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Back in the Bronx:

Gordon Matta-Clark, Rogue Sculptor
The Bronx Museum’s beautifully staged, streamlined version of the
artist’s career still conveys a full picture of his radical sensibility.

By Roberta Smith Jan. 11, 2018

The small Bronx Museum of the Arts regularly hits above its weight. It is doing
so again with “Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect,” a streamlined exhibition of the
work of this insurrectionary artist. The show creates a remarkably full picture of
an irrepressible and unfailingly D.I.Y. maverick who is revered as one of the
prime movers in the juggernaut of Conceptual, Process and Performance art
that emerged in the late 1960s and ’70s. With a range that few of his peers
equaled, Matta-Clark contributed to all of these genres.

He and his twin brother, John Sebastian, were born in New York to the Chilean
Surrealist painter Roberto Matta and Anne Clark, an American artist and
fashion designer. The parents separated shortly after their birth, and the boys
were raised primarily in Greenwich Village by their mother. Matta-Clark (1943-
1978) studied architecture at Cornell University, and evolved into a kind of
urban land artist who used his skills to reshape and transform architecture into
an art of structural explication and spatial revelation. He is best known for
cutting up derelict buildings scheduled for demolition, turning them into giant
temporary installations or extracting fragments from them that he then exhibited
as sculpture.

This show, organized by Antonio Sergio Bessa, the museum’s director of

curatorial and education programs, and Jessamyn Fiore, an independent
curator and co-director of the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate, is beautifully staged
in separate capsules of work. It doesn’t attempt to give us a wide-angle view of
Matta-Clark’s brief but prolific and extremely diverse career, barely a decade in
length, which ended with his death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 35. It
concentrates on his photographs and videos, seen in appropriately large
projections, and the ways he constantly fused art and the documentation of art.

Nonetheless, the exhibition captures his restless intelligence and, most

important, his relationship with the city and the urban landscape, which were
sources of both inspiration and material. “Anarchitect” also indicates the
freedom that the deterioration of the South Bronx in the 1970s granted him.
Following the clarity of the exhibition’s staging, the focus here is on its main
works or groupings.

‘Untitled (Anarchitecture)’ (1974)

Matta-Clark may or may not have known about the 1970 article “Towards
Anarchitecture,” by the British architect and theorist Robin Evans, when he
started using the subversive hybrid of anarchy and architecture in the mid-
1970s, but it perfectly personifies his attitudes. The show begins with a piece
consisting of 20 photographs, about half of them stock images of disasters
seen from above. Installed outside the exhibition galleries, these visceral
images introduce Matta-Clark’s sense of humor and his mordant eye for violent
intersections of the built and natural worlds.
 An image of a collapsed building at East Houston and Forsyth Streets is included in a Gordon
Matta-Clark piece from 1974 titled “Untitled (Anarchitecture).”
Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner and Electronic Arts Intermix,
New York

The photographs show collapsed buildings and bridges, a housing development

leveled by a tornado, train wrecks and floods. In one, cars crowd together on
the ramped roadway of a railroad crossing, like rats clinging to driftwood. But
the images taken by the artist deepen the mood of life irrevocably disrupted,
especially in retrospect. In three, tombstones in a cemetery are seen from
different angles. Another reveals the gap of space between the towers of the
World Trade Center. And yet another was taken from one of the windows of
Matta-Clark’s top-floor loft at 155 Wooster Street in SoHo, from which his twin
brother would jump to his death in 1977. The image catches the large ink-black
shadow of the building’s profile cast on West Houston Street.

‘Substrait’ (1976)
Matta-Clark’s interest in tunneling through things is reflected in a series of tours
he took with a few friends, armed with a video camera, along New York City’s
subterranean network. Old railroad tracks beneath Grand Central Terminal, the
crypt at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the 13th Street storm sewer
and pumping station were among the sites visited. Documented by a series of
murky video clips whose primary audio consists of the voices of different
guides, they provide a heady sense of the artist’s daring and curiosity and a
healthy dose of suspense, as if the Phantom of the Opera might be lurking.

‘Garbage Wall’ (1970)

Matta-Clark made his first “Garbage Wall” at St. Mark’s Church in the East
Village in 1970. Originally conceived as the ephemeral set for a performance, it
mixed garbage with concrete. But Matta-Clark soon saw that combination had
possibilities for both cheap housing and communal art; either way it was
something that could be made by anyone. For this exhibition, Jane Crawford,
Matta-Clark’s widow and co-director of his estate (and Ms. Fiore’s mother),
oversaw the Bronx Museum Teen Council in the making of a new, colorful
“Garbage Wall” installed on the museum’s terrace.
 Members of the Bronx Museum Teen Council made a new, colorful “Garbage Wall,” which is
installed on the museum's terrace. Stefan Hagen

Bronx Graffiti (1973)

The show’s greatest revelation may be a grouping of about 30 photographs in
black and white and, it seems, in color, that Matta-Clark took of graffiti on
subway cars and walls and buildings in the South Bronx. They have never been
exhibited in such abundance, and their delicacy and color enlivens the show,
especially the close-ups of walls.

“Graffiti” (1973), from the South Bronx.

Keith Sonnier; Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner

“Graffiti E-Z 129,” from 1973.

Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner

And even more when you realize the color images were actually hand-colored
And even more when you realize the color images were actually hand-colored
by Matta-Clark using an airbrush. They add a new twist to his penchant for
interacting with the urban environment — though here he is adding rather than
subtracting — and emphasize his gift for pictorial beauty. The close-up images
of wall graffiti with added color tend to be the liveliest. Had Matta-Clark lived
into old age, he might even have taken up other forms of painting, or at least
built on these.

‘Bronx Floors’ (1972-73)

Some of Matta-Clark’s first interventions in the urban architectural fabric were
the pieces of floor (including the beams and ceilings beneath them), roughly
four-feet square, that he cut from abandoned buildings in the South Bronx.

Photographs show the stages of the making of Matta-Clark’s “Bronx Floor: Boston Road,” from
1973. Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner

Several photographs and photocollages document three of these extractions,

and the show includes a single example, its only sculpture. “Bronx Floors,” from
the Museum of Modern Art, is displayed on a pedestal against a wall, more like
a relic than the still-shocking ready-made fragment that it is. It has deep
turquoise linoleum with a gold quatrefoil pattern and two thresholds, suggesting
that it lay at the juncture of three rooms.

“Bronx Floors” (1972-73), a building fragment of wood and linoleum, is among the works in the
show. Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner
‘Day’s End’ (1975)
One of Matta-Clark’s long-gone masterpieces is “Day’s End,” a site-specific
piece executed without permits on one of the decrepit piers on the Hudson
River in the West Village, which then served mainly for assignations among
gays. (Four photographs by Alvin Baltrop, who documented life on the piers, as
well as “Day’s End,” hang nearby.) Matta-Clark was after light and water views.
He cut a big semicircle through the corrugated steel end-wall of the piece. This
half-moon, orange slice or primitive rose window was echoed, just inside the
building, by a large quarter-circle cut through the heavy floor (but not the
beams) to reveal the river below.

A short, sometimes alarming video provides glimpses of the artist, blowtorch in

hand, working from what appears to be a large swing or small platform made of
rope and plywood.

Last year the Whitney Museum unveiled plans to have David Hammons
commemorate “Day’s End” with a full-scale steel outline of the old pier. Perhaps
it should include the outlines of Matta-Clark’s cuts.

‘Conical Intersect’ (1975)

After New York City officials discovered “Day’s End,” Matta-Clark faced an
arrest warrant and lawsuit. He hopped on a plane to Paris — where he had
another obligation — and remained there until charges were dropped. For the
ninth Paris Biennale, and with that city’s blessing and objections from both the
left and the right, he tackled a large 16th-century building being demolished to
make way for the Centre Pompidou. Its exoskeleton appears in the video that
records the artist at work, assisted by Gerry Hovagimyan.

The result, “Conical Intersect,” was a giant tunnel that telescoped down through
the building, widening as it went. It may be easier to grasp from some photo-
collages here, but the video conveys the grandiosity of Matta-Clark’s vision, the
fearlessness it required and the solidity of the building being torn apart; 16th-
century floor beams are something to behold. Any sadness about the loss of
this ancient structure may be complicated by the video’s final shot, showing a
steam shovel knocking everything down, the brief “Matta-Clark” included.

‘Walls/Wallspaper’ (1972)
Matta-Clark’s relationship to the ephemeral and the passage of time is complex
and was undoubtedly balanced by his use of cameras to document what he
saw and did. In addition to graffiti, he was drawn to all sorts of architectural
remnants, among them, interior walls exposed during demolition. The show
includes a dozen black-and-white photographs of such, sometimes from one
room, sometimes in multistoried clusters, all titled “Walls” and hanging in a grid.

“Walls,” from 1972, show interior walls exposed during demolition.

Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner

Another image from the 1972 “Walls” series.

Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David Zwirner

Across the way, an enormous wall is covered with grainy versions of similar
images from the series: offset lithographs printed on newsprint that repeat their
forms in changing combinations of fruity plum, citrus and lime and evoke Andy
Warhol. This is “Wallspaper,” first made to cover most of a large wall at 112
Greene Street in 1972 and reprinted for subsequent exhibitions.

‘Food’ (1971-74)
Near the show’s entrance, situated specifically in the museum’s cafe, a 60-
minute video by Matta-Clark records mealtime at FOOD, the relaxed semi-
communal restaurant, and artwork, that he and Carol Gooden founded, with
other artists, on the corner of Wooster and Prince Streets in SoHo.

It was 1971 and the neighborhood was still a nexus of artistic experimentation.
In perhaps his first architectural excision, Matta-Clark tore out the storefront’s
walls to achieve an open-plan kitchen and exhibited one of the fragments as a
sculpture at 112 Greene Street. In the video, you may recognize artists like
Keith Sonnier, Tina Girouard, Richard Nonas and Suzanne Harris, as well as
Matta-Clark himself.

“Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect” runs through April 8 at the Bronx

Museum of the Arts; 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org.

Videos: Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; David
Zwirner and Electronic Arts Intermix. Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Nicole Herrington and
Ariana McLaughlin.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: Radical, but Not Chic.
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