Gordon Matta-Clark: Constructive Destruction

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975; photograph; gelatin silver print, 10 5/8 in. x 15 5/8 in. (26.99 cm x 39.69 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Frances and John Bowes, Collectors Forum, Pam and Dick Kramlich, and the Modern Art Council; © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Conical Intersect, 1975. 27-29, rue Beaubourg, Paris. Courtesy of David Zwirner, NY and the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, source: artnet

Conical Intersect - detail / 1975

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LAND. 1. General: Primary input and factor of production which is not consumed but without which no production is possible. It is the resource that has no cost of production and, although its usage can be switched from a less to more profitable one, its supply cannot be increased. The term 'land' includes all physical elements in the wealth of a nation bestowed by nature; such as climate, environment,fields, forests, minerals, mountains, lakes, streams, seas, and animals. As an asset, it includes anything (1) on the ground (such as buildings, crops, fences, trees, water), (2) above the ground (air and space rights), and (3) under the ground (mineral rights), down to the center of the Earth. Perhaps the oldest form of collateral, land is still very attractive to lenders because it cannot be destroyed, moved, stolen, or wasted. All a lender needs is the borrower's clear title to it. (a)

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"By un-doing a building there are many aspects of the social condition against which I am gesturing: to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer—a virtually captive audience."  

_“Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark” (Antwerp, September 1977), published in Gordon Matta-Clark and Gloria Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2006), 250. (b)

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Our ecosystems are grounded on land*, and thus, to look at the issue of land use without any reference to the environment is short sighted. Land in the hands of humans often means change of the biophysical or ecological properties of land. Course of rivers are changed, forests give place to fields, pastures and settlements, soil is sealed with asphalts, ceramics and concrete, and populations are evicted, just to cite a few of well known changes in the landscape due to our use of land. 

Humphrey Street Splitting, 1974

Splitting 1974, Colour photograph, 680 x 990 mm, Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, GMCT1051 , © ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2007, source: TATE

Splitting (detail), 1974. 322 Humphrey Street, Englewood, New Jersey. Courtesy of David Zwirner, NY and the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

Splitting, 1974, New Jersey, PhotographGe20,4 x 25,4 cmMACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. LATA Collection (dins d'Espanya) / MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Long-term loan of Harold Berg (fora d'Espanya)

The reverse is also true, thus, as land use changes, communities also have their lives changed. And so, as soil, air and water gets heavily contaminated, land use is emptied of its value, and the consequences are often devastating: devaluation of the market value of properties, degradation of neighborhoods, disintegration of urban fabric, fading of community links, concentration of poverty, among other consequences of down grade land use. Thus, those who deal with land use – whether being an urban planner or an artist – are simultaneously dealing with issues related with sustainability. The artist Gordon Matta-Clark (June 22, 1943 – August 27, 1978) was one of these people who grasped the issue of land use to its full meaning: keen-sighted.

Photograph from Anarchitecture 1974
Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark 
© ARS, NY and DACS, London, 2007

As a graduated architect, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark probably knew about the power of land use to deal with the deterioration of – or in today’s language, to manage the sustainability - nature and society. Raised in New York, he had witnessed firsthand the constant demolition of older buildings for the construction of new ones, the result of shifting real estate values. "Work with abandoned structures," he wrote around 1974, "began with my concern for the life of the city, of which a major side effect is the "metabolization" of old buildings." The presence of empty and neglected buildings in urban centers is "a reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through modernization."(1)

Bronx Floors, 1972-1973

Bronx Floors, 1973

In 1970’s, guided by the concept of entropy as a process of degradation tending to disorder and dematerialization, Matta-Clark "buys" 15 leftover and unwanted properties in Manhattan (fourteen in Queens and one in Staten Island ) for $25–$75 a plot, and named them as the "Fake Estate" project. The properties were “gutterspaces”—unusably small slivers of land sliced from the city grid through anomalies in surveying, zoning, and public-works expansion that were periodically auctioned off by the City of New York. (1, 2)

Over the next years, he collected the maps, deeds, and other bureaucratic documentation attached to the slivers; photographed, spoke, and wrote about them; and considered using them as sites for his unique brand of “anarchitectural” intervention into urban space. Matta-Clark died in 1978 at the age of 35 without realizing his plans for "Fake Estates", and ownership of the properties reverted to the city. The archival material that he had assembled went into storage and was not rediscovered until the early 1990s, when it was assembled into exhibitable collages. Thus, "Fake Estates" has emerged not only as a mordant commentary on issues surrounding property, materiality, and disappearance that marked the whole of Matta-Clark’s career, but as artifacts of his own estate, reminders of the powers of absence and presence that govern our relationship to the past. (1, 2, 3, Fake Estates: list of properties)

In addition, these "estates" were unusable or inaccessible for development, and so his ownership, and his the power to capitalize on the land, existed virtually only on paper. The existence of land without any market value, challenged the American Dream myth that everyone could become “landed gentry” by owning property. Power is not only dependent on possession of land, but also to its usefulness – land use possibilities - and related market value of land.

Fake Estates: Schematic drawing of all 15 lots (to scale).  Source: Cabinet magazine, Queens Museum of Art, and White Columns

Fake Estates, 1973-1974

Fake Estates, 1973-1974

Fake Estates: Aerial Maps of Queens and Staten Island Showing Gordon Matta-Clark properties. Source: Cabinet magazine, Queens Museum of Art, and White Columns

Still, raising questions about entropy/dematerialization, land use value, and systems of social organization, in 1974, Matta-Clark starts the production of a series of site-specific artwork using abandoned buildings and removing sections of floors, ceilings, and walls from them. One of them is “Bingo”, in which he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, which was the site of a scandalous environmental disaster. Love Canal (Niagara Falls, NY) was a house development that was built on top of a toxic dump site containing, among other chemicals, 21.000 tons of chemicals such as caustics, alkalines, fatty acids and chlorinated hydrocarbons from the manufacturing of dyes, perfumes, solvents for rubber and synthetic resins from the Hooker Chemical Company.

Love Canal Protest

A combination of construction techniques and heavy rainstorms released the chemical waste from the land, leading to a public health emergency and an urban planning scandal. A survey conducted by the Love Canal Homeowners Association found that 56% of the children born from 1974–1978 had at least one birth defect. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that, in 1979, residents exhibited a "disturbingly high rate of miscarriages ... Love Canal can now be added to a growing list of environmental disasters involving toxics, ranging from industrial workers stricken by nervous disorders and cancers to the discovery of toxic materials in the milk of nursing mothers." In one case, two out of four children in a single Love Canal family had birth defects; one girl was born deaf with a cleft palate, an extra row of teeth, and slight retardation, and a boy was born with an eye defect. (4)

To fully understand the seriousness of the environmental problems at Love Canal, following is a quote of Eckhardt C. Beck (EPA Administrator for Region 2, 1977 – 1979):

 "I visited the canal area at that time. Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces." (4)

Boarded-Up Love Canal House, 30 de junho de 1981. A protest sign stands in front of an evacuated and boarded up house in the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls. The area was abandoned after it was learned that tons of toxic waste were dumped in the canal beside the houses. © Bettmann/CORBIS

To create "Bingo", Gordon Matta-Clark cut pieces from the facade of a house in Niagara Falls, New York, that was slated for demolition. It took a team of assistants 10 days to “unbuild” the house. Working 12 hours per day with a small team, he cut the north facade into nine equivalent rectangles (each nine feet wide and five feet tall), and then removed each one until only the central rectangle remained. Matta-Clark kept the three sections of the building pictured here, and deposited the remaining five in a nearby sculpture park, where he hoped they would be “gradually reclaimed by the Niagara River Gorge.” (5, 6)

Matta-Clark called this work "Bingo" because the facade, when cut into nine pieces, resembled the grid of a Bingo game card. In his complete vision for the project, Matta-Clark hoped to cut out the central panel of the opposite facade and leave the rest intact, to create a negative, or opposite, of this facade, but there was not enough time. He explained in his film The Making of “Bingo” that “an hour later, the bulldozer arrived.” (5, 6)

Sawing huge pieces out of buildings might sound destructive, but Matta-Clark believed it ultimately created visual order. Giving new life to buildings with demolition in their future—a process Matta-Clark called “anarchitecture”—opened up a view into the invisible—the normally hidden interior walls and floors. Of his choice of medium, Matta-Clark said, “Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much more a challenging medium? A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components.” (5, 6, 7)

Stills from Bingo X Ninths, 1974, Film, 16mm, Super 8mm Film, Farbe, ohne Ton, 9 min 40 sec, Auflage 1/10. source: Art Tatler

Bingo, 1974

Installation view: "Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, photo: Eric Wenzel

Installation view: "Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, photo: Eric Wenzel

Installation view: "Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, photo: Eric Wenzel

Bingo, 1974

Matta-Clark writes to “Mrs. Fredry Loizeaux” (co-founder, with her husband Jack, of Controlled Demolition Inc., one of America’s leading demolition firms) expressing his admiration for her family’s work and inquiring whether they might consider collaborating on a future project involving what the artist dubs “a new choreography for the violent alteration of buildings as art.” 

The response to Matta-Clark's letter, above, is written by Mrs. Loizeaux’s son, J. Mark Loizeaux, the firm’s current president. Correspondence courtesy Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal. On deposit from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Copyright J. Mark Loizeaux.

* including ocean floors or submerged lands