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affirmation of the social character (‘to deal directly with social conditions’)
of this destruction rerouted into a deconstruction (an unbuilding) by means
of cuts (cut out, cut up, cut away, cut through) inflicted on the building in
an experimental ontology of urban space, also serves as a break with Land
Art (too ‘literally like drawing on a blank canvas’) and with Conceptual Art
(‘Rather than using language, using walls’).1 Undoing the wall (défaire le
mur) so as to performatively and ephemerally liberate social space from its
‘architectural limits’ and from its oppressive private/public dialectic: it is in
this new sense that Gordon Matta-Clark uses the term ‘non-architecture’ to
mark the critical dimension of his projects in regard to the social function
of architecture, whose capitalist semiogenesis (in the name of ‘urbanism’,
the real plane of consistency of architecture) they subject to a counterinvestment.2
‘Nobody could construct buildings the way Gordon destructed them.’3 The
at once physical and social violence of Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions,
which he himself qualified as being of a ‘cleanlined brutality’ (Moure,
2006: 172) – and which we address here in terms of their characteristic
operation – implies such a radical break with the formalist conceptuality
of ‘architecture’ that the word extraction, which he used to describe his
first cut-outs, is the only way in which to introduce the relation – and
to introduce the negation in the relation – between Matta-Clark and the
architects whom he sees as lying ‘at opposite ends of the pole’ from his own
interventions in the building.4 It is as if one had to begin by going deep
inside the building, in order to extract oneself physically from architectural
structuring by attacking its functional foundations – which are as much
theoretical and social as material, given that ‘architectural matter’ is always
already semiotically formed by its embedding in the socius, and finds itself
more deeply organized than ever when subjected to the wholly modern
will to the planarity and transparency of ‘structures’. (This architecture,
‘proliferated by the International Style … in the development of post-war
American imperialism’, Matta-Clark [in Moure, 2006: 65] explains, ‘reflects
the iconography of the western corporate axis’ which ‘has created a
dehumanized condition at both a domestic and institutional level’. Whence
the importance of a radical critique of the contemporary modes of the
autonomy of architecture; a critique that will even go so far as to take
the form – the extreme form – of a Window Blowout shattering the glass
panes of the New York Institute of Architecture founded and directed by
Peter Eisenman.)5 So it is not insignificant that this former student of the
Architecture School of Cornell University (1962–1968) – known in the US as
the ‘Corbu School’ – begins his real-estate operations by homing in on the
foundations of the alternative space at 112 Greene Street (an artists’ house
and cooperative).
Some months after its opening by Jeffrey Lew (at the end of 1970), MattaClark would excavate a deep hole in the basement at Greene Street and
plant a cherry tree in it, along with some turf laid on the soil heaped across
the floor, hanging above the whole ‘installation’ infrared lamps that would
keep the tree alive for three months, thus determining the duration of the
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
work (Cherry Tree, 1971). But what is most interesting here is the way in
which the artist (interview with Wall in Moure, 2006: 68) explains that he
never managed to achieve his ‘real idea’,
which was digging deep enough so that a person could see the actual
foundations, the ‘removed’ spaces under the foundation, and liberate the
building’s enormous compressive, confining forces simply by making
a hole. To be able to pass freely under an area once so dominated by
gravitational constraint – that would have been something!
It should come as no surprise, then, that having expressed his will ‘to
alter the whole space to its very roots, which meant a recognition of the
building’s total [semiotic] system’, Matta-Clark himself would conclude that
‘physically penetrating the surface seemed the logical next step’. Cutting
through would be a matter of undoing the real-estate economy of gravity
by disrupting the physico-mental striation of global space operated by the
architectural administration of life and of the city – to the extent of inducing
the vertigo of a local absolute, its multiple perspectives proliferating by way
of perforations.
The penetration of the ‘basis’ of the architecture of space is thus the first
moment of a trial procedure (the trial of the foundations of architecture).
This procedure pro-poses itself as a prospective archaeology of its own
anti-architectural operation by dialecticizing the entropic situation of the
building within which it is ‘situated’ – a building lying at the epicentre
of the entropic architecture of Downtown Manhattan, south of Houston
Street, at the beginning of the 70s: a landscape of recession, an abandoned
industrial zone populated by rejects and marginals, where artists ‘outside the
system’ create open spaces (and open kitchens)6 at the very moment when
the economic revolution of neoliberal globalization – of which the World
Trade Center, under construction at the time, was the most visible sign –
was already in motion.7 The non-standard de-construction/re-construction
operated at 112 Greene Street (and which is also non-standart – that is, an
art that refuses to stand up functionally on its own)8 becomes a sign of what
Robert Smithson (1966: 304) calls ‘a dialectics of entropic change’, as well
as an amusingly over-literal confirmation of the Marxist topic of the spatial
metaphor of the edifice (base and superstructure) according to which ‘it is the
base which in the last instance determines the whole edifice.’ A confirmation
which, in this case, also implies Althusser’s (1984: 10) additional injunction
to think what the metaphor gives us ‘in the form of a description’, and
thus to give ‘a conceptual answer’ to ‘the spatial metaphor’. Matta-Clark’s
invocation of a ‘materialist dialectic of a real environment’ operating via the
(post-conceptual) hermetics of that which is ‘inwardly removed’ so as to be
virtualized in the affirmation–negation that it puts in place refers precisely
to the excavation of the architecturological system right down to the edifice
of the language that supports it, and whose most compelling metaphors (the
‘semiotic spinal column’ of its ‘theoretical foundations’) will be counteracted
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by ‘juggling in syntax’ with the ‘architectural structure in its reality’.9 This is
how Matta-Clark, distancing himself from all sculptural gesture (in defiance
of Liza Bear’s suggestion), defines the nature of his operations on a house,
which is always ‘something very real, especially when one considers its
environment’, going on to specify that it is a matter of ‘disintegrating some
kind of established sequence of parts’.10 This syntactical disintegration is
precisely the proposition of an anarchitecture that operates only through
the cut of its primary syntagm, indefinitely placed in variation: from an
anarchy-tecture said to be ‘SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE THE LAW’, which
makes it definitively deviate, into a ‘Narco Tecture’ authorizing all possible
derives since (II) ‘YOU ARE THE MEASURE’ – which cannot be taken
too seriously as a phenomenology given that (III) the final stance reads
‘A ROCKING-CHAIR ESTATE’.11 A declination that might be extended as
follows, as in a card made by Tina Girouard and photographed for the
exhibition Anarchitecture, a kind of anti-manifesto in grid form, a word grid
permitting all conjunctions (a/some cross words in the form of a Wall Text):
‘AN ARK KIT PUNCTURE – ANARCHY TORTURE – AN ART KIT TORTURE
– AN ART DEFECTOR – etc.’12
This ‘ETC.’ is also that of a dis-organizing (or ‘disintegrative’) placinginto-variation of the endless city whose architecture, given that (as entropy
dictates) nothing works without breaking down, will be taken across this
limit (which had been warded off by a structural effect). The limit will no
longer mark a threshold effect but a ‘threshole’ effect, taking us into a world
where ‘NOTHING WORKS BEST’ given the simple fact of a ‘direct and non
productive response to form following function’ (Matta-Clark, Notebook, in
Moure, 2006: 376–367, emphasis added). The functionalist productivity of
architectural form is thus subjected to an anti-production which makes a
hole in the ‘system’ by mobilizing the outside that it had denied (entropic
catastrophe as a physical outside, deconstruction of everyday urban life as
a diagrammatic outside), and by disrupting the metaphorical spatialization
of the world-image as architectural structure. ‘NOTHING WORKS BEST’ will
thus immediately be metonymically translated into a disarticulated series
of disorder-words which ‘verbalizes’ the whole process of anarchitectural
antiproduction around (NOTHING) WORKS/WORDS: ‘NOTHING WORDS
BEASTS/BEASTS OF THE NORTH WORDS’.
All things considered, this could well stand as a perfect (de-)definition of
the anarchitectural collective which, whatever it may have been in reality (a
pure interchange? A theoretical machine?), could not escape the task with
which it defined itself: How to undo things with words; the collective of a
‘state of mind’ that its inspirer had aspired to in the cleanlined antilanguage
of his cut-outs, produced in situ, but also off-site in ever more vertiginous
montages whose transmedia expression must equally be seen as a real
practice of the anti-formalist subversion of architecture qua marker of
power. (In other words: if ‘We are anti-formal’13 is the form of expression
that serves as the machinic opening onto the multiplicity of mediums, MattaClark is the proper name of the collective assemblage of anarchitectural
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
enunciation which he induces and deduces from it – indefinitely: ‘Keeping
it an ongoing open process. Not finishing/just keeping going and starting
over & over.’)14
Splitting (1974) consisted not only of cutting the exterior and interior of
a house (also slated for demolition) vertically down the middle with a
chainsaw, but more radically in making one half of it tip backwards – so that
the operation of dissection was also a collapsing back of architecture onto its
bases.15 With the cutting out of a 2.5cm ‘slice’, the vertical sectioning of the
building takes the architectural code of the section to the letter, redrawing the
intact structure of the construction on a 1:1 scale and rendering immediately
visible the composition of the material strata that functionally correspond
to the housing needs of a working family in a New York bedroom suburb
(Englewood, New Jersey). Waiting to be demolished in order to make
way for a more profitable residential subdivision of the land, its grounds
covered with unkempt vegetation, the house was a cell of the suburban
fabric, exemplary of its mode of production and habitation and its expanded
reproduction through the expulsion of its precarious tenants. Matta-Clark
began by piling into the basement the remains of personal objects and
furniture left behind by the former residents (which were photographed as
testimony to the subterranean violence of this ‘urban renewal’).16
In a second step that would give the operation its true importance – not
planned at the outset, it occurred to him as he carried out the work – he
turned his attention to the substructure left intact by the vertical cut: the
whole length of the first layer of cinderblock foundations was removed
and the back half of the house undercut and supported on jacks so that
its entire 15-ton weight could be lowered until it tilted back at an angle.
This tour de force, the outcome of which remained uncertain right up until
the last moment, dissociated the architectural box from itself – a synonym
for a total, disorienting, and defunctionalized disarticulation of space. The
operation used the static structure of the house itself to wrench it from the
gravitational inertia that ensured its firm seating, and then to keep it in a
state of tension that spread to the whole interior, affecting, disquieting, the
very possibility of inhabiting it. As Matta-Clark (in Jacob, 1985: 33) explains:
Starting at the bottom of the stairs where the crack was small, you’d
go up, and as you’d go further up, you’d have to keep crossing the
crack. It kept widening as you made your way up the stairs to the top
so by the time you got to the top, the crack was one or two feet wide.
You really had to jump it. You sensed the abyss in a kinesthetic and
psychological sense.
In this way Matta-Clark was able to satisfy his desire, formulated at the time
of Cherry Tree, to ‘liberate the … enormous compressive, confining forces’
from the laws of gravity by acting on the foundations so as to ‘alter the
whole space’.
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In his 1974 interview with Liza Bear, he recounts the experience of Splitting
with the house:
Throughout the process, there was a terrific suspense, not really
knowing what would hold and shift, but the structure acted perfectly
… She came down like a dream … the whole event gave me new
insight into what a house is, how solidly built, how easily moved.
Drawing on his familiarity with the world of dance, in particular through the
work of Trisha Brown, who defied the laws of gravity in the city with her
dancers walking down walls, he adds: ‘it was like a perfect dance partner …
the realization of motion in a static structure was exhilarating.’17
One of the effects of the splitting that is particularly well captured (or
intensified) by the Super 8 film (silent, 10m50s) is the startling penetration
of the light as it infuses the space in a manner that places it in fusion
and violently frees it from its principle of closure. Depending on the light
conditions and the position of the camera, what is striking is the sharpness
of the gap that traverses the house – sometimes dark, sometimes lit up – and
the traits of light projected through the crack, which form immaterial (nonenclosing) dividing lines moving with the sun and constantly redrawing the
internal space without fixing it. Because of the tilt, the crack widens towards
the top, as if the building were in the process of splitting, in a generalized
placing-in-tension which physically and ontologically unbalances it and
opens it up at the same time. For what is at stake here is not the tilting of the
house for its own sake – so as to produce a spectacular and/or comical form
of architecture – but, through the necessarily perilous and uncertain nature
of the operation, an overcoming of all the usual limitations of space, an
overcoming made possible by the passage to the limit of the (or a) breaking
point that is approached as closely as possible under the mobilizing pressure
of demolition (and not just the motivating pressure, faced with the urgency
of the situation). In this respect, the imminent demolition constitutes a
forcible and necessary component of the operation. As such, the latter will
be documented from the perspective of a history other than that written by
the victors ‘on the surface of things’.
The theoretico-practical stakes of this operation rest upon the opposition
between two types of diagrammatism, an opposition rendered quite
visible and legible by the comparison of two photomontages (see Moure,
2006: 153, 155). On one hand, we have the (now iconic) photomontage
showing half of the interior of the (whole) house, sectioned vertically on
a plane that coincides with the plane of the material cut (invisible here),
and juxtaposing the different rooms, with each in its respective place but
shot from its own photo-graphic perspective, thus subverting both the more
usual abstract representation of a cubic space and the technical Palladian
sectional elevation (here the cut functions as a disquieting diagram of
general cellularity, or a diagram that disquiets such cellularity). And on the
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
other hand, a photomontage as heterogeneous assemblage of a series of
dislocated/dislocating views which (de)composite the cut and the tilt with
each other, rendering space intrinsically flexible or pliable at the split (in
this case, the diagram decoordinates that which it articulates: below and
above, in front of and behind, leaning to one side and the other). Further
photomontages place the parts in variation in other ways: in some, the split
cleaves the house as a whole from roof to ground floor, vertically or with
a slight clinamen; others multiply it into stripes, extend it into an arc, or
make it oscillate around its off-centre/off-centring axis. Running through
all of the photomontages, the cut holds all of space in a suspense which
allows the void to operate (the photographs also capture Matta-Clark himself
at work, hanging suspended in line with the walls). A sharp, exploded
proliferation of photomontages – a montage of montages rather than a
collage of collages – augmented by all available means for the expression of
space, infinitizing its virtual potentialities and their at once disjunctive and
inclusive conjunction (an un-limiting series of inclusive disjunctions making
space differ from itself). This un-limiting operates through a diagrammatism
which has a coenaesthesic effect, for the space deterritorialized by the
constructivist multiplicity of its expressions – a machinic trans-expressivity
– foils both the optical and kinaesthetic work of mental collaging (which
would reterritorialize it on the image of the lived body – it solicits this
collaging only so as to undo it) and the relation of alterity (a non-dialectical
relation, in spite of Matta-Clark’s own declarations) between the two parts
of the house: the spectator/visitor is instead drawn into a splitting of/in
movement-space, placed in a situation which, rather than ‘atmospheric’, is
one of kinematic acceleration and cinemato-graphic disorientation. All the
more so in that the house was subject to a third operation: its four uppermost
corners – where the roof met with the orthogonal walls – were removed
(Splitting: Four Corners), subjecting the architectural box to a new separation
– a discrowning which now opens it up not only to the light but to the
desolate environment that surrounds it; and therefore to the wild vegetation
into which the camera plunges, in a final shot of pure greenery whose
significance is unclear, except that it provisionally undoes the suburban
domestication of nature understood in terms of a ‘defoliation’ (and in terms
of the necessary alliance with ‘autochthonous survivors’).18 Shown ad hoc in
a gallery (or museum), these four corners refer back paradigmatically to that
of which they are the syntactical voiding, in a diagrammatic transfer of the
dialectic of site/non-site such that ‘it is not only the Englewood, New Jersey
house that is “split”, but the representational field that it occupies’, outside
of any kind of formalism reconfigured ad litteram; instead, here formalism
is autopsied (Fer, 2007: 139).
Indeed the ‘iconic’ photomontage of Splitting, by representing in section
the structural relations between façade and interior, associates this autopsy
with the restaging of a powerful architectonic schematization whose
principle, since Palladio, had itself been linked to the anatomies of the
fabrica of the human body. An autopsy of a dissection, then, which, as
Caroline van Eck (2009) remarks, characteristically produces the return
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of the anatomico–architectural repressed by cutting into the tissue/
into the living fabric of a house which can now be seen in each of its
autonomous ‘plan(e)s’, in contorted perspectives, as the negative presence
of its habitation: we enter into the photomontage from the ground floor
(also the largest photo) showing in the background, in what was once
the kitchen, an old stove, slightly out of place yet still redolent with the
marrow of domesticity (we can make out wallpaper and a small picture
frame). The process of abstraction constitutive of architecture’s movement
towards a functional formalism is thus inverted in favor of the exposure
of the most quotidian materiality of traces of habitation, multiplied by
the effect of a photomontage that juxtaposes scenes of an absent life into
which the anatomist–anarchitect’s scalpel has cut. Whence the disquieting
strangeness (Das Unheimliche) that emanates from the scene of the crime
(complete with dance macabre), brought to light by he who dances with
houses by giving them to be perceived (or pierced?) ‘as a very live element’
(Moure, 2006: 177).
Office Baroque is a perfect example of how the work functions, and is
conceived, exclusively diagrammatically: as a machine of machines (an infernal
machine) that is multi- or trans-enunciative (geometrical, material, gestural,
graphic, photographic, filmic, socially ostensive and discursive); a machine
whose principle of existence consists of a deliberately induced ratcheting-up,
with uncontrollable effects owing to the heterogeneity of its elements and the
heterogenesis that it sets in motion. The conditions of the intervention were in
principle ideal: Antwerp, an important site of maritime trade and birthplace of
the ‘baroque’ Rubens, the fourth centenary of whose birth was approaching.
Matta-Clark had been authorized to make an intervention in the company
headquarters of a maritime trading operation that had gone bankrupt = broke
(‘liquidated’ along with a good part of the former maritime–industrial activities
of the city), situated in the heart of the (highly photogenic) historic tourist
centre (just opposite the Steen, the ‘Castle of Antwerp’, alongside the National
Maritime Museum) and slated for demolition by the company who purchased
it, and who were unreservedly dedicated to the most speculative practices of
urban renewal.19 This exceptionally opportune project testified to a significant
recognition of Matta-Clark’s work by one of Europe’s most innovative
programmes in contemporary art, directed by Florent Bex, also director of the
Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC) where the photomontages of Office
Baroque would be shown off-site, accompanied by a cut-out in the shape of
a boat suspended from the gallery ceiling. An in-site cut-out which, it was
said, seemed more unreal and distanced from the reality of the work than the
‘highly manipulated’ photographic (de)compositions that were at the heart of
the exhibition, and which made it, in everyone’s eyes, an event (see Diserens,
1993: 113).
Matta-Clark’s original project, which was to have been entitled Sphere,
proposed to cut out a ‘spherical quadrant’ from the corner of the building
that faced onto the street, to its full height (except for the fifth floor, set back
from the frontage). This plan would therefore have involved cutting out
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
most of the façade, affording a view into the interior that would have been
all the more public given the nature of this office building, the implacable
and anonymous rigour of whose geometry Matta-Clark’s stripping-bare
would have respected, all the better to expose (and violate) the intimacy
of a site that was by nature foreclosed, the violence that inhabited it taking
the dissimulated form of figures and commercial contracts. The municipal
authorities, officially for reasons of security but doubtless also through fear
of opening up this negative perspective on a site so central to the city’s
tourist development plans, refused the project, and allowed Matta-Clark to
intervene only inside the building. The plan for the cut-out, which was
suggested by the overlapping circles made by a teacup on the preparatory
design, consisted of the arcs of two unequal circles (45cm and 30cm wide
according to the plan, and of a different diameter for each floor) which
crossed over, and whose intersection (virtual extensions traced onto the
floor) would yield the outline for curvilinear cut-outs in the form of a sloop.
As the cut-outs progressed from the large spaces of the ground and lower
floors up to the small communicating rooms on the higher floors, the forms
gave rise to a series of smaller circular cut-outs in the floors and scooped out
of the vertical partitions whose constriction complexified and disoriented
the whole, before reaching the level of the flat roof where they opened into
two circles which flooded the interior of the building with a play of shadow
and light.
In the catalogue for Antwerp, Matta-Clark explains (in Moure, 2006: 257)
that the (hierarchical) arrangement of the space
determined how the formal elements transformed from uninterrupted
circular slices to shrapnel-like bits and pieces of the original form
as they ‘collided’ with partitions and walls. Besides the surprise and
disorientation this work stimulates, it creates an especially satisfying
mental map.
On this mental map the curves are a principle not of formal organization
but of the leashing and unleashing of space, registering the way in which
the rather obvious hermeneutics of the initial ‘nautical’ sign-form is
metamorphosed into an ‘hermetics’ of signs–forces which explodes (hence
the shrapnel-effect) any kind of formal metaphoricity to become locally
a-signifiant and generically post-signifiant of the ‘baroque’ – a baroque
whose contemporary physiology comes to contradict and cut through, in
situ, the seat of this maritime bureaucracy (which had ‘gone broke’).
As intelligible as the scale drawing (reproduced in Diserens, 1993: 291) may
have seemed, the building itself was subtracted from all possibility of even
virtual synthetic apprehension and, unlike his other projects, eluded what
Matta-Clark here calls a ‘snap-shot interpretation’ (an interpretation that is
instantaneous in the photographic sense of the term) – ‘here’ meaning here
in this major tourist site ‘where everyone comes to snap a shot’.20 This
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photogenic setting is somewhat ironic, then, given the not just geographical
but also temporal situation created by the intervention: a situation within
which one could not help but lose oneself (‘to wander from top to bottom’)
without any hope of capturing a ‘moment’: the ramified depth of the cutout fields is that of a ruin in waiting, held in suspense between a bygone
era and the immediate future of its demolition, a demolition that is already
underway in its dissimulated present as non-site. Hence the need for the
hypercomplexity of the large-format cibachrome photomontages to which
Matta-Clark turns in order to project us through Office Baroque, their
superimposed planes embedded into each other in a way that becomes
undescribable as soon as the point of view ceases to be rigorously vertical:
the cut-outs cut across each other, the retained beams barring them
and creating divergent angles of vision (from below/from above) which
accentuate the phenomena of an undecidable high-angle/low-angle shot,
the doors flapping in the wind taken up in a ‘panorama of arabesques’
which can only be documented with a 45-degree collage of two photos …
The skewed couplings of the negatives manage to collapse space by making
its every direction fluctuate wildly (to the point of making the disassembled/
reassembled [démonté/remonté] façade dance in a sequence of photos taken
from outside with views onto the interior); the staggered perforations of
the edges of neighbouring photos make planes slide and grate against one
another (as in an abstract kinematic time of composite durations); while the
artificially tweaked Cibachrome colours complete the derealization of the
scene by overexposing – along with the choreography of cuttings which are
not so much photographed as photographically extended and intensified or
‘heightened’ in the montages – its disquieting strangeness. As far as can be
from any phenomenology (of the lived body), then, this is a body totally
deterritorialized by a spatio-temporal disorientation amplified by the transmedia ordeal with which the spectator is confronted (and which he or she
cannot disregard off-site): a trial procedure that animates this space and,
with its abstract-concrete energetics, plunges it into a mise en abyme.
But Matta-Clark’s refusal of the snapshot, a refusal to which his whole
practice had led him, and which increasingly prompted him to no longer
use static shots unless they were (dis)assembled (dé)monté and their
colours artificialized, with the perforations of the filmstrip left visible
(which is of a piece with the de-monstration or de-definition of these
photos in regard to their indexical and documentary function) – this refusal
also marks the greatest distance from photoconceptualism’s ‘rhetoric
of indifference’, whose format Matta-Clark had borrowed only so as to
détourne it from its proper usage: the image is no longer undone from
outside via the neutralization of all its non-documentary effects; it is undone
by precipitating the viewer into the multiplied splitting of an ‘interior’
rendered inhabitable by a projection in the form of a hyperconstructivist
montage of deconstructive cuttings of buildings, cuttings become quasibodies which cannibalize viewers by deterritorializing them ‘around and
in the round’ (in Briony Fer’s, 2007, words). For this ‘round’ will have been
so visibly manipulated that it is strangely disquieting, disruptive even to
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
that presence of a having-been-there with which the photograph is usually
associated: it is no longer the sign-form of a real unreality giving access
to the ‘natural’ being-there of ob-jects in space – even if only as remains
– but the sign-force of a reality of the unreal whose genesis the whole
dispositif of unbuilding has deconstructed by implicating in it the territorial
planning of the present as ‘ruins in waiting’. Isn’t it this ‘in waiting’ that is
clearly at work in the loss of (‘indexical’) reference in photographs (‘throwaways’) whose montage acts as a critical de-monstration of their original
non-site which we inhabit – tout court, in the post-history that is ours (posthistory as history of the non-site), faced with these photomontages which
are capable of merging with us, reanimating us with their quasi-body?21
Hence the need for the meta-physical subversion of the photographic
optic, in photomontages which contradict the supposed transparency of
the medium so as to re-present a space that is given only for us to be lost
in the ‘circle’ of its deconstructions and of the planned demolition that bars
all ‘access’ to it. (‘You have to walk’ [through], Matta-Clark tirelessly repeats
– but we can’t [get in], and he knows it.) Excluding all ‘snapshot scenic
work’, defying ‘that whole object quality [that] is with all sculpture’ (even
‘extended’ sculpture), it is the engagement in this inaccessibility that is,
in the last instance, photomontaged and proposed to us as a dismantling
(démontage) of what Matta-Clark calls a ‘sort of internal piece’.22
The radicality of the spatio-temporal deterritorialization of the site qua
non-site produced by the cibachromes of Office Baroque can be gauged by
comparing them with those of Conical Intersect, an intervention made in
Paris some years previously (in 1975), and which consisted of carving out
a vast conical volume, through partitions and beams, between the external
wall of a house whose third and fourth floors it opened up, to the sloping
attic roof of the neighbouring house.
The aim of Conical Intersect is elsewhere. It is the Matta-Clark intervention
whose interaction with the ‘urban fabric’ was the most thought-out. Here
the principle of the circular cut-out is no longer limited to one single place/
non-place; it is a properly trans-habitational cut-out running through two
late 16th-century terraced buildings condemned for reasons of sanitation
and dilapidation, in the context of the ‘Gaulist “renovation”’ of the Plateau
Beaubourg and Les Halles.23 The truncated cone Matta-Clark cut into them
over two weeks with the help of two assistants was 4 meters wide where
it began in the street-facing wall, 2 metres wide at the roof of the other
house, and its axis was inclined at approximately 45 degrees towards
Rue Beaubourg, an important artery of north–south circulation. This
breakthrough does indeed deserve to be called an ‘intersection’ since, on
the north side, it took the building and the road athwart, opening them
broadly towards one other, while on the south side it had in its sights the
Centre Georges Pompidou, whose skeletal armature, in the background,
thrust skyward its metallic network of spars, bracing beams and vertical ties,
and its stacked platforms – a modern technological avatar of the ‘grid’ – like
a spider inexorably extending its gigantic web. The cone cut into the two
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old buildings might well have suggested a projectile aimed at the Centre
Pompidou (and after all, wasn’t the Beaubourg spoken of as a ‘building
with all its guts hanging out’?) Especially as this ‘mental projection’ inclined
at 45 degrees was not so different in form and scale to the transparent
tubular mantle covering the building’s external escalators – one of the most
famous signatures of Piano’s and Rogers’s architectural project. If MattaClark presented his intervention as a kind of ‘son et lumière spectacle with
neither sound nor light’ (are we to understand: an Anti-Beaubourg?), it was
as an ironic publicist of his project for the French public – not only an art
audience of spectators but a public of the street, with whom he wished
to ventilate the meaning of an intervention which could (and would) be
accused of ‘collusion with the forces of destruction and urban renewal’
of which the Beaubourg Centre seemed to be the probe-head.24 And yet
it is this black hole, this ‘vacuum-making machine’ that every one of the
documentary photos of Conical Intersect shows (montre) and breaks up
(démonte), their main characteristic being that they always present (in black
and white) the intersection of interior and exterior (Baudrillard, 1982: 3).
In his ‘rough draft manuscript’ for the project proposal, Matta-Clark explains
that the two buildings, constructed in 1700 for ‘Mr+Mrs De Lesseville’ (a
couple of buildings) have no great historical importance outside the fact
that they are among the last to be awaiting demolition under the rubric
of the ‘general Gaullist–Pompidou inspired “modernization” of Les Halles
and Plateau Beaubourg’; they ‘are brought into full relief by a backdrop of
the immense bridge-like structure of the Centre Pompidou to be opened
soon’.25 Matta-Clark would later say that Conical Intersect constituted a
‘non-monumental counterpart’ to the Pompidou, but one immediately
sees the problem here, and the impossibility of resolving it through some
‘solution’ or other: with its armature of tubing declaring that our only
temporal mode is that of the accelerated cycle and of recycling, the Centre
is not really a centre, but spreads out like a ‘new cobweb of culture’ which
itself, as Baudrillard (1982: 5) rightly says, already ‘argues against traditional
mentality or monumentality’.
Invited under the auspices of the ninth Paris Biennale, Gordon Matta-Clark
had initially proposed that his participation would consist in making cut-outs
from the platforms and ceilings of the Centre in order (as he proposed,
straight-faced) to allow the play of light into the building (see Jenkins,
2001: 5). However, given that he knew enough of the controversy over the
Beaubourg for it to have played a part in any intervention he might have
made in Paris, the proposed project could be formulated in more radical
terms: since all artistic contents of the Beaubourg are rendered anachronistic
by this architectural post-structure to which ‘only an interior void could have
corresponded’ (Baudrillard, 1982: 4). This void will be anarchitecturally cut so
as to carry out that which the architectural carcass of the Beaubourg declares
but which ‘Beaubourg-Museum wants to hide’, as Baudrillard asserts.
In a break with everything Matta-Clark had produced up to this point,
the clear cut-out in the structure of the building, barely built, clad in its
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
protective metallic skeleton, would have lost all stratigraphic character and
would have made a hole in that which replaces all inscription of duration
within the spaces of life: namely, a just-in-time temporality whose surface
connections are articulated with ‘the ideology of visibility, transparency,
polyvalence, consensus, contact’ (Baudrillard, 1982: 4) that aligns the
management of social relations with the principles of a cultural regeneration
presiding over the urban renewal of the metropolis. We must note here the
strong convergence of the neo-Gaullist truth of the Pompidou era, of which
the Beaubourg was the ‘international’ shop-window (in response to a May
’68 which was no less so) – Matta-Clark calls it (see Moure, 2006: 183)
the ‘general Gaullist Pompidou modernity orgy’ – and a new art context
whose tendency had been anticipated in New York by the progressive
transformation of the creative community of an ‘artist ghetto’ into a pilot
project for the new global economy (and not only that of the art market)
– SoHo for short. Matta-Clark would have had no difficulty in recognizing
the conditions of the acceleration of the global process in the integrated
cultural circuits of the post-industrial metropolis proposed at Beaubourg as
‘the model of all future forms of controlled “socialization”’ – a programme
that Baudrillard sums up, in a phrase with a most situationist ring to it,
as that of the ‘retotalization of all the dispersed functions of the body and
of social life (work, leisure, media, culture) within a single, homogeneous
space–time’ (Baudrillard, 1982: 8).
With this in mind, it is quite understandable that the Paris Biennale should
have refused (or relayed the Beaubourg’s refusal of) a project which – to
continue mining a situationist vein that Matta-Clark felt very close to – would
have effectively rendered this negation of life visible by detouring the void of
a ‘Centre’ that his operation, in a reversal of the usual procedure, would have
reprocessed into a ruin of the present before it had even been completed. If
the actual intervention kept the Beaubourg in its sights, then, it could only
do so by acting as a kind of arrow pointing beyond the ruined façades of the
last surviving edifices in the ambient void, which become the anachronistic
site of a no less ‘extravagant new standard in sun and air for lodgers’ (see
Moure, 2006: 256). In this way the visual consumption proper to the museum
institution preserved behind the tubular network of the culture-hypermarket
could be inverted, in a most Duchampian manner, into an ‘Étant d’art pour
locataire’. A locataire which Matta-Clark spells locatair – once more in
relation to Duchamp, respirateur of the Air de Paris – in the titles of his film,
which also venture a Conical Inter-sect, now demoted to a subtitle.
Superimposing the ‘bookish’ abbreviation of section (= sect.) onto the
anarchitectural cut and its (supposedly) ‘intersubjective’ construction
of situations in the absence of any remaining ‘locataires’ (to whom one
gives a present of a hole of life and light that could be no more than an
Étant-d’art objected to its contradictory museification), the sect effect was
guaranteed by way of the meta-irony in the field of the sign [Du(-)champ
du signe] thereby mobilized against the new Centre’s ‘total universe of
signals’ (Baudrillard, 1982: 8). The Duchamp-Effect is confirmed by the
declination (or placing into variation) of further names for the intervention,
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names whose primary syntagm is given by ‘Quel con’, in explicit reference
to Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q.26 The media-commercial play on a Mona Lisa
reduced to the most common reproduction is thus referred back to the
‘contradictions’ of the Beaubourg Museum, while the bringing back into
play of gender (feminine/masculine, con/cône) runs through the couple
of buildings (quel cône!) on the verge of being shaved in favour of the
same. This is therefore incontestably a tribute to an artist – a great friend
and accomplice of his father, the painter Matta – who was Matta-Clark’s
Godfather, and to whom he paid vibrant homage upon his death in 1968 by
lacing the gravestones of a cemetery with a Mile of String, thus reviving a
work of Duchamp’s that would become the object of a retrospective (under
the direction of Jean Clair) on the occasion of the opening of the Centre
Pompidou in 1977. But no less evident here is Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural
difference in relation to the anartist who made no mystery of his sovereign
apoliticism, and who in 1968 saw fit to remind us that ‘art is not like a
political movement’. Propelled by the intersection into the (non-)place of the
hypercontemporary reprocessing of art and culture, the problem becomes
that of the difference one can object to it, when resistance to the ideology
of cultural production no longer knows how to take any path other than
a reactionary one, by setting forth a defence of art and of the artist with
incontestably Duchampian overtones. As a Baudrillard (1982: 5) afflicted by
‘simulation’ writes, denouncing the humanist fiction of the culture around
which the opponents of the Beaubourg had rallied: ‘Culture is a precinct of
secrecy, seduction, initiation, and symbolic exchange, highly ritualized and
restrained. It can’t be helped. Too bad for populism. Tough on Beaubourg.’
Something which, in the field, may suggest the necessity of a ‘godfathercide’,
had it not already been carried out by that anarchitectural targeting, like
a new ‘étant donné’, of an otherwise contemporary art, opposing to the
Disneyland of the aesthetic dream (whether aristocratically distanced or
democratically shared) a collective laboratory of practical fictions.
Notes
1. See the interview with Donald Wall in Moure (2006: 61). Note also Gordon
Matta-Clark, ‘Completion through removal’, undated catalogue entry, in Moure
(2006: 89).
2. Matta-Clark, ‘The earliest cutout works’, undated, in Moure (2006: 136). See
the December 1974 interview with Matta-Clark by Liza Bear reprinted in
Moure (2006: 166).
3. See Castle (1979). There is thus a true ruse of history at work in the fact that
the Matta-Clark Archive is today deposited in a Centre for Architecture. That
one can retroactively judge this necessary does not contradict the proposition.
4. According to the full version of the interview with Donald Wall deposited at
the CCA (Montréal) (cited in Ursprung, 2012: 30). Only an abridged version
has been published, see Moure (2006).
5. Invited in 1976 within the framework of the exhibition ‘Idea as Model’
organized by the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,
Matta-Clark would attach photos of South Bronx buildings with smashed
Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
windows between the windows of the Institute – before breaking from outside
all the windows, with the use of an air rifle. His participation would be
immediately suspended by Peter Eisenman, who went so far as to speak of a
Kristallnacht – and had all the windows replaced within the day.
6. In 1971, Matta-Clark, with Carol Goodden and several other artist friends (Suzy
Harris, Tina Girouard, Rachel Lew) opened an alternative space/restaurant
called Food situated in (what was to become) the SoHo neighbourhood.
7. Artists were at once the most virulent dissenters against it and its involuntary
agents, with the gentrification of what would be announced and built after
1973 in SoHo.
8. In Le Corbusier’s sense, when he wrote, in a phrase that is still cited today:
‘To establish a standart [sic] is to exhaust all the practical and reasonable
possibilities, to deduce a recognized type consistent with function, maximal
return with minimum expenditure of means, manpower, and materials, words,
forms, colors, sounds’ (see Le Corbusier, 2008: 186).
9. See Marianne Brouwer, ‘Laying Bare’, in Diserens (1993: 51–52).
10. Matta-Clark, interview with Liza Bear (1974) ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting the
Humphrey Street Building’, Avalanche, December 1974, reprinted in Moure
(2006: 172).
11. See Matta-Clark’s ‘Proposal for Anarchitecture’ (1974), Notebook, reproduced
in Sussman (2007: 97, plate 41).
12. Reproduced in Mark Wigley, ‘Anarchitectures’, in Von Ameluxen et al. (2012).
13. Matta-Clark, ‘Our European Heritage’, Notebook, undated, in Moure (2006:
365). The note reads: ‘Anarchitecture refers to ways of functioning – we are
anti-formal.’
14. Matta-Clark, Artcard headed ‘Anarchitecture’, reproduced in Moure (2006),
final pages (unpaginated).
15. The house and surrounding grounds had been bought, not without a
speculative aim, by Holly Solomon, the wife of the gallerist who was a
very close friend of Matta-Clark. But the project of urban renewal was
never completed. The Solomons would organize a bus tour to visit Splitting
following the other ‘works’ in June 1974.
16. Two photographs of these ‘remains’ would be presented in the small-format
artist’s book (17 black and white photos, without text) made by Matta-Clark
(reproduced in Diserens,1993: 170–174).
17. See Trisha Brown Company, Man Walking down the Side of a Building
(1970) and Walking on the Wall (1971). Matta-Clark’s partner Carol Goodden
danced in Trisha Brown’s company. Splitting would also mark the end of their
relationship (see Matta-Clark’s interview with Liza Bear in Moure, 2006: 175).
18. See Matta-Clark, Notebook c. 1969–1971, in Moure (2006: 75). In these
fragmentary texts entitled ‘Cannibalism Suburbia’, Matta-Clark opposes the
‘cannibalism’ of suburban gardens (‘Industrial garden estates’), industrially
developed against all the ‘spontaneous forces of life’ (beginning with the
forests) the need for a ‘renewed cannibalism’: ‘Now is the time for a renewed
cannibalism …’, in which anarchitecture, in the form of an ‘eat-a-tecture’, will
participate. Which refers us back in turn to the first ‘slices’ of wall cut out by
Matta-Clark in the context of the running of the restaurant-cooperative Food: at
which time he made, very performatively, a Wall Sandwich!
19. In a manuscript text bearing the title ‘Office Baroque’, Matta-Clark mentions
the future construction of an ‘ANTWERP HILTON’ (see Moure, 2006: 228).
20. Note the Antwerp Catalogue (1977) in Moure (2006: 256–257). It recommends
‘eluding what I call snap-shot interpretation’.
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21. Matta-Clark’s expression ‘throw-aways’ is found in his interview with Judith
Russi Kirshner (February 1978) in Moure (2006: 319, 317). At the beginning of
the interview, he recalls that ‘no one in America outside of New York has ever
seen – very few people have ever seen – any of [his] projects at all.’
22. See Matta-Clark’s comments in Moure (2006: 319–321), especially when he
comments on ‘even with the people who have escaped the so-called “sculpture
habit” by going into some sort of landscape, or extra-gallery, extra-museum
type of territorial situation’.
23. Introductory text to the film Conical Intersect by Gordon Matta-Clark and
Bruno de Witt (1975, 18.40m, colour, silent, 16mm).
24. See Matta-Clark’s interview with Elisabeth Lebovici in Sussman (2007: 132–
133). He also notes ‘a silent “son et lumière”’, as we read in the titles of the
film (see Matta-Clark interview with Judith Russi Kirshner in Moure, 2006:
330).
25. Gordon Matta-Clark, ‘Étant d’art pour locataire’ in Moure (2006: 182).
26. See Matta-Clark’s interview with Gerry Hovagimyan in Jacobs (1985: 88).
References
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Castle T (1979) Gordon Matta-Clark. Flash Art (June–July): 90–91.
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CT: Yale University Press.
Ursprung P (2012) Gordon Matta-Clark and the limits of architecture. In: Von
Ameluxen H et al. (eds) Gordon Matta-Clark/Moment to Moment: Space.
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van Eck C (2009) Empty spaces haunted by presence. Abstraction, defiguration
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Alliez Gordon Matta-Clark
Éric Alliez is Professor at the Université Paris 8, and at the Centre for Research in
Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He recently published
Défaire l’image. De l’art contemporain (Undoing the Image: Of Contemporary Art,
in collaboration with Jean-Claude Bonne) (Presses du réel, 2013, English translation
forthcoming from Urbanomic, 2016), which is the last volume of a trilogy focused
on a critique of aesthetics, and which also includes The Brain-Eye: New Histories of
Modern Painting (with collaboration from Jean-Clet Martin, Rowman and Littlefield
International, 2016) and La Pensée-Matisse (Matisse-Thought) with Jean-Claude
Bonne (Le Passage, 2005).
Address: Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University,
Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 2EE, UK. [email: E.Alliez@kingston.ac.uk]
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