GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) made transformative art out of New York’s desolate corners. The French Deconstructionists and Situationists’ concept of détournement, or “the reuse of pre-existing elements in a new ensemble” was a major influence to his work, which included performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works.
Both of Gordon Matta-Clark’s parents were artists: the American Anne Clark and the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, artist of Basque, French and Spanish descent. His twin brother Sebastian was also an artist, who committed suicide in 1976.
He studied architecture at Cornell University, but did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as “Anarchitecture.” At the time of Matta-Clark’s tenure there, Cornell’s architecture program was guided in part by Colin Rowe, a preeminent architectural theorist of modernism. His vision of modernism later influenced much of Matta-Clark’s own work in its relation to modernist practice and theory. He also spent a year studying French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris and was in Paris during the student strikes of May 1968. It was in Paris that he became aware of the French deconstructionist philosophers and Guy Debord and the Situationists. These cultural and political radicals developed the concept of détournement, or “the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble.” Such concepts would later inform his work. He is most famous for works that radically altered existing structures. His “building cuts” (in which, for example, a house is cut in half vertically) alter the perception of the building and its surrounding environment.
Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his “building cuts.”
Matta-Clark also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture). He demonstrates that the theory of entropy applies to language as well as to the physical world, and that language is not a neutral tool but a carrier for society’s values and a vehicle for ideology. (Wikipedia)