Gordon Matta-Clark

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Gordon Matta-Clark (full name Gordon Roberto Matta Echaurren * 22. June 1943 in New York; † 27. August 1978 in New York) was an American architect and conceptual artist , which refers to the areas of intervention and deconstruction had specialized .

family

Gordon Matta-Clark was a son of the surrealist painter Roberto Matta and the artist Anne Clark (second marriage to Anne Alpert) and a twin brother of John Sebastian Matta (1943-1976). The godmother was Alexina Duchamp , the wife of Marcel Duchamp . The mother separated from Roberto Matta shortly after the twins were born. She has been known as Anne Halpert since she married the American film critic Hollis Alpert in 1950.

In May 1978 - a few months before his death from pancreatic cancer - Gordon Matta-Clark and Jane Crawford married. As heiress Jane Crawford has the Vienna Generali Foundation by way of donation - via suitable documents to and from the artist - unpublished part.

Life

Gordon Matta - he took the name Clark as an artist to distinguish it from his father - grew up multilingual. Together with his mother and brother John Sebastian, he lived in France for a year from 1948/49. In 1962 Gordon Matta-Clark began studying architecture at the School of Architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (USA), which he completed in 1968 with a Bachelor of Arts . From 1963 to 1964 he stayed in Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne .

Gordon Matta-Clark was also in Paris during the May riots in 1968. Through his studies in France, he got to know the Situationists around Guy Debord . Another great influence on his work as a concept artist came from the deconstructivism influenced by Jacques Derrida .

Gordon Matta-Clark met the American land art artist Robert Smithson in 1969 in Cornell during the exhibition Earth Art . It was during this time that he turned away from traditional art production based on a single medium and turned to multimedia art .

Works

vehicle

Under the pseudonym George Smudge , the artist built a wheelchair-like two-seater vehicle in 1972, combined with a fresh air tank: the people in motion can breathe fresh air while using it.

Food

In October 1971, Gordon Matta-Clark opened the Food restaurant in SoHo (Manhattan) together with Caroline Goodden, Tina Girouard , Suzanne Harris and Rachel Lew in the building at 127 Prince Street and Wooster Street. The initiators intended the restaurant as a communication center, source of income and an independent work of art. Mainly the dancer and photographer Carolin Goodden financed the art project for a period of two years. For the trained architect Gordon Matta-Clark, a combination of food and architecture was the inspiration for his first cuts , which made him famous in the years that followed.

Performances

In 1972 Matta-Clark had a red delivery van with the Herman Meydag logo on it at a New York landfill , crushed by two tracked vehicles and mixed with rubbish. The performance is documented in the film Fresh Kill , which was the name of the waste disposal facility at that time.

In a performance in 1974, Matta-Clark climbed a clock tower in New York with water flowing from its hands. Here he performed several shower actions that are captured in the film Clockshower .

exploration

In 1976 Matta-Clark conducted an underground exploration in New York City , which is documented in his film Substrait . From the point of view of film history , the recordings of the sewer system can be compared to the feature film The Third Man .

Cuttings

The cuttings are cuts that Gordon Matta-Clark made using a chainsaw or small electric hand saws through the facades, ceilings and floors of buildings. He removed entire parts of the building to reveal the interior of an inhabited and used architecture as well as the inner structure of the wall structure.

In 1974 Matta-Clark was able to completely separate an empty single-family house planned for demolition in Englewood ( New Jersey ) in the middle. In addition, he reduced the stone foundation on one side so that after the cut there was an inclination and widening of the split. Matta-Clark documented the cut in the film Splitting . Three months after this work, the house, which the artist was able to dispose of through a gallery owner, was torn down.

Without the owner's permission, Matta-Clark cut a round part several meters high from a hall wall in the port area (Pier 52) on the Hudson River in New York in 1975. He also slit open the floor of the warehouse and removed load-bearing wooden structures. The film Day's End shows the cutting of the materials, whereby at the same time the increasing light can impress the viewer.

Matta-Clark's interventions and deconstructions produced completely new perspectives. However, they only existed for a short time: the buildings had already been approved for demolition, so that the cuttings have only been preserved as temporary works of art through films and photographs.

This way of working resulted in a group of works which is also called anarchitecture . The word creation documents the artist's permanent resistance to a conservative architecture that had barely given space to experiment. As an avant-garde artist, Gordon Matta-Clark used his art to prepare the way for an architecture of deconstruction .

literature

  • Sabine Breitwieser (Ed.): White Cube / Black Box. Retrospective Valie Export and Gordon Matta-Clark. Reader for the exhibition of the same name (January to June 1996) . EA- Generali Foundation , Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-901107-14-2 .
  • Klaus Bußmann, Markus Müller (ed.): Food. Exhibition in the Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History Münster from October 3, 1999 - February 13, 2000 . König, Cologne 1999
  • Corinne Diserens: Gordon Matta-Clark: Opening perspectives through the invisible. In: Sabine Breitwieser (Ed.): White Cube / Black Box. Valie Export and Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective. Reader for the exhibition of the same name (January to June 1996) . EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-901107-14-2 , pp. 129-139
  • Corinne Diserens: Gordon Matta-Clark. Phaidon, New York 2003
  • Dan Graham : Gordon Matta-Clark. In: Sabine Breitwieser (Ed.): White Cube / Black Box. Valie Export and Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective. Reader for the exhibition of the same name (January to June 1996) . EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-901107-14-2 , pp. 215-226
  • Catalog: Gordon Matta-Clark. Antwerp 1977
  • Catalog: Gordon Matta-Clark. One for All - All for One. Düsseldorf 1979
  • Catalog: Gordon Matta-Clark. Office Baroque and other work. Karlsruhe 1979
  • Catalog: Gordon Matta-Clark. A retrospective. Chicago 1985
  • Matthias Korn: A modest suggestion for getting to know architecture: Destroying. Gordon Matta-Clarks Building Cuts . In: Wolkenkuckucksheim , 13th year / No. 1/2008, Cottbus, May 2009
  • Pamela M. Lee: Object to be Destroyed. The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark . MIT Press, Cambridge - London 2000
  • Friedemann Malsch: Gordon Matta-Clark. In: Kunstforum International , Vol. 117/1992, pp. 172–183
  • Peter Noever: Anarchitecture. Works by Gordon Matta-Clark. November 17, 1997 - January 18, 1998 Schindler House, LA . MAK Center LA and MAK Vienna 1997
  • Thilo Rissing: Visualized ban on images? Theology in conversation with Gordon Matta-Clark's Deconstruction of Architecture . Lit, Münster 2003
  • Elisabeth Sussman (Ed.): Gordon Matta Clark. You are the measure. Yale University Press, New Haven - London 2007 ISBN 978-0-300-12395-1 .
  • Philip origin : Gordon Matta-Clark and the limits of architecture . In: David Gugerli, Michael Hagner, Philipp Sarasin , Jakob Tanner (eds.): Not knowing . Diaphanes, Berlin a. Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-03734-089-9 .

Exhibitions

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Friedemann Malsch: Gordon Matta-Clark. In: Kunstforum Vol. 117/1992, pp. 172-183.
  2. Day's End by Gordon Matta-Clark