At the Limits of Sculpture - Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark - Review

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.

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).

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.

Lee's last two chapters explore this situation of fragmentation and contingency. These essays are by far the book's best. In a breathtaking analysis, she traces in her third chapter the ways Matta-Clark's building cuts literalized several of the defining phenomenological conditions of Minimalist sculptural practice. In doing so, his works created a situation of spectatorial excess, pushing the phenomenological experience of Minimalist sculpture toward what Lee calls a "phenomenology of the sublime." The subjective experience of Matta-Clark's cuts tend toward the vertiginous; they do not consolidate the spectatorial body but rather disperse it; they expose the structure of buildings only to make of this literal transparency a more disorienting, thickened opacity. And in this excessive, dispersed spectatorship, Lee locates the political stakes of Matta-Clark's work. She does this in the last chapter through her most incisive extension of Bataille's writings on a sacrificial economy: his notion of a "workless co mmunity." Predicated on loss, a sacrificial economy legitimates a vision of politics where only that loss would unite the community of its members--imagine, Bataille once wrote, the disconcerting idea that death is "the fundamental object of the communal activity of men, death and not food or the production of the means of production." [2] Imagine, in other words, a community predicated solely on the shared mortality of its members, a community where the finite limit of mortality itself may be the only conceivable universal quality. Looking to the artist's last projects in Paris, such as Conical Intersect, Lee reconfigures current debates on site-specificity and community-based artistic practices in light of this idea. Often, Lee notes, Matta-Clark's cuttings took the form of a hole or burrowed into the ground like a burial cavity: "Challenging any claims to an essentialized community of spectators, his work produces a viewership founded on loss, not the fullness of productive or performative experience" (209 ). It cannot be stressed how fertile this reconfiguration is for the increasingly stagnating debates on site-specificity in contemporary art. It reads like a recipe for contemporary practice, offered at the moment of a massive recuperation of site-specificity, instrumentalizedo as it is today in the service of artistic and civic institutions alike. [3]

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.

George Baker is Assistant Professor of Art History and a coordinator of the Mastor's Program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism, and Theory at the State University of Now York, Purchase. He is currently at work on a revisionist study of Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris and is editing an anthology of critical essays on the artist James Coleman.

(1.) See, for example, Pamela Lee, "Mike Kelley's Name Dropping," Word & Image 2 no. 3 (July-September 1995): 300-319; and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

(2.) Georges Bataille, "Nietzschean Chronicle," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 208.

(3.) Lee's reading has been extended in Miwon Kwon. "Unsitings of Community," Sharawadgi, ed. Christian Meyer and Mathias Poledna (Vienna and Cologne: Felsenvilla and Verlag Walther Konig, 1999), and my own "The Space of the Stain." in Knut Asdam: Works 1995-2000 (London and Copenhagen: Tate Britain and Galleri Tommy Lund, 2000).

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