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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
In a book of such ambition, there will be much with which to quibble. Far too many references to Enlightenment philosophy mar Lee's writing, and their relevance remains unarticulated. As a consequence, Bataille's notion of a sacrificial economy remains relatively underdeveloped in this Gordon Matta-Clark. Conical Intersect (Etant d'Art Pour Locataire). account. Given the notion's very opening onto a model of "economy," Lee doesn't press the connections that could be made between Conceptual art's work on economic practices--its literal reflection on money-and the implications of Bataille's idea. Similarly, Bataille's focus on the erotic as the preeminent contemporary avatar of a sacrificial dynamic seems unfortunately repressed here. (Matta-Clark did jokingly refer to his Conical Intersect by the alternate title Quel Con, a seemingly minor connection that Lee's Bataillean frame could have addressed, with perhaps illuminating effects on her otherwise desexualizing rejection of feminist critiques that read Matta-Clark's cuttings as so much virile avant-gardism and violent masculinist display.) And given Lee's deconstruction of various art historical models and methods, the constraints of monographic history remain far too strongly in force. Much attention is given to Robert Smithson, but littl e to the great tissue of connections linking Matta-Clark's work and other artistic projects of his time. Given their shared hostility to architecture, a confrontation between the work of Matta-Clark and Richard Serra might be more important to stage at this moment than the Smithson connection; it might have allowed Lee to articulate more clearly the transgressive logic opening sculpture at the moment of the late 1960s onto other domains. Although Lee rather unconvincingly tries to distance Matta-Clark's work from the practices of institutional critique, it was precisely in this milieu that a specific of affiliation to Bataille and transgression was most clearly posed: I am thinking primarily of the work of Daniel Buren. Indeed, it is hard to read one of Buren's most direct references to the notion of transgression, a 1976 New York installation at the John Weber and Leo Castelli galleries entitled To Place, To Transgress, as anything other than a precise response to Matta-Clark's 1975 Conical Intersect. In tha t instance, Buren's circular placement of striped panels on the windows of both galleries bored a visual hole through the entire facade of the gallery building on West Broadway. How would it have changed Lee's book to take into consideration such parallel concerns?
This is perhaps a question for future work. I have only been able to pose it after a confrontation with Lee's project; figures like Buren and Serra do begin to look different in its wake. This is due, in great part, to the brave questions that Lee here faces, questions of method and meaning, that open onto the major concerns of form and history, and of aesthetics and politics that still divide art historical work. These are questions that Lee knows enough to leave unresolved; moreover, she forces a lack of resolution on either side of their current divide. Lee rehabilitates Matta-Clark's sculpture as a gift to contemporary artistic and historical practice. To borrow an older critical formulation, he leaves us miles from "the conclusion of modernist sculpture": rather, positioning sculpture at its limit, the concerns of the medium can neither be seen as reaching a conclusion nor retreating into a new conception of autonomy. Sculpture will rather break constantly, repeatedly, and with unknown results into new domains. This is the logic that transgression prescribes. It is a situation the depths of which we have only begun to plumb, a felicitous obscurity within which Lee helps us to lose our way.
