Robert Smithson

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
DAN GRAHAM
In the seventies, artists attempted to leave the politically coercive bounds
01 the art gallery. They deserted the' city to make neoprimitive earth
works, relocations, or simply maps of their walks in the landscape. But
in the display (documentation) of this work to the public, ironically, the
art gallery came back as a support.
Landscape (is) co-extensive with the gallery. I don't think we're
dealing with matter in terms of a back to nature movement. .. (or,
said inversely) the world is a museum. I
Smithson wanted to deny any reading of his work in terms of the
currently "fashionable" ecology movement or any "political" reading;
rather. it was to be read as formalist or as an ambiguously "romantic"
stance.
Not only couldn't the earth artists escape the need for the gallery to
document their work, but they were in danger of taking part of nature
and exhibiting it as a "found object". This was a great dilemma for
Gordon Matta-Clark, a young artist and friend of Smithson's. He
describes his first work:
I made a series of visits to ghetto areas ... moving into spaces with
a handsaw and cutting away rectangular sections of the floor or walls to
create a view from one space into another. The sections were ... removed
from their original positions (and taken) to an art gallery2
Matta-Clark came to the pOSition that work must function directly in the
actual urban environment. "Nature" was an escape; political and cultural
contradictions were not to be denied. By making his removals something
like the spectacle of a demolition for casual pedestrians, the work could
function as a kind of urban "agit-prop", something like the acts of the
Paris Situationalists, in 1968, who had seen their acts as public intrusions
or "cuts" in the seamless urban fabric. The idea was to have their
gestures interrupt the induced habits of the urban masses, which might
then unrepress certain concealed realities. Matta-Clark saw his" cuts" as
probes, liberating "areas from being hidden", opening up socially
hidden information beneath the surface and
breaking through the surface (to create) reperCUSSions in terms of
what else is imposed upon a cut it was kind of the thin edge of
'what was being seen that interested me as much, if not more than,
the views that were being created the layering, the strata, the
different things that are being served. Revealing how a uniform
surface is established. The simplest was to create complexity
without having to make or build anything.
3
Matta-Clark used houses and building structures which were about to be
demolished and created de-constructed "ruins" which reveal hidden
layers of socially concealed architectural and anthropological family
meaning. In the early 18th century deliberately ruined pavilions which
served as "Temples of Contemplation", "Hermitages" (for homeless
monks) and elegiac evocations of ruined classical structures were built in
parks. Today ruins are created each moment as buildings are demolished
and replaced as part of the cycle of endless architectural consumption.
Matta-Clark's work attached itself to the notion of the instant ruin of
today: the demolition. Half-remembered, the existence of a Matta-Clark
work now takes the form of a photograph or film or drawing in
conjunction with the viewer's own memory and knowledge of the city.
In Marie-Paule MacDonald's and my "Museum for Matta-Clark" we used
the outward media image of Splitting as "ruin" to memorialize the late
artist's work. However, the intent of the "Museum" is to relate Matta-
Clark's cutting methodology to urban planning.
If his "dematerialized" methodology is conceptual art, this "Museum for
Matta-Clark", a form of conceptual art, wishes to re-materialize his
work. It also wishes to equate urban planning and conceptual art.
Matta-Clark's work starts by setting up a dialogue between art and
architecture or architecture's own territory. It doesn't generalize the art
gallery as the site of a repressive architecture, identified with the
378
Establishment, but now links itself to the urban environment on an
experienced political architectural historical basis which includes its
relation to itself as a memory of archetypal architectural form. These
ideas about architecture and the city have been espoused by the
architectural critic, Manfredo Tafuri, who has criticized modern
architecture for its destruction of the city as context.
4
Tafuri starts with the assumption that the idea of every new building as a
self-sufficient utopian vision began with the French Revolutionary
architects, Boullee and Ledoux; individual works of architecture were, in
each particular architectural proposal, a unique symbol for a social vision
projected to be contained, solely, however, within the work's formal
properties. During the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Age
produced both novel materials for construction and a taste for historical
eclecticism, the city became full of proliferating new buildings as
innovative formal utopias.
Old bUildings were seen as "reactionary" failures and torn down to
make way for the new, more progreSSive forms. In fact, this process
was connected to the capitalist organization of architectural practice
which structured architecture in terms of competing buildings which
would each be judged for having superseded all previous buildings. The
economic effect was to keeP the consumption/production cycle
progressively stimulated as new buildings constantly replaced old ones. All
of this was at the expense of the cohesiveness of the City structure and
tended to constantly displace urban districts which were redeveloped to
generate money for an expanding economy.
This position is "Marxist" in its commitment to a revolution of the
oppressed, the underclasses, but in opposition to Karl Marx's ideological
rejection of an appeal to the memory of past events. Marx wanted to
break the ideological blinders of the past which he thought obscured the
implications of the future in technological progress:
Th'e social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw from
the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before
it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past. Earlier
revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to
drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at
its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let
the dead bury their dead
s
Walter Benjamin observed, in this century, that, on the contrary,
bourgeois ideology is "maintained" by the notion of progress and that
that view is supported by an empirical, "scientific" ideology of
"objective" historical progress. In opposition to the twentieth century
ideology of "progress", Benjamin proposed a recuperation of historical
memory. Without the concept of historical memory and the redemption
of "past" oppression, Marxism would, itself, only fall into the trap of
reducing itself to the dominant terms of rationalism as capitalist society:
The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to
as redemption. There is a secret agreement between past
generations and the present one ... Like every generation which has
preceded us, we have been endowed with a '.'weak" Messianic
'power, a power to which the past has a claim ... Nothing that has
ever happened should be regarded as lost for history ... [The
oppressed have a] retroactive force and their struggle calls into
question every victory, past and present,- of the rulers The true
image of the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up
at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the
way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it
flashes up at a moment of danger ... Only that historian will have the
gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced
that "even the dead" will not be safe from the enemy if he wins
6
All of us "are living in a city ... [whose] whole fabric is architectural. ..
[where] property is so all-pervasive," noted Gordon Matta-Clark. He
wanted his work to expose this "containerization of usable space" in the
interests of capitalism? To achieve this, instead of building, restoring, or
adding new elements to existing architecture to call attention to the
"innovative" or "progressive" elements of each new "idea:' manifested
in a new work of architecture, Matta-Clark proposes to attack the cycle
of production and consumption at the expense of the remembered
history of the city. Such ideas have also been espoused by Tafuri, and
also Aldo Rossi and Leon Krier. But Matta-Clark's approach differs from,
say. Kriel's by a refusal to construct; Matta-Clark's practice, instead, is
to subtract from architeccural structures already in existence. No new
buildings are added to the world; what is gained is a newly available
historical time/popular memory of the city. Matta-Clark usually focuses
on one, singular, vernacular syntax at a time (row houses, seventeenth-
century twin mansions, etc.) and through his deconstruction opens up his
selected building's (and by implication other nearby or similar style
buildings') external relation to property lines and codes of public and
private. "By undoing a building [11 open a state of enclosure which
had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the
industry that proliferates suburban and urban boxes as a pretext for
ensuring a passive, isolated consumer ,,8
These deconstruccions can, paradoxically, "still" be a form of
architecture; for the effect of stripping or cutting into buildings functions
to enhance or preserve the site. Mana-Clark notes that in Splitting:
what the cutting's done is to make the space more articulated, but
the identity of the building as a place, as an object, is strongly preserved,
enhanced.,09
In Splitting, Mana-Clark operated on a standard suburban dwelling
type in a working-class neighborhood. He divided the building into
two halves with a vertical cut, removed the four corners at the roof
intersection, and removed material from the foundation so that one
half of the house lifted forward. In Splitting, the cut, the operative
element, opens the compartmentalized disposition of the rooms in
the house in the sequence of suburban lots. The model places the
representation of the house at 332 Humphrey Street in an
abstracted context, suggesting the spatial condition which existed
around the house and indicating its relationship to a system of
division and terrain in a larger scale.
The cuning praccice of Gordon Mana-Clark responded precisely to
the imposed suburban order of the New Jersey site Matta-Clark's
negative architectural activity operated on an existing architectural
logic; the interaccion between the two produced an analytical
transgression of a series of architectural and urbanistic constraints.
The cut is able to emphasize the organizational capability of the
architectural logic, as the observer realizes how the space is
composed, how it "should have been" before the cut, which has
disclosed the order using a process of selection. 10
To stlip, eviscerate, deconstruct a building is a statement against
conventional professional architectural practice. To destroy and not to
construct (or reconstruct) a building also amounts to an inversion of
functionalist architectural doccrine. While Mies van der Rohe, for
instance, constructed with materials such as glass and steel to reveal both
the material structure and the previously revealed interior, Mana-Clark
looks for already existing "gaps, void places that were not developed".
These only exist as negation in modern architecture. In fact, the sheer
glass and steel openwork often are measures taken by modern
alchitecture, like the modern bureaucratic thinking it reflects, to cover
over these contradiccions (often in definitions of public property against
definitions of private property). A Mana-Clark "deconstruction", unlike
"minimal," "pop" or "conceptual" art, allows an historical time to
enter.
There is a kind of complexity which comes from taking an otherwise
completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous situation and
redefining it, it into overlapping and multiple readings of
conditions past and present. I I
Mana-Clark grew up in both Paris and New York: his work must be
located at both in terms of twentieth-century French art and in terms of
contempNary American Art, especially "minimal" art like reduccivism
and ., process-art".
Many of Mana-Clark's American works deal with vernacular apartment
or two-family house structures. The cuts reveal private integration of
compartmentalized living space, revealing how each individual family copes
with the imposed social structure of its container. The constructural
imposition becomes revealed, along with the private family and/or
person's adaption to the architecture's socially conformist concealed
order, to the outside public. in the form of "sculpture".
Describing the logic of a Genoa office block he dissecced, Matta Clark
notes:
Normally 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.
'2
Matta-Clark fragments or splinters architecture, turning it into a kind of
reverse Cubism or "anti-monument", but one whose task is to
reconstitute memory, not conventional memory as in the traditional
monument, but that subversive memory which has been hidden by social
and architectural and their false sense of "wholeness".
(There) is a type of space we all ." have stored in memory: spaces
that are detailed and precise, fragments generally, at all levels of
reminiscence. And, of course, once you get into r,eminiscence, an
infinite number of associations emerge. Memory seems to create a
unique kind of space setting up an about-to-be-disintegrated leveL
'3
It is only the specialized professional architects in society who can
penetrate the and read general schematic structures to building
units. This professional world is itself institutionalized and containerized in
its own place of work: the engineer's or architect's office suite.
The Datum Cuts". took place in an engineer's rooms and offices.
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.
Unlike the conventional monument designed to smoothly link past to
present to implied future, Matta-Clark's "monument" is profoundly
pessimistic. It will be qUickly demolished; as a work it is something of a
useless gesture as opposed to a permanent symbolic form. It accepts its
fate - to be remembered only as a photoltext representation, as
"conceptual art", and to disappear into the anonymous rubble. It is
close to an instant ruin - a photo of what was once a spark of hope
and is now erased by more dominant forms. These negative
"monuments" or remembrances of works desire to "open up" history
and historical memory, which could lead to a critical view of present
oppression.
In effect, Mana-Clark's work, although negative as to architectural
practice, still hopefully opts, from the view of historical materialism, for
a communication value; which is the ideal of "conceptual art": "The
determining factor is the degree to which my intervention can transform
the structure into an act of communication." 14
He identifies his deconstructions in terms of linguistic acts: "Ie's like
juggling with syntax, or disintegrating some kind of established sequence
of parts.. the piece is a way of imposing a presence, an idea, it's a way
to disorientation by using a clear and given system.. "IS
His most (propagandistically) effective work was Conical Intersect, in the
Les Hailes district of Paris, then under demolition for the erection of the
Centre Pompidou and luxury housing. Mana-Clark was aware of the
specifically Parisian connotations of this area's symbolic meaning and of
the relation of the new Centre to its visual alignment with the Tour
Eiffel: one, a monument of contemporary French national ideology, the
other, a monument of nineteenth-century French progress.
Matta-Clark used two seventeenth-century "twin" townhouses from
which he cut out a massive conical base of four meters on the diameter.
The central axis made an approximately 45 angle with the street
below. As the cone diminished in circumference, it twisted up
through the walls, floors, and out of the attic roof of the adjoining
house.. [becoming] a new standard in sun and air for lodgers. 16
The conical removals penetrated through the bUildings, the holes optically
functioning like periscopes in their directing the attention of the people
on the street to, specifically, the alignment of the building to both the
Tour Eiffel and the new Centre Pompidou as well as to these two
landmarks' relation to each other. With the aid of this "periscope" they
could look not only into the interior of the Matta-Clark
sculpture/building, but "through" the conical borings to these other
buildings that form past and present eras Df Paris. The Centre
Pompidou's modernist infrastructure, with its throwback to a 1960s
"Archigram" - science-fictiDn-look - has service ducts expDsed to
look like a circuitry diagram. BDth interior and exteriDr pipes are color-
coded and expDsed tD thDse passers-by whD wish to read the
mfDrmation concerning the technical functioning of the building. Its
technological popular optimism seems in contrast to the rubble of the
rest, Df the Dlder section of Paris. The new Centre, then, is a talisman,
linking contemporary French technDIDgy/culture to the Paris of the Tour
Eiffe!' Matta-Clark's "monument" alludes to the destruction of any
histDrical cDntinuity between Did and new Paris, evidencing a profoundly
negative view of progress. Its negative fDrm mimics both the Centre
Pompidou and the Tour Eiffe!' Matta-Clark's view of the Tour Eiffel
echDes Barthes' description of this monument: " ... an object when we
look at it, it becomes a look-out in its turn when we visit it, and nDW
cDnstitutes as an object, simultaneDusly extended and collected beneath
it, that Paris which just nDW was 10Dking at it." 17
AppDsitely, Matta-Clark's "antimDnument" alludes bDth to the
destructiDn Df the Did histDrical quarrier and the shattering Df any real
historical continuity between old and new Paris for thDse who live there.
Its formal openness mimics both the symbolic Tour Eiffel and the new
Centre Pompidou. It takes a gamble: that by deconstructing an existing
architectural object, designed to be destroyed anyway (a kind of double
negation being involved here), the work has "more" (not less)
articulation or symbolic meaning than the two other competing
monuments. In art terms, Matta-Clark's work in Paris evokes a
succession of Parisian forms: it suggests synthetiC and analytic Cubism
but a reversed Cubism, for where Cubist collage consists of fragments
of the real world brought into (gallery) art, Matta-Clark's work cut away
from (into) things to subtract from the real world, in order to make a
"sculpture". The conical borings, in their sinuous form, suggest Art
Nouveau, for example, Hector Guimard's Paris "Metro" entrances.
The effect of stripping or cutting away in Matta-Clark's work is to
reveal the usually hidden constructional and historical layering; this is
inverse to such display of compositional or functional inner workings as
in the Centre Pompidou's constructed, only "apparently" open, display
to the public which promulgates an ideological notion of "progress".
Matta-Clark's aim can be viewed as a form of urban "ecology"; his
approach is not to build with expensive materials, but to make
architectural statements by. removing in order to reveal existing,
historical aspects of vernacular, ordinary buildings. Thus, the capitalist
exhaustion of marketable material in the name of progress is reversed.
Of course, Matta-Clark himself was influenced by theories and existing
examples of architecture. His restoration of the archetypalness of a
typical house might be compared to Michael Graves' 1969-70 Benerraf
House in New Jersey. Graves' "add-ons" leave the form of the old
house intact, but build a Corbusier- or Leger-like schematic front
extension which places the house in dialectical juxtaposition with its
"Heroic Modernist Revival", architect-built extension. Both, in a sense,
are archetypalized. What holds the compOSition together is that the
addition is actually derived from the elevation diagram (hidden behind the
fa,ade of the house ... only known to Graves, the architect). Or
compare Matta-Clark's deconstruction of a house to a new house by
Robert Venturi. One of Venturi's most radical compositional ideas is that
architectural fa,ades must be composed through inflection towards
(mimicking) other publicly visible buildings in the surrounding, immediate
environment. This is a way of looking at, or reflecting, the world as it
actually is, and eliminating the authoritarian impOSition of the architect's
self-contained utopian building.
. What Matta-Clark's projects attempted, but which is avoided by the
many compositional stratagems of modern architecture, is to expose to
the outside public the property lines and general containerization of the
space to which the urban environment is subjected. This question is
380
usually hidden within the composition of the modern building by the
architect's compOSition.
I Robert Smithson. quoted in a symposium at Cornell University. Ithaca, in connection with the
exhibition Earth, 1970.
2 Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark. in Macca-Clark, (exhib. caL). lmernationaal Cultureel
Centrum, Antwerp 1977. p. 8.
) "Gordon Matta-Clark: Splirting, The Humphrey Street Building", an interview by Uza Bear,
in Avalanche. Dec. 1974, p. 34.
~ Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architeccure, Grenada, New York 1980. See
especially first chapter.
S Karl Marx, The Eighteenrh Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, International Publishers Co.. New
York 1963, p. 18.
6 Walter Benjamin, lfIuminations. ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books,
New York 1969, pp. 254-255.
7 "Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting .. ", op. cit., p. 34
8 Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark in Matra-Clark, op. cir.. p, 9.
OJ "Gordon Matta-Clark: SpJirring ...... op. cir., p. 37.
10 Marie-Paule MacDonald, "Project for 'Gordon Matta-Clark Museum' for Paris", in
Flykcpunkcer/Vanishing Points, (exhib. cae). Moderna Museet. Stockholm 1984).
It Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark in Marca-Clark, op. cit., p. 10.
n Donald Wall, "Gordon Matta-Clark's Building Dissections," in Arcs MagaZine. March 1976.
pp. 74-79; reproduced in Matta-Clark, op. cit., p. 40.
I] {bid, p. 41.
1'1 Ibid. p. 39.
IS "Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting. ,op. cit.. p. 36.
If> Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark in Mana-Clark. op. cic.. p. 12.
11 Roland Barthes. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard, Hill and
Wang, New York 1979, p. 4.
ART AND THE SACRED
EUGENIO TRiAS
After the 'oeath of the last great generation of major and minor
prophets, almost two centuries went by when it seemed to the children
of Israel that prophetic inspiration had disappeared. During this period of
suspension and concealment, when the breath of the spirit, ruah, ceased
to blow and the community lost the habit of feeling buffeted and lashed
by the biting words of the prophets, a conviction began to grow that
the times were preparing the final act of the drama of salvation. An
opinion began to form that the coming prophet would be the last, the
one who would finally halt the flow of prophetic inspiration and
inaugurate the messianic age. And so they lived in a kind of suspended
time, becalmed, awaiting a final, eschatological event whose obvious signs
would be, inevitably, universal catastrophes and plagues.
Today we are, perhaps, living in one of those periods of suspense,
whose most distinctive characteristic consists of a certain general
sensation of being becalmed. Today we are also witnessing the close of a
prophetic era. What we call modernity was, for all Df us, a historical
conjuncture with a propenSity for the spirit of prophecy. The principal
features of the prophetiC universe defined the discourse of modernity
and the style of its exemplary products (artistiC, literary, philosophical).
Also its political referents, with their dual dimension of criticism of what
exists and of utopia. Or their characteristic way of lambasting today, the
present time, when comparing it with an ideal community of feeling
(both long awaited and perpetually deferred). Modernity was prophetic in
its artistic forms, its philosophical thinking, its social critique and its
political convictions.
Today, however, modernity is openly in retreat in relation to our vital
space. We are its children, to be sure, but our world no longer
recognizes itself in it. Our world is characterized by the extinction of
that scourging messianic spirit which we recognize in all our greatest
masters of art, thought and life: in the ancestors who moulded and
taught us. But the present time is a time suspended, when the rousing
wind of the prophetic spirit seems to have flagged and died away.
Does all this herald the coming of the messianic agel Is it a general
warning to navigators concerning prospects and prDgnostications of
mighty historical storms, or a forecast of general heavy seas for the
future? Or is it a suspension sine die, indefinitely prolongable for years,
decades or centuries? What is the meaning of this general atmosphere
that we perceive in our world, in politics, in art, in thought, and also in
daily experience, in day to day affairs .. .1