DEMOLITIONS
A
retrospective at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) honors Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work falls, alluringly, somewhere between theater, sculpture, land
art, performance art, and political protest. (The exhibit’s subtitle is Anarchitect.) It might be best understood, loosely, as architectural intervention. Though I’m enamored of his work, the exhibition didn’t hold my interest.
The show has been thoughtfully curated and handsomely mounted. But the physical artifacts from Matta-Clark’s projects are inert. A patch of floor cut with a machine saw from a wood frame house looks, simply, like a chunk of building debris. It doesn’t have the mythic aura or syntactic richness of one of Rachel Whiteread’s architectural casts. Even photos (like the ones from Conical Intersect in 1975, offering views through a giant cone carved through a Parisian house) and video (like the one from Day’s End in 1975, showing the artist on a harness, with a blow torch, cutting a three-quarters-moon shape through a warehouse wall) have little effect.
What’s most remarkable about Matta-Clark’s work is its sense of the prehistoric. In Day’s End, by simply removing a chunk of wall, the artist connects us – simply, powerfully, mysteriously, unsentimentally – with the cosmos. Light falls through the opening onto the rough concrete floor of the building like a blessing; the sky tumbles inside. Matta-Clark’s work carries memory of a time when we were tethered indelibly to the movements of sun and stars. It also carries memory of the primal power of architecture. The structures he operates on are, typically, unoccupied and abandoned. After his transformation they become shrines, havens, temples. Matta-Clark’s actions aren’t merely tactical or intellectual; they allow magic again into the everyday world.