by KDOTDAMMIT - 22 Feb., 2007

  My Body and Gordon Matta-Clark

    by KDOTDAMMIT

I recently stumbled across a photograph of this “building cut” by artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and I fell into it and really didn’t want to climb out. I never heard of Gordon Matta-Clark before, but I was captivated by this image and the concept that Matta-Clark literally cut through buildings and transformed the urban landscape as part of his art. I know I have become a bit obsessed with urban landscape transformation as an art form, but often the art I read about in these contexts seems to be solely theoretical and conceptual.

For example, I’ve been reading The Situationist City by Simon Sadler which talks about the Situationists’ approach to architectural transformation as a means to political and cultural revolution. The theory is profoundly interesting and inspiring, and I love spinning my brain around the ideas embedded in urban landscape art, but I rarely feel the intensely personal pull and hook that I felt from Matta-Clark’s building cuts. With the building cuts, I’m not only responding intellectually, but bodily and emotionally.

I’ve been chewing on Matta-Clark for the past few days because I really wanted to talk about him, but first I had to figure out why it is that I respond so strongly to his work and then why I’ve taken up my current obsession with architecture and urban landscape as an artistic medium.

While I always enjoy theoretical discourse on art and culture, I really love when something slams into the core of my personal being and hits a nerve and is the cause for intense self-reflection in which I experience the art on an intimate personal level. While art is a great mechanism to deliver radical thought and ideas, ultimately art is also a means of communicating outside the boundaries of linear discourse to touch on real human emotions, experience, thoughts that are not easily articulated in regular language. Art can touch us in places other things can’t reach. The Matta-Clark building cuts had this effect on me.

Very little has been written about Matta-Clark and little of his artwork other than photos, film, and other documentation has survived, but this article in The Scotsman will give you a good sense of his work and his life. In the building cuts, Matta-Clark literally cut into and transformed abandoned buildings in New York City into things of metaphysical beauty. He used power saws, drills, jackhammers, sledgehammers and various other industrial tools to rip apart the decaying landscape and unearth a hidden beauty within. The building cuts represent a perfectly balanced intersection between decay (the abandoned buildings), violence (the physical act of cutting into the buildings) and sublime beauty (the end result of the work).

On the face of it, his building cuts look destructive, but Matta-Clark was more interested in opening up, in liberating rather than destroying. Peter Plagens called him "the most soulful deconstructionist ever". James Atlee writes: "[He was] a man for whom the surface of things was a challenge rather than a barrier. He was always looking for wormholes, escape hatches, exits through which he could tumble to another level … He sought to change the nature of things as much as medieval alchemists sought to transform base metal into gold." Matta-Clark himself said: "The first thing one notices is that violence has been done. Then the violence turns to visual order and then, hopefully, to a sense of heightened awareness."

This quote from the Scotsman article linked to above gets to the heart of why I so personally feel affected by Matta-Clark’s work. In the years that I’ve been working out my life through art, I have moved from the intensely personal where everything was quite literal and associated with specific incidents and people (the surface) to a more theoretical look at my body and my life as a multi-layered object, a phenomenon that can be deciphered through other more radical approaches. So I’ve moved from looking at my body as just a body to understanding it more as a landscape on which history has been written and which must be excavated and re-articulated to gain understanding, resurrection, and new life. To a large degree, the body that I occupied when I finally excavated myself from the hole of violence, drugs, prostitution, crime, and physical abuse was a decaying building, a crumbling landscape whose infrastructure had been shattered and was hanging together with rusty nails, loose bolts, and duct tape. My body was a decaying building.

I’ve had to take the remains of my body and transform it into something new, something vital, something alive and powerful. This is exactly what Matta-Clark’s building cuts have done to the urban landscape. I am responding to Matta-Clark’s work because my body is a building and I am an urban landscape. I literally identify with these buildings that were decaying and abandoned and then violently cut up to unleash the beauty that was buried within.

Call me hoaky. Call me lacking in objectivity. But I’ve never really been about objectivity in the first place. It is my intense subjectivity that has allowed me to cut through the building of my body and my life and make room for the light to shine through it. So there. That’s why I like Gordon Matta-Clark. Isn’t he awesome?

As an endnote, I should mention that Matta-Clark died an early death as a result of cancer, so it adds to the aura and spiritual sense of his work to know that neither his body nor his body of work survived.

Additional reading: Gordon Matta-Clark | a 1977 story

KDOTDAMMIT has a LiveJournal and, is a place where I put my words. Sometimes it's about sex. Sometimes it's about my kid. It's about movies, poetry, art. It's about weird people I see. My garden. My house. My cats. My family. My life. It's about saying fuck a lot because I try never to say fuck in front of my kid, so I say fuck here. It's my screen test. It's my trailer. I don't know what the fuck it is. It's mine though, and I pretty much limit the content to me. It's about me, by me, for me. It's narcissitic masturbation. It's My Big Experiment. It's whatever. But I love everyone who reads it. A lot. Really.

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