In 1969 Gordon Matta-Clark helped Dennis Oppenheim participate in Cornell’s pioneer Earth Art exhibition by cutting a swathe across a frozen lake to make Beebe Lake Ice Cut. The social experience was a powerful introduction to the avantgarde. He met Robert Smithson, whom he came to admire for his ideas on landscape and entropy.
In 1970 he built Garbage Wall, a means of recycling compressed detritus to provide shelter for the homeless.
‘Unbuilding’ Through Building ‘Cuts’
Matta-Clark is most known for his clever use of chainsaws and weightbearing jacks in the mid-1970s to remove triangles of wall in order to make a series of deconstructive ‘anarchitectural’ installations that ran counter to the High Modernist ideology of city planners like Le Corbusier, whom his father once worked for.
Matta-Clark opposed those values, being anti-function and against Le Corbiser’s assertion that buildings were ‘machines for living in’. His activities subverted the utopian ethos of a grand civic plan. His carefully calculated ‘anarchistic’ modifications of condemned buildings—seeming vandalism—split them open or exposed their interiors though huge spiralling holes, celebrating a new type of beauty.
Matta-Clark’s films and photographs show the light flooding in through the penetrated planes to reveal the normally hidden floor, roof, and wall framing structures. Sometimes huge, cut-out slices of house facades become portable exhibitable sculpture. See, for example, Bingo (1974), Splitting (1974), and Conical Intersect (1975).
Other works were much more subtle and avoided spectacle, such as Reality Properties: Fake Estates, “Jamaica Curb,” Block 10142, Lot 15 (1978), which was part of a series of urban land acquisitions comprised of small slivers of useless land bordering footpaths that were far too small to build on. These were made to satirise property ownership greed.
Matta-Clark died tragically young of pancreatic cancer.
