Gordon Matta-Clark
When the institute’s fellows saw it, they were appalled and had the windows replaced and Matta-Clark’s photos removed in time for the opening reception. Only the eight photos survive; they’re mounted in a grid, also called Window Blow-Out, which constitutes one of the 60 Matta-Clark works now on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
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For Matta-Clark, conventional buildings were too separate from the outside world–one of his goals was to open them to light and air. In another photo, Splitting (1974), he cut out portions of a house’s front and back porches wherever the porches opened to the outdoors. He also cut this photo down the middle, splitting the house in two from its top down. And over several months he actually cut a giant wedge down the middle of the actual structure, a modest two-story home slated for demolition in Englewood, New Jersey.
No gallery show could hope to fully capture this protean artist, whose works often don’t have much impact unless one hears the whole story behind them. Laurie Anderson, a friend of Matta-Clark’s in the early 70s, considers what he said about his works “part of the work itself.” She recalls “feeling frustrated with Gordon’s shows…because without the talk, the background, the thing that was left was really blank. The life was out of it.” Fortunately Rhona Hoffman, who knew Matta-Clark, can provide much information, and the gallery has available a collection of catalogs and articles.
Matta-Clark’s objections to “existing property demarcation lines” and to modernist architecture were part of a grand utopian vision: he sought to deconstruct all the symbolic and social systems that separate people from people, structures from structures, and people from the physical world. He also sought to destroy traditional hierarchies of value–the twigs and pebbles and grass of the “Fake Estates” are lovingly presented, as if they had the same importance Velazquez gave the King of Spain in his portraits of Philip IV.
A variety of intersecting and contradictory impulses and meanings are at play in these photo collages. The bright colors, repeated arcs, and various patterns of daylight convey an almost musical aesthetic and a rare lyrical beauty. But there’s also a feeling of danger: Can one walk about without falling in? Will this cutaway building continue to stand? The arcs contrast with the building’s right angles, an organic element in these self-enclosed boxes. The cuts destroy the usual separation between substructure and finished rooms. Of necessity support beams are left in, and so for the first time since its erection we can see how the building was constructed: we seemingly view the house as it’s being built and as it’s coming down. Matta-Clark the revealer of urban infrastructures is here also a kid full of wonder, taking an alarm clock apart for the first time.
