell in 1969, and his place among a group of antiestablishment artists in the SoHo art world, including Laurie Anderson, Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard, Richard Landry, Richard Nonas, and many others who were involved with 112 Greene Street, has been well documented. But underneath it all Matta-Clark remained deeply invested in architecture: not the architecture of the profession or its own mavericks, but another architecture, one in which buildings responded to life and environment rather than to formalist rules. Indeed, what is fascinating is how Matta-Clark, well trained as he was, utilized these same formalist rules against themselves in work after work. He never abandoned projective geometry; his cuttings were meticulously planned according to the "rules" of the objects to be cut, and drawn with precision in notebook after notebook. But--and here his critical position toward the '60s version of modernism taught at Cornell becomes clear--his material, as opposed to the white walls and heavy masses of post-Corbusian architecture, was space itself. Hence his invention of what he called "anarchitecture." This word is at once a play on the title of Le Corbusier's 1923 manifesto, Vers une architecture, "Towards an architecture" (mistranslated in English as Towards a New Architecture), and a neologism that placed "anarchitecture" on the same plane as "anaesthetics." A handwritten document in the exhibition shows some of his other plays on the word architecture, offering a fascinating glimpse into Matta-Clark's search for an alternative spatial world. Some examples: ant-arco-tecture; an-arco-tecture; a-arc-o-tecture; narc-o-tecture; a-che-o-tect-chore; parc-o-tecture; moc-o-tec-ture; hack-a-tecture; lark-o-tecture; barc-o-tecture; epi-tecture; and so on, in an endless search into the roots of the tectonic and their connections to social and individual life.
It is as if Matta-Clark internalized the call of early modernism for an architecture of space-time and set himself the task of fully realizing its potential, seeing himself, in fact, as the only true heir to modernism in architecture, the one who pushed its premises to their radical conclusions. These premises, of course, were not simply formal games to be played with in architecture schools, but the product of an attitude that saw a social and ethical role for architecture as an instrument and condenser of change--even, in the case of the Russian Constructivists, of revolutionary change. Behind each of Matta-Clark's architectural interventions lies a similar impulse: to seek the most fundamental transformation of architecture, one that would respond to the conditions of life rather than art, and certainly not one that followed the already static conventions of the neo-avant-garde. The action of bringing light into the house (in Splitting) might itself be the best metaphor for Matta-Clark's "anarchitecture": In the end, like his beloved alchemists, systems theorists, and psychologists, and together with the theorists, if not the practitioners, of modern architecture, Matta-Clark was an apostle of light--an "enlightener" in practice and in theory.
