GORDON MATTA-CLARK expo Whitney Museum N.Y.

Exposição de Gordon Matta-Clark: ‘You Are the Measure’ no Whitney Museum of American Art em New York até 3 de Junho 07.
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Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) has attracted increasing interest over the past ten years. Thanks to monographic studies by Pamela M. Lee and Corinne Diserens, published in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and several recent exhibitions in San Diego and New York, Matta-Clark’s ten years of frenetic productivity are becoming known to a larger public. The show currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is, however, the first retrospective of Matta-Clark’s work since that held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1985. The many objects on display include fragments from his celebrated cuttings and splittings of condemned buildings; photographs and photomontages of the results of these cuttings; drawings and sketches; notebook pages; index cards; and, of course, films of the more important actions.
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A number of significant revelations emerge from such a comprehensive collection of material, particularly after so many partial glimpses of Matta-Clark’s work in previous shows. Among the most noteworthy of the items on display, especially given the difficulty of reconstructing the spatial nature of the buildings before and after cutting, are several large photomontages, which provide an almost filmic vision of Matta-Clark’s process. Particularly striking are the photomontages of the “Core” and “Datum” cuts of A W-Hole House, 1973, itself a beautiful exemplar of the complex geometrical nature of Matta-Clark’s actions, as he sliced horizontally and vertically through the square studio with its pyramidal roof. In an incisive catalogue essay exploring Matta-Clark’s relation to his father (the quasi-Surrealist artist Roberto Matta), as well as to architectural history and the “origins” of architecture in particular, Princeton professor of architecture Spyros Papapetros posits a parallel between a consideration of the conceptual nature of the Egyptian pyramids in the second volume of Sigfried Giedion’s Eternal Present (1964) and Matta-Clark’s use of the pyramid as “a median plane to invert his previous architectural education.” Papapetros’s argument is especially persuasive because the influence of Giedion’s earlier book, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941)—the central “set book” of the 1960s that saw the Baroque as the progenitor of the Modern Movement, the dramatic spatial geometries of the former transformed by the collapsing of space-time in the latter—can be felt in the cuttings Conical Intersect, 1975, and Office Baroque, 1977. The large color Cibachrome photocollages documenting the creation of Office Baroque might well be playful elaborations of Giedion’s premise, taking it literally but reversing the historical movement by returning the modern to its Baroque roots.
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The works on view have frequently been adduced as evidence of his strong reaction against the architectural training he received at Cornell University, where he graduated with a professional degree in 1968. After all, cutting houses open with a Sawzall, shooting through windows with a BB gun (as he did at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York for Window Blow-Out, 1976), and hammering conical holes through the party walls of Parisian apartment buildings have never been part of the orthodox practice of architecture. Nor were such actions in tune with the prevailing neo-avant-garde works of the time, whether the populist imagery of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, or the rationalist and post-Surrealist work of the New York Five, who represented the dominant tendency at Cornell in the ’60s.
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Behind each of Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions lies a similar impulse: to seek the most fundamental transformation of architecture, one that would respond to the conditions of life rather than art, and certainly not one that followed the already static conventions of the neo-avant-garde. The action of bringing light into the house (in Splitting) might itself be the best metaphor for Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture”: In the end, like his beloved alchemists, systems theorists, and psychologists, and together with the theorists, if not the practitioners, of modern architecture, Matta-Clark was an apostle of light—an “enlightener” in practice and in theory.
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Anthony Vidler in ARTFORUM