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At the Limits of Sculpture - Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark - Review
Art Journal, Fall, 2001 by George Baker
Lee is largely content to allow Bataille's notions to work subterraneously on her text; the reader turning to Lee's account for an extended theoretical development of his ideas will be frustrated. Instead, she proceeds through a series of practical interpretative demonstrations, in which Bataille's notion of the sacrificial progressively eats away at the conventional tools of the art historian. In a first chapter dedicated to Matta-Clark's earliest works, she turns to issues of historical and biographical context, positioning Matta-Clarks focus on the sculptural alteration of the home as tied to his own conflicted domestic scene, partially abandoned as he was by his father, the surrealist painter Roberto Matta who had trained as an architech. Likewise, Matta-Clark's reconception of the monument as a "non-ument" provokes a reading in terms of his architectural training at Cornell University, where he met the artist Robert Smithson during the famous Earth Art exhibition. In both cases, Lee digresses to a contex tual reading, offering a brief history of the suburbs, in the first instance, and a parallel history of the Cornell University campus, in the second. Both readings, however, are shown to be inadequate to the ambiguities of his inflection of them: "the undecidable character of Matta-Clark's space does not so much work in opposition to these terms [of the "flight" to the suburbs, of the "split" character of his family life] as it works around them, or perhaps even after them" [29]. One might ask why turn to contextual hermeneutic strategies if Matta-Clark's work cannot be circumscribed by them? It is a move compounded by the strategies in Lee's second chapter, "Improper Objects of Modernity," wherein the artist's first architectural cuttings in New York occasion for Lee, a social history of the gentrification of SoHo. But this constant shifting between formal and contextual readings, ultimately pointing out their deep imbrication and mutual cancellation, reflects the contradictory positioning of Matta-Clark's w ork. Describing the early cutting Food, a building extraction displayed as sculpture in a gallery, Lee explains: "The specific elements which lend it its peculiar plastic interest ... are deeply evocative of phenomena that stand in excess of the thing proper. Indeed, its interest accrues around something that is outside of it, improper to it: the architectural setting that literally supported the fragment in its former life" (58).
Seizing on the crucial deconstructive notion of the extrinsic and the improper, Lee shows Matta-Clark's work to be determined not by the immanent concerns of form, but by what lies beyond the strictly formal--in other words, she positions his work on a limit. It heralds a moment in which the traditional mediums of artistic practice systematically cross into arenas that had previously been denied to them. Drawing, in Matta-Clark's hands, would not so much remain a tool to define the limits of form, to cut a shape from the continuum of the world; rather, it now cuts corrosively into the objects of the world, undoing the boundaries and the givenness of forms. Sculpture, too, would cross its limits, posing its subtractive procedures against the conventions of the built environment, becoming architectural in the process--but an architecture predicated on "unbuilding," dedicated to its own loss. This transgressive logic--a play with borders, an opening up of limits--does not so much appropriate a set of new territo ries for drawing, sculpture, and architecture to occupy, as it pits each entity against the others, hybridizing evaluative criteria along the way. Sculpture, in other words, speaks now to the formerly architectural concerns of urbanism and the rationalization of social space; architecture loses its instrumentality to be opened up by terms of sculptural apperception and aesthetic experience. And neither extreme can represent the whole picture. There will be no more whole picture.
