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GORDON MATTA-CLARK: POETIC ANARCHY Words Juliette Khoo
By the time Gordon Matta-Clark completed his architecture degree at Cornell University, he was determined to pursue art as a career.
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During his studies, Matta-Clark mingled with the students in the art department instead of his own and helped to organise the first Earth Art exhibition held in 1969 at Cornell. Matta-Clark outwardly expressed his distaste for the architectural education he received: “…the things we studied always involved such surface formalism that I never had the sense of the ambiguity of a structure, the ambiguity of a place, and that’s the quality I’m interested in generating what I do.” His views continually conflicted with the tenets of high modernism: the endorsement of science and rationalism, an adherence to rigid form, and the detachment of architecture from the political, social and economic order. In 1969, Matta-Clark returned to a chaos-ridden SoHo, marked by violent civil protests against the Vietnam War and the government’s plans to demolish entire neighbourhoods to build a steel and
high modernism, preferring to engage in what Robin Evans terms as positive interference: a change that permits “an expansion of possible actions but does not produce any restriction of existing possible actions”. The group met weekly at FOOD Restaurant, which Matta-Clark co-owned, to socialise, cook, perform and chat over a meal. Matta-Clark’s idea of dissecting a building originated from renovating the space by cutting up the existing counters and walls. ONE: UNBUILDING Due to the urban blight, many of the buildings in Lower Manhattan had fallen into a state of neglect and disrepair. Matta-Clark began to utilize these “free properties” for his building interventions, explaining that he felt a need “to relate to those buildings that have been abandoned by a system that doesn’t look after them, that imposes the rise and fate of property only as an end in itself.”
“ANARCHITECTURE ATTEMPTS TO SOLVE NO PROBLEM BUT TO REJOICE IN AN INFORMED WELL-INTENDED CELEBRATION OF CONDITIONS THAT BEST DESCRIBE AND LOCATE A PLACE.” Gordon Matta Clark, written notecard, c.1973 glass metropolis. Despite beginning his artistic practice in this tumultuous period, he formed a tight-knitted artist collective later colloquially known as the Anarchitecture group (1971). The group opposed the systemization and machine tradition of
One of his first dissections was Bronx Floors: Threshole (1972). Rectangular holes were cut through the floors of deserted buildings located in the South Bronx, then displaced from their original homes and exhibited in an art gallery. The South
