The W-hole Story
Lisa Lefeuvre on Gordon Matta-Clark
In recent years, Gordon Matta-Clark's work has generated considerable interest, his 1973 piece Reality Properties / Fake Estates being one of the cornerstones of 'Documenta X' five years ago. His working practice meandered through Minimalism, language, humour, politics, graffiti, performance, the city and included all the stops between.
Central to the New York art scene of the 70s, Matta-Clark's practice moved from well-known building cuts to the lesser-known prototypes and community projects. In 1969 he fried photographs in gold leaf. In 1971 he made a restaurant into an artwork. In 1974 he cut a suburban New Jersey house in half and photographed the space between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The next year he cut a hole in a building in Les Halles, Paris, near the Pompidou Centre. In 1976 he shot out the windows of New York's Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies with an air rifle. In 1977 he cut a spiral through an office block in Antwerp, dug a hole into the floor of a gallery for the duration of an exhibition and explored underground New York and Paris. Matta-Clark proclaimed that he inscribed himself into architecture: by drawing a line through buildings he revealed and celebrated the negative spaces of the city. He mined a location impossible to articulate — the spaces between architecture, language, time and ideas.
Seen to be related to Matta-Clark's concerns and methodologies is the recent work of artists such as Rachel Whiteread, who has turned architecture inside out; Gregor Schneider's rearticulation of domestic space; DJ Simpson's drawing with a router; Liam Gillick's siting of his work in a location he describes as 'the middle ground'; and Rirkrit Tiravanija's creation of active social spaces. However, what does it mean to place an artist working some three decades ago within these contemporary discourses? How can an artist of the 70s who made ephemerality a part of his practice be allied to the present? As Deborah Schultz notes of Marcel Broodthaers in AM249, the question of 'how to present art accurately that was either dematerialised or intimately tied to the time and place in which it was made and exhibited has not been fully addressed'.
Earlier this year, a selection of Matta-Clark's works primarily relating to the 1973 project A W-Hole House — including drawings, photographs, photoworks and a 'remade cut' — was exhibited at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. The key question that keeps on returning in relation to Matta-Clark's practice is: 'What is the work?'. It is highly unlikely that any of the aforementioned contemporary practitioners will have seen the physical presence of the architectural interventions and interruptions for which he is best known. Even Matta-Clark's peers recall that making the journey to inhospitable and sometimes dangerous suburban locations was not always an attractive proposition. In spite of this, there are critics and contemporaries of Matta-Clark who argue that the definition of the work is its physical presence, with the drawings, photographs, photoworks, film and texts being sideshows to the main event. I would like to argue something different, that the work is in fact all of these elements and, perhaps more importantly, it is also the spaces in between. Reading his work from a contemporary perspective brings Matta-Clark's slippage between modes of representation to the fore, highlighting time as one of his media.
It is important to note that studying Matta-Clark's work now involves looking back at an historical moment through the context of the present. This historical component enriches the work through the layering of time — a crucial element to Matta-Clark's work within its own time. A prime example of this is Pierre Huyghe's reworking of Matta-Clark's 1975 work Conical Intersect. The insertion of the work within current practice means the first work becomes mediated through the second. Consisting of an architectural intervention, 16mm film, photoworks, documentation and anecdote, Conical Intersect created a rupture in the modernisation of Les Halles in Paris. The original plan for the work was to make a hole through the then building-in-progress, that became Pompidou Centre. Instead, he used a site from where views of the Pompidou and the Eiffel Tower intersected — two historically charged symbols of progress.
In a pair of buildings, Matta-Clark created a cone-shaped volume at a 45° angle running through the walls and floors of both buildings. The work was inspired by Anthony McCall's film Line Describing a Cone (included this January in 'Into the Light' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, see AM252), the first of a number of investigations into the ways that light is thrown off by a projector. Matta-Clark's volume existed as a negative space — it was a void through the building. The Pompidou Centre was the focus of much polemic at the time, when the development of new buildings around Beaubourg was described as creating a trou (hole) — a comment that seems all the more significant with the addition of Conical Intersect. The film element of the work begins with the statement: 'Site was at 27-29 rue Beaubourg using two buildings constructed for Mr & Mrs Bonneville in 1690 which were amongst the last to be demolished in a decade of "renovation" of Les Halles'. Huyghe's 1996 work, Light Conical Intersect, took the film Conical Intersect at the point where light shines through the completed cone-shaped cut into the building, repositioning it at the original site. Effectively, Huyghe extended Matta-Clark's cut into the urban fabric by making it a cut through time.
Recontextualisation of the work through history brings methods of representation to the fore, both in terms of Matta-Clark's own use of documentation and photoworks, and in the way publications, references and anecdotes have fixed the work. Dan Graham describes Matta-Clark's pieces as being 'half remembered, the existence of a Matta-Clark work now takes the form of a photograph or a film or a drawing, in conjunction with the viewer's own memory and knowledge of the city'. There was even a gap between how Matta-Clark described his work and what actually happened. One could think of these gaps (as well as the space between the words and the art object) as being one of the very media that Matta-Clark worked with. His Duchampian fascination with puns, spelling ruptures and plays on words create negative space with potential for excavation. This is extended as the performative events become experienced as recorded history.
The Genoa work A W-Hole House that was on show in New York stands as a key moment in the development of Matta-Clark's practice, leading on to the better known works Splitting and Bingo of 1974. These projects took most of their energy from the object-like treatment of the suburban home, working against the notion of the stability of buildings. As Matta-Clark stated: 'The notion of mutable space is especially taboo in one's own home. People live in their space with a temerity that is frightening.' Paolo Minetti of Galeriaforma invited Matta-Clark to make an architectural intervention in the office and drafting room of an iron foundry scheduled for demolition. He was fascinated by the interior plan, which had developed from a simple, and rigorous, dividing process around the centre of the building. A square room had been divided into halves, one of which became the drafting room. The second half was again divided in half — one side for an office, and the other again divided in two for a bathroom and coatroom, with the bathroom further subdivided in two.
This dividing and subdividing resulted in a complicated intersection of doors and walls — a notion already investigated in his earlier works — fixed on the centre of the building. 'Everything was progressively divided so that the remaining piece was 1/32 of the whole.' 1 Firstly, Matta-Clark removed a square section from the roof using a crane, which exists as the sculptural object Roof Top Atrium. Following the angle of light falling on the building, further cuts were made laterally through the walls, known as 'Datum Cuts'. These formed a play on the vertical and horizontal axes of the architecture. Chiselling by hand through the walls, lines were created that seemed to refute the illusion that walls support a building's weight.
The work was exhibited this year as a series of cut drawings, pen drawings, photoworks and documentary photographs. In addition to this, one of the 'Datum Cuts' was recreated in the David Zwirner gallery space. If the question 'what is the work?' is relevant for Matta-Clark's practice as a whole, it follows logically to ask whether or not such a recreation can become a part of the work. I am really not sure. Matta-Clark's practice featured a number of prototypes for altering space, and it does make sense to follow this through to a 'Datum Cut'. Seeing this current intervention beside the historical drawings and photographs of A W-Hole House is an enriching experience — bringing the disparate elements together makes more sense of a work than otherwise would need to be built in the imagination. However, I think that this conceptual construction is a crucial element to the work, indeed Matta-Clark actively looked to place the viewer in a space between modes of representation. Materialising a dematerialised cut does not make it exist as a part of the work; rather it is a very useful illustration of an historical event. Such an illustration recreates the context of the work — an essential point to consider when revisiting the past — but it does not necessarily exist as 'the work'.
1. Donald Wall, 'Gordon Matta-Clark's Building Dissections', interview in Arts Magazine, May 1976, p76.
'Gordon Matta-Clark: A W-Hole House and Selected Drawings' was at David Zwirner Gallery, New York from January 10 to February 16 2002.
This feature was originally published in April 2002 / No 255, pp12-15.
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