Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections

first published in
Arts Magazine, May 1976, 74-79

GORDON MATTA-
CLARK’S BUILDING
DISSECTIONS

by Donald Wall

Gordon Matta-Clark’s building destructions
anatomize space and form, seeking an analysis
of behavioral architecture

Datum Cuts, article page 74

A wry paradox surrounds Gordon Matta-Clark’s art: On the one hand, his building removals and dissections represent the furthest advance yet made in American behavioral architecture. On the other hand, most people, including many accomplished art/architecture critics, are not even aware that a new architecture has been among us for the last decade – an architecture which has just rendered culturally obsolete European-derived Modernist architecture as effectively as did that architecture once render obsolete the older beaux-arts tradition. It’s time to catch up; time to begin placing the new architecture into its own genealogical framework, much like Corbusier once did with Purism. A good place to start might be with certain comments made by Clement Greenberg in 1948. The mid century does, undeniably, constitute a crucial germination in American artistic thinking.

Greenberg, writing on David Smith, made the following observation: “Painting continues as the most leading and the most adventuresome as well as the most expressive of the visual arts. In point of recent achievement architecture alone seems comparable to it.” The comments were well taken. American architecture, under direct insemination by the presence of such imports as Mies Van Der Rohe, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Breuer, Neutra, Chermiayeff, and others, did exhibit much the same progressive excellence characteristic of its overseas origins as had painting. But American painting under the hands of Motherwell, Still, Pollock, Newman, de Kooning, soon broke out of the European mold. Architecture never did, then. Increasingly, architecture failed to command attention: by 1960, architecture all but disappeared from the pages of the art magazines. Its absence was easily overlooked in a decade where, as Peter Schjeldahl so aptly observed, “extreme avant-garde ideas proliferated like flies.” Schjeldahl’s words prompt no architecture imagery comparable to the heady list that even the most casually informed reader could compile for painting, sculpture, conceptual, linguistic or other art forms. At no time did architecture stir intense critical debate. Nor can such a lacuna be attributed to a lack of vocabulary on the part of the art critics: given Weiner, Kosuth, Acconci, individuals like Lippard, Perreault, Burnham soon manufactured a properly responsive lexicon. Architecture was not integral to that lexicon. In contrast with their 1910-1920 prototypes, the sixties architect did not personally participate in the various burgeoning controversies and ideological disputes. Whatever controversy there was in architecture – I am thinking particularly of the supergraphic and Pop episodes – it looked like pale versions of harder core attitudes already firmly established by far tougher intellects. And what little did emerge remained virtually unexplored from exponent to exponent. One exception might be Louis Kahn’s innovative use of structural/constructional emblematics (a type of heraldic art with strong affinities with the work of Stella and Held). But not even Kahn could legitimize the stasis of an entire discipline. Indeed, architecture so rarely qualified as serious art, it did not and could not participate in that process of intradisciplinary autocriticism which Greenberg and others deemed mandatory for regenerative growth. For all intents and purposes, traditional architecture became irrelevant to well over a generation of creative thinkers, Amusing, in a way; while the art and language boys were running around trying to talk painting and sculpture to death, functionalist architecture assumed the culturally mortuistic without sponsorship, and without fanfare.

But not architecture itself. By the mid-sixties, radically new precepts of architecture were in the process of formation in America, almost all of it of non-European derivation. Most of the activity took place among artists, not the professional practicing architect. And for good reason: ambitious art exists only by breaking with fixed notions concerning what is possible and what is not. So when the artists did focus attention on the built environment, two mainstays of conventional architectural thinking (functionalism and patronage) quickly became rejected. Rather than depending on use specified by others, the artist substituted himself as locus of development – and all that this implicates in terms of years of enriched autocriticism.

The following interview with Matta-Clark will illustrate the new origins. Matta-Clark traces his genealogy not to the Bauhaus, nor to Corbusier, but to the Greene Street establishment. Predominate are influences from his childhood, especially that of voyeurism, dollhouses, and silent comedy. An irreverence for today’s architecture is notably apparent. And always there exists concern over what constitutes allowable limits.

Matta-Clark’s work should not, however, be understood as that of an outsider. Similar to others who have begun to redefine our postures to architecture (Insley and Saret), Matta-Clark received a formal architectural education. Typically, he also abandoned customary architectural notions to favor the strictly ideational. Therefore, whether referring to his early diggings under 112 Greene Street, or to the compost heaps under stairways, or in the use of dumpster garbage containers as “found” architecture, Matta-Clark’s work accepts architecture first as information before all else: to be more specific, information that is itself undergoing a feedback process (metamorphic) from other sources, whether ecological (his garbage works) or manmade (the removals and dissections). Due to this decided process and performance base, Matta-Clark’s architecture is absolutely antithetical to the “object”-oriented architecture characteristic of European sources. If one had to classify Matta-Clark’s work, it obviously does not belong to the conventionalists like Moore, Venturi, Roche, Meier. Rather, his art belongs to that ever-growing body of work stemming from people like Acconci, Morris, Nauman, Smithson, Levine, Asher, Bochner, and others who have explored the behavioral and definitional aspects of place. These individuals originate from a potpourri of influences – art-as-idea-as-idea, developmental psychology, happenings, etc. – or whichever factors one wishes to cite for the emergence of “performance constancy” as a concept distinct from “object constancy.”

The impact of all this was the pulverization of architecture into discrete pieces of subject matter, with each artist usually addressing himself to a specific circumstance. For Vito Acconci, this meant behavioral-spatial topology derived, perhaps, from Lewis’ psychology. For Matta-Clark, this meant a metamorphic cutting into a building’s specific semiology.

Such a pulverization was guaranteed, for within the autocritical attitude (which most artists, even now, subconsciously carry around) lay the reductivist mentality. “The growing specialization in the arts is dues,” augeristically wrote Greenberg again in 1948, “to our increasing faith in and taste for the immediate, the concrete, the irreducible [and] in principle, to avoid dependence upon any order of experience not given in the most essentially construed nature of the medium.” The impact of reductivism cannot be sufficiently underscored where hybrid art is concerned. All hybrid art, to which architecture certainly belongs, faces instant disintegration as soon as the components are differentiated into the autonomous. In its geometric abstractness, for instance, decorative Greek pottery was replaced by architecture; in its depicted imagery, the pot succumbed to the invention of the easel painting. A similar case can be seen in architecture. Prior to 1900 architecture held virtual sway over geometric abstraction in the fine arts. If geometry existed in painting, it existed either covertly as underlying compositional structure, or overtly in the renderings of interiors or exteriors of buildings, in fabric patterns, on the sleeves of garments, etc., where it predominately served as a foil for biomorphic human form. With the rise of nonobjective painting and sculpture, architecture slowly lost dominion over the geometrically abstract, not only in terms of flexibility of enterprise, but also in purity of results. No longer need a spectator depend on the Gothic cathedral in order to experience horizontal/vertical equilibration: there were now the Mondrians. (Granted, the comparison is overly simplistic.)

Similar comments could be made about other so-called “prerogatives” of architecture. Scale, geophysicality, projective viewpoint, location, etc., eventually became subject matter in themselves. This seems to suggest that the irrelevance of modernist architecture cannot be attributed to architecture as architecture, but to the means traditionally employed to sustain architectural thought. It is too early, however, for an accounting of what precisely are these newer means. Today’s behavioral architecture is still at a yeasty stage of development, and should be left that way.

GMC: By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against I am gesturing: first, to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer – a virtually captive audience. The fact that some of the buildings I have dealt with are in Black ghettos reinforces some of this thinking, although I would not make a total distinction between the imprisonment of the poor and the remarkably subtle self-containerization of higher socio-economic neighborhoods. The question is a reaction to an ever less viable state of privacy, private property, and isolation.

Humphrey Splittings, article p. 79

I see in the formal aspect of past building works a constant concern with the center of each structure. Even before the Splitting, Bin.go.ne, and Pier 52 Projects, which were direct exercises in centering and recentering. I would usually go to what I saw as the heart of the spatial-structural constant that could be called the Hermetic aspect of my work, because it relates to an inner-personal gesture, by which the microcosmic self is related to the whole. In fact, one of my earlier works dramatized this when I hung myself upside down at the center of one of my openings. More recently I have enjoyed a term used in reference to Walter Benjamin, “Marxist Hermeneutics.” This phrase helps me think about my activities which combine the inwardly removed sphere of Hermetics and interpretation with the material dialectics of a real environment. The activity takes the form of a theatrical gesture that cleaves structural space.

The dialectics involve my dualistic habit of centering and removal (cutting away at the core of a structure); another socially relevant aspect of the activity then becomes clearer. Here I am directing my attention to the central void, to the gap which, among other things, could be between the self and the American Capitalist system. What I am talking about is a very real, carefully sustained, mass schizophrenia in which our individual perceptions are constantly being subverted by industrially controlled media, markets, and corporate interests. The average individual is exposed to this barrage of half truths and monstrous untruths which all revolve around “who runs his life” and how it is accomplished. This conspiracy goes on every day, everywhere, while the citizen commutes to and from his shoe-box home with its air of peace and calm, while he is being precisely maintained in a state of mass insanity.

DW: Would the following be a fair description of how you proceed? First, you find an abandoned building, one that has outlived its usefulness, go in with chain-saws, sheet-metal cutters, and what have you, then section out various portions of the building; when it’s all done, the building is re-abandoned. For the layman as well as for the practicing architect, wouldn’t this be regarded as not only useless but almost inane behavior? And you don’t find something perverse in this form of expression?

Paris Cuttings, article page 76

Paris Cuttings, article page 77

GMC: No, that would be an oversimplification. One of my favorite definitions of the difference between architecture and sculpture is whether there is plumbing or not. So, although it is an incomplete definition, it puts the functionalist aspect of past due Machine Age Moralists where it belongs – down some well-executed drain. Without getting too carried away, what I mean is that the very nature of my work with buildings takes issue with a functionalist attitude to the extent that this kind of self-righteous vocational responsibility has failed to question, or reexamine, the quality of life being serviced. I know that this may sound like an artistic rationalization (and to some extent it is), but it is exactly here that I defend Art against Architecture – or at least that aspect of Architecture that is a janitor to civilization. I don’t mean to belittle the janitor’s role as people, only as policy. My best (wo)man-in-the-street reaction to the Paris work came from a 70-year-old concierge who said, “Oh, I see the purpose of that hole – it is an experiment in bringing light and air into spaces that never had enough of either.” As far as being perverse, I am sure of it. Especially to the extent that anyone is, who enjoys breaking the rules while being convinced that he is right some of the time.

DW: In view of this, how does your life as a professional artist function in the gallery system? Especially since your works deals with specific sites?

GMC: The whole question of gallery space and the exhibition convention is a profound dilemma for me. I don’t like the way most art needs to be looked at in galleries any more than the way empty halls make people look or high-rise city plazas create lifeless environments. And even though my work has always stressed an involvement with spaces outside the studio-gallery context, I have put objects and documentation on display in gallery spaces. All too often there is a price to pay due to exhibition conditions; my kind of work pays more than most just because the installation materials end up making a confusing reference to what was not there. But for me, what was outside the display became more and more the essential experience.

DW: Yet the Humphrey House residue might end up in the Hirshhorn sculpture court.

GMC: There is always that danger. I am more interested in making the Hirshhorn a piece. I mean, if someone in the museum was truly interested in my work they would let me cut open the building. The desire for exhibiting the leftover pieces hopefully will diminish as time goes by. This may be useful for people whose mentality is orientated toward possession. Amazing, the way people steal stones from the Acropolis. Even if they are good stones, they are not the Acropolis.

DW: What criteria do you use in selecting a building?

GMC: The best building I can find.

DW: Best in what sense? Picturesque? Structural? Compositional?

GMC: I seek typical structures which have certain kinds of historical and cultural identities. But the kind of identity for which I am looking has to have a recognizable social form. One of my concerns here is with the Non.u.mental, that is, an expression of the commonplace that might counter the grandeur and pomp of architectural structures and their self-glorifying clients. In Paris, I was incredibly lucky in finding just such a situation. The work was done on two 17th-century town houses. Typical, but with remarkable identities, almost to the point of having anthropomorphic qualities. This old couple, as I called them, were literally the last of a vast neighborhood of buildings destroyed to ‘improve’ the Les Halles-Plateaux-Beaubourg areas. And they were surviving in the web of an immense modern structure which – in the traditionally monumental French approach – is to house all the FineArt Agencies of Parisian Culture.

The determining factor is the degree to which my intervention can transform the structure into an act of communication. It is undesirable to have a situation where the fabric of the space is too run down for it to be identified as ever having been changed, or a situation where I would be competing with factual disintegration.

DW: This brings us to the placement of your work historically. Does it lie more within Dadaist or Land Art concerns?

GMC: I’ll answer the last part first because Land Art is more recent and my break with it is clearer. First, the choice of dealing with either the urban environment in general, and building structures specifically, alters my whole realm of reference and shifts away from the grand theme of vast natural emptiness which, for the Earth artists, was literally like drawing on a blank canvas, But more important, I have chosen not isolation from the social conditions, but to deal directly with social conditions whether by physical implication, as in most of my building works, or through more direct community involvement, which is how I want to see the work develop in the future. I think that differences in context is my primary concern – and a major separation from Earth art. In fact, it is the attention paid to specific occupied areas of the community.

At this point I should mention my feelings about Dada since its influence has been a great source of energy. Its challenge to the rigidity of language both formal and popular, as well as our perception of things, is now a basic part of art. Dada’s devotion to the imaginative disruption of convention is an essential liberating force. I can’t imagine how Dada relates stylistically to my work, but in spirit it is fundamental.

DW: Are you solely interested in the social implications of the “cuttings”?

GMC: The act of cutting through from one space to another produces a certain complexity involving depth perception. Aspects of stratification probably interest me more than the unexpected views which are generated by the removals – not the surface, but the thin edge, the severed surface that reveals the autobiographical process of its making. There is a kind of complexity which comes from taking an otherwise completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous situation and redefining it, retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present. Each building generates its own unique situation.

The Datum Cuts, for example, took place in an engineers’ drafting rooms and offices. I couldn’t deal with the outside because there wasn’t enough exterior enclosure to really penetrate anything. What fascinated me was the interior central plan. The engineers took a small, square, primitive hut shape and divided it in half to make one big drafting room. They divided the other half into a quarter which became the office, and divided the remaining quarter in half again for the coatroom and bathroom. And then divided that again to make a shower or something. Everything was progressively divided so that the remaining last piece was 1/32 of the whole. I used the idea of division around the center. Therefore, I removed a square section out of the roof apex, then projected that cut from the roof down into the building and spread it out laterally through the walls and doors. The walls in Italy are fascinating because they hold a good fine chisel line without falling apart.

The Niagara Falls was quite different. It involved a subtraction game. Each of the removed pieces is one-ninth of the total façade, randomly taken out. I would have preferred a sequential removal. As it turned out, the problem of just getting it done physically was so great that it couldn’t be ideally choreographed. I crated all the removed pieces and debated for a while whether to reconstruct the crated façade in immediate proximity to the house. In the crates the removed sections had this incredible anonymity which was also an identity – a masked identity. If you looked really hard you could detect differences. For awhile I thought of showing them in their crates in New York, at John Gibson’s. Instead, I left six of the nine extractions, still in their crates, out in the countryside. They were dumped – thrown off the back of my truck and left pretty much as they fell.

DW: Are they still there?

GMC: I have no idea.

DW: Do you feel any apprehension in occupying an ideological position diametrically opposed to the practicing architect, and to all that the profession implicates regarding solving humanity’s problems?

GMC: I don’t think most practitioners are solving anything except how to make a living. Architecture is a big business. It’s an enormously costly undertaking and, therefore, like government, comes equipped with it entire panoply of propaganda.

I must clarify several issues. First, I think it is a mistake to place what I have done, with its very specific and, especially local emphasis into so grand a historical context, as the whole issue of Modernity, proliferated by the International Style, must be seen in the development of postwar American Imperialism. The state of that architecture reflects the iconography of the Western Corporate Axis. It is first the abuse of Bauhaus and early Purist ideals that I take issue with. Then I must clarify how Monolithic Idealist problem-solving has not only failed to solve the problems but created a dehumanized condition at both a domestic and institutional level. So what I am reacting to is the deformation of values (ethics) in the disguise of Modernity, Renewal, Urban Planning, call it what you will.

DW: Are there other artists or architects who interest you?

GMC: Yes, anyone who challenges the preconceptions of limits?

DW: The limits of what? Perception? Or just limits?

GMC: Artistic, ethical, and moral limits. I don’t know too many artists who are concerned solely with perception. It’s more a mixture. There’s Sonnier’s transmission piece which pushes our conceptions about local space to an extreme: it’s very hard to grasp locality at the speed of light, in motion, from one side of the continent to the other. Then there is Vito Acconci; he deals in an entirely different spatial context, which is a type of space we all, all of us, have stored in memory: spaces that are detailed and precise, fragments generally, at all levels reminiscence. And of course, once you get into reminiscence, an infinite number of associations emerge. Memory seems to create a unique kind of space setting up an about-to-be-disintegrated level.

DW: How sympathetic are you to performance art?

GMC: I feel my work intimately linked with the process as a form of theater in which both the working activity and the structural changes to and within the building are the performance. I also include a free interpretation of movement as gesture, both metaphoric, sculptural, and social into my sense of theater, with only the most incidental audience – an ongoing act for the passer-by just as the construction site provides a stage for busy pedestrians in transit. So my working has a similar effect. People are fascinated by space-giving activity. I am sure that it is a fascination with the underground that most captures the imagination of the random audience; people can’t resist contemplating the foundations of a construction site. So in a reverse manner, the openings I have made stop the viewer with their careful revealings.

Moreover, I see the work as a special stage in perpetual metamorphosis, a model for peoples’ constant action on space as much as in the space that surrounds them. Buildings are fixed entities in the minds of most – the notion of the mutable space is virtually taboo – even in one’s own house. People live in their space with temerity that is frightening. Home owners generally do little more than maintain their property. It’s baffling how rarely the people get involved in fundamentally changing their place by simply undoing it.

DW: To interject for a moment. Duchamp once said that a major artist makes maybe one or two major statements in his lifetime, and the rest is infill, something to be done merely to occupy time; in effect, garbage. How close are you to those statements?

GMC: Duchamp was a master strategist. Being a perfectly tutored rational human being, he could define his problem in terms of a few discrete, well maneuvered gestures. I see the process of my own work as being much more diffuse. Generally, I don’t know what the next piece will be. I work similarly to the way gourmets hunt for truffles. I mean, a truffle is a fantastic thing buried somewhere in the ground. Very fleshy, esteemed as a prize food. So what I try to find is the subterranean kernel. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t.

In fact, the next area that interests me is an expedition into the underground: a search for the forgotten spaces left buried under the city either as historical reserve or as surviving reminders of lost projects and fantasies, such as the famed Phantom Railroad. This activity would include mapping and breaking or digging into these lost foundations; working back into society from beneath. Although the original idea involved possible subversive acts, I am now more interested in the act of search and discovery. This activity should bring art out of the gallery and into the sewers.

DW: What were your first works like?

GMC: I believe that was the pipe piece at the Boston Museum of Art in 1971. I extended one of the gas lines from behind a wall out into the exhibition space and then returned it back into the wall, accompanied by a photographic documentation of the pipe’s journey from the street into and through the building. The pipe led two lives: it had both physical as well as photographic extension, and dealt with the building as a mechanical system rather than as a series of discrete spaces. Well, no, I guess that wasn’t the first. A year previously I dug a deep hole in the basement of 112 Greene Street. What I wanted to do I didn’t accomplish at all, which was digging deep enough so that a person could see the actual foundations, the ‘removed’ space 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! Another installation I had for Greene Street, which I was a bit reluctant about since it might have jeopardized the people in the building, was to have cut each column at midpoint and insert a small steel cube. Where digging a hole liberated compression, this one would have done the opposite: concentrated the entire building’s forces onto those little cubes. The cubes then would have balanced the building: an identity transference. The sheer compressive energy invoked would have made, I think, the physical reality of confronting those cubes a fairly threatening experience.

DW: Hadn’t other artists become deeply involved with the environment by 1970, either using the environment as explicit subject matter or using the environment tangentially on their way to other concerns? Where do you fit into all this? Obviously a proving into place, whether through information interdiction or perceptual modifications, had been firmly established by the end of the sixties. Yet your reliance on the existing architecture’s infra-systems point to unique, somewhat divergent sources.

GMC: One of the prevailing tendencies was – and I think Greene Street was typical of widespread sensibilities – the idea of working with a very specific, particular space. The generalized was downplayed. So most everyone’s work at that time involved doing art in a space as well as for a space. I wanted to alter the whole space to its very roots, which meant a recognition of the building’s total (semiotic) system, not in any idealized form, but using the actual ingredients of a place. So physically penetrating the surface seemed the logical next step.

Let me qualify this. While my preoccupations involved creating deep metamorphic incisions into space/place, I do not want to create a totally new supportive vision, of cognition. I want to reuse the old one, the existing framework of thought and sight. So, on the one hand, I am altering the existing units of perception normally employed to discern the wholeness of a thing. On the other hand, much of my life’s energies are simply about being denied. There’s so much in our society that purposely intends denial: deny entry, deny passage, deny participation, etc. We would all still be living in towers and castles, if we hadn’t broken down some of the social and economic barriers, inhibitions, and restraints. My work directly reflects this.

I would like to end with an idea of the direction in which I can see my work evolving. One of the greatest influences on me in terms of new attitudes was a recent experience in Milan. When searching for a factory to “cut-up,” I found an expansive long-abandoned factory complex that was being exuberantly occupied by a large group of radical Communist youths. They had been taking turns holding down a section of the plant for over a month. Their program was to resist the intervention of ‘laissez-faire’ real estate developers from exploiting the property. Their proposal was that the area be used for a much needed community services center. My exposure to this confrontation was my first awakening to doing my work, not in artistic isolation, but through an active exchange with peoples’ concern for their own neighborhood. My goal is to extend the Milan experience to the U.S., especially to neglected areas of New York such as the South Bronx where the city is just waiting for the social and physical condition to deteriorate to such a point that the borough can redevelop the whole area into the industrial park they really want. A specific project might be to work with an existing neighborhood youth group and to involve them in converting the all too plentiful abandoned buildings into a social space. In this way, the young could get both practical information about how buildings are made and, more essentially, some first-hand experience with one aspect of the very real possibility of transforming their space. In this way, I could adapt my work to still another level of the given situation. It would no longer be concerned with just personal or metaphoric treatment of the site, but finally responsive to the express will of its occupants.

 

Certain ideas put forth in this interview evolved out of discussions with such friends as Joseph Kosuth, Marlis Grueterich, and Betsy Sussler.

article illustrations:
pp 74/75 Gordon Matta-Clark, Datum Cuts, 1974. Courtesy of Holly Solomon Gallery
pp 76/77 Gordon Matta-Clark, Paris Cuttings, 1975. Courtesy of Holly Solomon Gallery
p 78 Gordon Matta-Clark, Humphrey Splittings, 1974. Courtesy of Holly Solomon Gallery

Gordon Matta-Clark Exhibition on view through June 3, 2007 at Whitney Museum of American Art.