Gordon Matta-Clark

What do boys do? Make fart jokes, break things, rule the world. Reductive, yes. But boys get the power of the rude and the scatological, and they keep at it long after the rest of us have buckled down. A good deal of the muscle of the Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective this spring at the Whitney lies in the rogue machismo of work made well before the rebranding of such sentiments—think of TV’s Jackass, for instance—put another dent in available masculine experience.

Take the joyful destruction on view in Freshkill, 1971, a Super 8 film that follows Matta-Clark en route to the Staten Island dump, Fresh Kills, where he drives his truck into a bulldozer, turning it over to the machine and, finally, the scrap heap. Or consider the science class fun of the agar-growing (and exploding), bottle-melting or photo-frying experiments that produced works beloved today as much for their remains as for the stories and methods of their making. Then there is Window Blow-Out, 1976, a series of photographs documenting his short-lived contribution to the “Idea as Model” exhibition at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where the artist shot out the windows of the gallery space—a counterpoint to his photographs of public housing in the Bronx installed inside, and a comment on the felt complacency of other work on view. Aggressive mischief, incendiary fun, these acts astonish today with their unapologetic maleness.

“You Are the Measure,” indeed. The exhibition title, one of many aphorisms made and collected in notebooks and on index cards by Matta-Clark, nails precisely the refreshing cheek and balls at the core of his work. Resisting prose, siding with word as gesture, the phrase conjures the artist’s daring position in and against avant-gardes, disciplines and city politics. Whether in performance documentation, drawings, photographs, building fragments, notebooks and ephemera, the portrait of the artist proposed by the Whitney is of a fearless mind, let loose in a 1970s New York cut down by urban decline. We meet Matta-Clark—city native, Cornell University architecture graduate and son of Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta Echaurren—as he roams the streets, turning the abandoned rubble of the sidewalk into contemporary art, no permission asked.

A seminal force in the reclamation of SoHo as an artist’s community, Matta-Clark lived and worked in the formerly industrial neighborhood. In 1971, with a group of friends, he renovated a space at the corner of Wooster and Prince, and opened the artist-run restaurant and gathering place, Food. Among his art actions: roasting pigs, playing with fire, jacking up abandoned cars for use as alternative housing, offering oxygen to passersby on Wall Street. In the short decade before his death from cancer in 1978, he produced an enormous amount of work, at once richly heterogeneous, sharply focused and meticulously executed. If nostalgia partly explains the hyperbole encircling this artist right now—Artforum referred to his “perfect eye,” the Times called the show “heavenly”— the more difficult edges of his work better illustrate Matta-Clark’s lingering impact.

The building cuts, for instance, perhaps his best-known work, still come with a sting and a prayer. Simply put, there is a breathtaking perversity to cutting a house in two, as he did with Splitting, 1975, in a city perennially embroiled in issues of poverty and affordable housing. Ditto for his project at Pier 52, an abandoned building along Manhattan’s Westside highway formerly used commercially by dock workers, then without sanction by gay men and artists. Breaking into the space to, in his words, “take possession, occupy,” Matta-Clark sliced a nine-foot-long channel across the floor, exposing the rough waters of the Hudson River below. Then he carved a blade-like hole in one wall, an oval in the roof, a quarter circle in the floor corner and, above that, a full circle. Allegorized then and today as “cathedral-like,” the work is aesthetically powerful: marking the play of light and shadow, disrupting the boundaries of inside and out, reconfiguring the façade of the city in beautiful, surprising ways.

But to focus on aesthetics alone misses the point. Watching Day’s End, 1975, the film documentation of the event, you see Matta-Clark hanging suspended from the roof, cutting through the metal with a blowtorch. You see the sun pour into the space like light on sleeping eyes. You see the hard work, the extreme physicality, the degree of risk involved. That these cuts were dangerous, to make and to see, seems crucial to their meaning. The most awesome effect of the work, it seems, is the way it reoriented the body to the city, imagining the built environment as wilderness. That the site was closed down, that Matta-Clark escaped to Europe to avoid prosecution—advising authorities himself that “Matta-Clark” was nowhere to be found—only further indexes the criminalization of public space.

“I don’t try to make destruction a beautiful thing, by any means—I think of it as an immensely wasteful condition,” says Matta-Clark in the excellent Podcast accompanying the exhibition, and available on-line. He is speaking of anger as one of the possible responses to Conical Intersect, 1975, a cut on a condemned building adjacent to the construction of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “[I think of it as] reorganizing things that are, for one reason or another, beyond my control, taking things that are doomed … taking something at the last moment and reorienting it into some kind of alternative expression.” If the alternatives according to Matta-Clark hollered joy and theoretic smarts, they equally pointed the finger at the obstacles to architecture as social space—among them, governments and markets.

Nevertheless, actions of this order left relics that stand as fascinating sculptural objects, if not also as soon-to-be Sotheby’s sale items. I loved, for instance, the elegant, wheelchair-like device with umbrella used to deliver hits of free oxygen in the performance Fresh Air Cart, 1972, a vaguely sinister thing that melds medical taboo with hot-dog-stand fun. More ordinary, and with more emotional wallop, is the side of a house taken from a cut near Niagara Falls called Bingo, 1974. The fragment pits the weather-beaten siding of the exterior against the decorative elements and the trace of a shorn-away staircase on the wall of the interior. What startles is the figuring of those barely perceptible structures that dominate daily life: walls, shelter, air—suddenly made striking, made visible.

There are less divisive moments, when a focus on Matta-Clark as communal force seems more apt. Tree Dance, 1971, a film documentation of an early performance at Vassar College, recalled to my mind the Judson Memorial Church crowd, in particular Steve Paxton’s inflatable sculptures and outdoor dances. In the film, four people join forces to make shelter in a tree; suspended on swings, housed in cocoon-like tents, connected by ropes and ladders, their forms turn to pure silhouette in the intense light of day. Accompanying the film is a collection of plant drawings that, according to a particularly corny didactic, explore the “rich potential of vegetal growth.” Instead, the imagery records the sublime strangeness of the common and the near, as houseplants grow thorny, branches entwine, trees form archways. Balancing the taut surrealism on view is the sense of the artist’s own wonder at the formal patterning of the natural world, a preliminary source of design ideas.

I had always thought of Matta-Clark predominantly as a performance artist. But, whether in documentary, montage or collage, the range of photography included in the exhibition tracks his commitment to pressure the form beyond the needs of documentation. Untitled (Anarchitecture), 1974, for instance, offers up a sociology of the city’s vernacular in a collection of found scenes that attest to the drama of objects in everyday life. We see an intersection shot from a loft window; a wedding cake on display in a shop window; a set of teeth in a glass of water; bikes left down in a city park.

Elsewhere, a large-scale print of a subway car written over with neon-coloured spray paint, Graffiti Photoglyph, 1973, stages the charged relations between city officials and street artists, between realistic image and stylized gesture. It’s a fine example of the lifelong nature of Matta-Clark’s interest in the photograph as ritual object, a surface to be acted upon. This practice reaches its pinnacle in the final Cibachromes, Conical Intersect, 1975, and Circus, 1978, in which documentary photos of the building cuts were reworked through collage. I stared at these images for a long time, unable to figure out what I was seeing, unable to connect the spun geometry and heady angles to any fixed origin. This is photography as IMAX theatre, architecture as ferris wheel, history as fantasy. As the allure of authentic mimetic detail recedes into the volatility of physical experience, the Cibachromes reiterate the destabilizing might of an artist currently being anointed for the markets today. ■

Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from February 22 to June 3, 2007.

MJ Thompson is a writer living in Brooklyn and Montreal.