GORDON MATTA-CLARK: YOU ARE THE MEASURE
22 February – 3 June 2007
www.whitney.org
Radicality
is perhaps the quality that is most abundant in Gordon Matta-Clark’s work,
and the most anticipated. But there is also an extraordinary range of
emotion and psychological depth. This complex nexus of self was captured in
the outstanding career-spanning retrospective held earlier this year at the
Whitney Museum in New York.
Matta-Clark’s art is one of violent transformation. Violence, tenderness and
audacity are given distinctly material expression in his famed building
‘cuts’, which were here represented by detailed notes and plans, documentary
video and photographs, and a number of hallucinatory collages. But it is
also evident in his numerous actions and performance pieces. In Clock Shower
(1974), for example, the artist clambers atop a clock tower and performs the
familiar morning rituals of showering, shaving and teeth-brushing. The
simple juxtaposition of public and private rituals render both domains
strange, as the territory of the seemingly everyday becomes transformed into
a place of spry wit and magic.
By contrast, the building cuts transform the everyday into a forcibly sacred
space. This conversion is so completely performed that the cuts appear to
the viewer as near-alien interventions. Evidence of this was perhaps best
seen in the architectural sections displayed in the gallery – artifacts
stranded on the floor, as if artificially constructed. As the end products
of the production process, these pieces had virtually lost all traces of
their architectural origins.
And yet process was everywhere in the exhibition. Above all, there was a
powerful sense of work, which is distinct from the notion of process, but
also so much a part of Matta-Clark’s philosophy and politics that the two
functioned as reflexive images of each other. ‘Not the work . . . the
worker’ reads a note in Untitled (Handwritten Notes on the Subject of
Architecture) (c.1973- 1976). While the breathtaking impact of the cuts and
interventions remained both the initial and enduring impression left by the
show, the philosophy of work was equally integral. Throughout, and placed
alongside now-familiar documentary photographs of the interventions, were
videos of the artist at work, power-sawing through walls and floors. Yet
there is a distinct sense of inconsistency in seeing the physical work
involved in producing what are ultimately metaphysical and visual
constructs. This was, perhaps, where the core of the exhibition lay. For all
the emphasis on process and exposition – from drawings of tremendous force
and velocity documenting the gestation of a cut, to meticulous architectural
plans and the videos themselves – the interventions remained intact, their
totality unruptured, their mystery undiminished. Observing their slow
gestation does nothing to alter the alien quality that is so much a part of
their final, completed state.
At the core of that strangeness is the figure of Matta-Clark himself, who
emerged as a charismatic figure of both monkish and heroic proportions,
whose contradictory and magical creations perform a kind of alchemy. It is
maybe for this reason that Glass Plant: Garbage Bricks (1970 – 71), in which
the artist gathered bottles from the city and transformed them into
multi-coloured, light-refracting bricks, remains one of his most fascinating
pieces.
Matta-Clark’s genius was not simply for reframing the everyday – a task that
many lesser artists can claim to perform – but for refashioning the
quotidian world, carving into it and laying it apart, leaving the landscape
utterly changed and destroyed. He found places and ways of seeing that had
never been imagined, infusing velocity into stillness and depth into
two-dimensionality. The roles of alchemist, revolutionary and avenging angel
may be too cliché-laden to grant much illumination, but the work
nevertheless often appears miraculous.
KATIE KITAMURA