| What does one seek from a work of art? Is it the sensuality of paint, the allure of color, the attentiveness to shape and form, the artist’s handling of line, circuitous or straight, wavy or merely linear, the mysterious application of paint, rich in color, vaporous in shadow? Of course, it is all of this and more. One wants to know that the artist is aware of his world, of his community and, as Gordon Matta-Clark has said, that his interest is “to clarify our personal awareness of place.” It is to the everyday experiences of spaces and built forms, therefore, that Gordon Matta-Clark has been devoted and, as he was taught in his Cornell architectural courses, … |  |
Gordon Matta-Clark – Harriet Zinnes
What does one seek from a work of art? Is it the sensuality of paint, the allure of color, the attentiveness to shape and form, the artist’s handling of line, circuitous or straight, wavy or merely linear, the mysterious application of paint, rich in color, vaporous in shadow? Of course, it is all of this and more. One wants to know that the artist is aware of his world, of his community and, as Gordon Matta-Clark has said, that his interest is “to clarify our personal awareness of place.” It is to the everyday experiences of spaces and built forms, therefore, that Gordon Matta-Clark has been devoted and, as he was taught in his Cornell architectural courses, his devotion is also to creating what he called “anarchitecture,” to discovering new experiences of space in built and unbuilt environments and in the occurrences of everyday life.
It is not strange, therefore, that Gordon Matta-Clark, the son of the surrealist painter Roberto Echaurren Matta, realized that, through intervention upon existing buildings, he could create something new. These interventions were indeed violent. They were forced cuts. He used a chainsaw to cut two vertical parallel lines, an inch apart (as the curator, Elisabeth Sussman, describes it in the catalogue), along the sides of the house, bisecting the building—splitting the house in half. At the rear of the house, he then chiseled stones out of the foundation and lowered the back half of the building, widening and accentuating the gap between the halves. Finally, we are told, he cut sections from the four top corners of the house, removing the places where the walls met the eaves of the roof. Then of course, after the destruction of the house, the artist left his documentation and artifacts from the project: photographs, a film, the extracted fragments and even an artist’s book, as in the project called “Splitting: Four Corners.”
This is an exhibition that requires attention to wall texts, to photographs and to films. The objects that one finds here are scarce—Gordon Matta-Clark was not interested in creating objects. He was interested, rather, in visual and conceptual experiences. The artist, whose life was short indeed—he died at age 35 in l978—felt keenly the need for an individual’s awareness of his presence in the world—as he said, “You are the measure.” And, in this exhibition at the Whitney Museum, the individual should take stock.
