Content provided in partnership with
At the Limits of Sculpture - Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark - Review
Art Journal, Fall, 2001 by George Baker
Pamela M. Lee. Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000. 240 pp., 99 b/w ills. $35.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Today, it seems, the practices of contemporary art, criticism, and art history alike face a crossing, familiar and yet intractable. Call it the split between form and content, aesthetics and politics: postmodernism, no matter its rhetoric of rupture, did little to distance us from such old debates. Perhaps it only exacerbated them. On the one hand, critics such as Rosalyn Deutsche argue persuasively now for reconceiving much contemporary art as a fully urban practice, responsive to imperatives measurable only from outside what she has called the "ghetto" of aesthetic discourse; while others, such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster, have begun convincingly to reverse the rigor mortis that has long clung to such concepts as artistic autonomy and medium-specificity. This is the horizon within which we can best begin to understand Pamela Lee's recent monograph on Gordon Matta-Clark, Object to Be Destroyed. For Lee presents us with a book of deep methodological contradictions, swinging as it does from interpretive strategies informed by the concerns of biography and social art history, but also by formalism, phenomenology, and the discourses of contemporary urbanism. These strategies sit uncomfortably together in Lee's project; their evident incompatibilities are not resolved. But resolution is not Lee's point, and I want to see the contradictions of Lee's project not as a weakness but as perhaps its most important contribution. The book proposes an articulation of the terms of the methodological impasse of contemporary art history and a transgression of its current limits.
Lee achieves this articulation, this irresolution, by locating a unifying principle at work in the sculptural projects of Gordon Matta-Clark. His career cut short by an untimely death in 1978 at the age of thirty-five, Matta-Clark's reputation rests today on his "building cuts," a series of sculptural transformations of abandoned buildings achieved through literal operations of subtraction from the site. Positioning sculpture as a process of destruction--through a radical reconfiguration of the medium's traditional basis in subtractive procedures such as carving--Matta-Clark's cuttings redoubled that destruction by focusing on buildings slated to be demolished, with the result that none of the artist's major projects continues to exist today outside of photographic documentation. Lee resists the received wisdom that positions Matta-Clark's ephemeral practice within the narrative of "dematerialization" supposedly achieved by Conceptual art. Although she doesn't stress this, the bodily, performative dimension a nd manually produced nature of Matta-Clark's cuttings do sit incongruously amidst the industrial and linguistic paradigms of Minimal and Conceptual artistic production, like atavistic eruptions from a past that could no longer be repressed. In fact, Lee makes the potentially anachronistic move of connecting his practice to the legacy of Dada and Surrealism, signaled by her book's title, taken from the Assisted Readymade by Man Ray of the same name. Engaged with procedures of destruction and destined to be themselves destroyed, married to what Lee calls the "shifting temporalities of the built environment" (xiv), Matta-Clark's cuttings embraced the condition of loss as their first principle. Lee finds the principle for the artist's work in what Georges Bataille called "unworking," within a larger notion of a sacrificial economy.
This is not the first time that Lee has employed Bataille's ideas in a revisionist reading of contemporary art, nor is it the first time that we have seen Matta-Clark's sculpture harnessed to an investigation of the continued use-value of Bataille's legacy. [1] But the collision of Matta-Clark and Bataille in Lee's project marks a quite specific achievement. The notion of a sacrificial economy emerges relatively late in Bataille's thought, surfacing by the 1940s as a repositioning of Bataille's earlier notions of the informe (formless), heterology, expenditure, and transgression. Heralded by a crucial 1933 essay entitled "The Notion of Expenditure," Bataille only consolidated his ideas on sacrifice in the wake of World War II, with that social catastrophe as his work's ultimate horizon. A sacrificial economy, for Bataille, positions loss and the excessive squandering of energy at the basis of social life, a Nietzschean inversion of the logic of the modern bourgeois world-view, dedicated as it is to procedures of accumulation and preservation, to progress and rationalized growth. The social and political ramifications of Bataille's notion seem to have attracted Lee, as she proceeds to articulate a repeated crossing over of the formal operations of loss within Matta-Clark's cuttings into their social dimensions. Matta-Clark's work, she writes, "is a politics of things approaching their social exhaustion and the potential of their reclamation. It is a politics of the art object in relation to property; of the 'right to the city' alienated by capital and the state; of the retrieval of lost spaces; of communities reimagined in the wake of their disappearance; a politics of garbage and things thrown away" (xvi).
