Robert Smithson

GORDON MATTA-CLARKDAN 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 stl·ip, 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

al·chitecture, 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, ret~anslating 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 fa~ades 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 fa~ade 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. 348 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 SACREDEUGENIO 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