Anarchitecture. A group of radical vigilantes that included musicians, dancers, architects, and artists. This group was made up of eight artists; the most prominent of the artists included singer Laurie Anderson, performance artist Tina Girouard, sculptor Richard Nonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist that can’t really be assigned a genre. Is he an architect? A sculptor? A photographer? Anarchitecture is a subgenre that Gordon Matta-Clark is best known for. Known as an artist that cuts into buildings, often through buildings that are planned to be demolished. He transformed architecture into giant temporary installations, extracting fragments that becomes a sculpture on view to the public with site specific scenes throughout the seventies. These ephemeral installations only exist today through video and photographs that Matta-Clark archived. Anarchitecture was a collaborative effort of ideas and participation; it held a mindset that allowed Matta-Clark to create violent intersections of the built and natural worlds. Unfortunately, Gordon Matta-Clark’s work barley lasted a decade due to his death from cancer that took his life at the early age of thirty-five; a death that resembles the temporality of his work.
Before Anarchitecture, Matta-Clark studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, leaving his hometown of New York City. The university at the time was taught by the most eminent architectural theorists of the time. The fresh writings of Jane Jacobs was a huge influence on Matta-Clark. He loves the city of New York, especially Greenwich Village where both Jacobs and Clark lived. They see the urban environment as a space that can be learned from; legitimizing the community of dense neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs and Le Corbusier were the most obvious architectural influences for Matta-Clark. During the sixties when Clark was in school, Le Corbusier was a prominent figure in architecture schools, as he is today. The book Vers Une Architecture was a required text for the students at the time and fundamental to Matta-Clark’s education. His father, Roberto Matta, a Chilean surrealist painter, even worked as a drafter for Corbusier. After graduating Cornell with a bachelor’s in architecture, Matta-Clark pushed for this emergence of “Anarchy” and “Architecture.”
The starting point of Anarchitecture was a linguistic one. Their first exhibition of this group incorporated twenty photos showing the urban environment of New York. Celebrating the inner city to all of its craziness and disorder. But what do these photos suggest? The photos of Anarchitecture wasn’t a literal one, but an exploration that focused on the language of the work through the otherness of the photographs. Richard Nonas, a member of Anarchitecture, quotes, “The interesting thing about Gordon was that he was full of ideas and in a way highly intellectual. But, just in the same way that he broke context, he broke words and ideas. So he was playing with it, playing with the intellectualizing…” (Attlee). Matta-Clark believed in language as a central idea in the design making process. He uses language that serves his dynamic inventiveness that is reflective in his work; a constant play of words and puns, hence the term “Anarchitecture.” We can see a play in language through his photos of the World Trade Center (figure one). When looking at the photo of the urban landscape, our eyes are constantly moving up. Looking up the vertical skyscrapers, the roman columns, the trees, and the strange tombstone-like monuments populating the vacant sidewalk. The photo is dark, full of urban shadows, except for the white sky, where our eyes look directly at the void that is formed between the World Trade Center towers. The photograph is vague and open-ended, which it is intended to be. Matta-Clark deepened the mood of life irrevocably disrupted, challenging our way to see the world and the way we see space and reality, forming an atmosphere of human activity.
Figure One
This human activity can only be experienced as a free act, only occurring “within an articulation of a world (a human habit)” (Welch 355). Even though Matta-Clark took photos of the majority of his work, (he even intentionally distorted these photos through collages) these photographs fail the true experience of his work. When experiencing Matta-Clarks work, its all about the moment he creates with the piece. The creation of moments, like a wall crumbling to the ground, exposing near perfect geometry, or the sound of hammers and electric saws gnawing at floor beams; even the heat of a welding gun creates a new atmosphere. Matta-Clark creates a performance, which are then supplemented by photos and film. One of his most famous pieces titled “Conical Intersect,” can’t be understood through the complexity of the work he produced seen through photos. Matta-Clark focused heavily on experiencing the site in person, from a pedestrian point of view or an artists’ view. “Conical Intersect” is a piece by Matta-Clark that existed in Paris where he carved a tunnel out of a building next to the Centre Pompidou, which was under construction at the time. Gordon Matta-Clark chooses two, seventeenth century buildings that appear to be residential, based off of the interior spaces and the variety of wallpaper that the artists smash through with their sledgehammers. They start carving from the inside out. An angled void in the shape of a cylinder that grows from the second story to the fifth floor. The fifth floor welcomes the outside elements with a large, circular hole, exposing the insides of the building (figure two). When walking towards Centre Pompidou, you can look up into the void, a projection that continues to the sky and changes with every step as it exposes more and more through new angles. The floors and walls are completely removed with such an aggressive force you can see the unevenness and the rough edges of the void. Each room exposed shows a different color and function. We can see blue bathrooms with porcelain toilets and claw-foot bathtubs, beige living rooms with glass doors leading to a kitchen, and dark closets that holds nothing but emptiness. Walking around his work exposes new images. Gordon Matta-Clark created spaces that are transformative; spaces that change every second.
Figure Two
Gordon Matta-Clark wants to create a new reality in public space. A temporal experience similar to that of my artefact and the tension within the subways of Toronto. Matta-Clark directly exposes the urban environment with the humans of the community that can only be experienced in person. When I open up the depths of the subway station, I expose the iron veins of Toronto. You see things you wouldn’t see with the previous built environment; humans walking, talking, resting, running, and so on. This human exposure creates the architecture, not the walls going up around them. Matta-Clark deconstructs the public space, opening it up to specific narratives. The Parisian neighborhood where “Conical Intersect” took place was promoting a gentrification process that promoted Matta-Clark to create this architectural piece. The construction of Centre Pompidou that took over the neighborhood triggered Matta-Clark. “Conical Intersect” was intended to be seen as a new perspective of the city. A city trying to hold on to the past while constantly projecting towards the future. The deconstruction of the seventeenth century building prompted a critical view of the city; Do we keep the ruins of Paris or do we demolish them? Matta-Clark provided an alternative vocabulary in response to this question, he wanted to do both. Just like that of St. George and Bloor-Yonge. Two stations clinging to the past, ignoring the present and the humans of today. Opening these two stations up to the city up will allow the interventions of humans through pathways, open spaces, and private spaces, creating the dialogue between the built environment and the human environment. Forcing some passengers to walk through the subway labyrinth, while allowing others to wander, a journey that blurs vertical from the lateral. Ideally, allowing people to meet. When entering these public spaces of St. George, Bloor-Yonge, and Conical Intersect, anything can happen, a temporal and memorable space. Especially that of my artefact.
Matta-Clark exposes the insides of the buildings, at the time a radical approach. This exposure is similar to my interpretation of how humans feel in public space, which I expressed in my artefact. We walk through public space scared, fearing the eye contact of others. The average human feeling naked as eyes stare and watch the humans. The audience looks through the clear, connected garments, noticing the flesh of the human bodies moving. Skin, hair, fat, and muscles can be seen as the participants walk up and down the stairs. The audience watches in horror, or in delight. Just like the audience in Paris, walking towards the Centre Pompidou, but noticing a massive hole cutting through their beloved French architecture. Both my artefact and Gordon Matta-Clark challenge reality, deconstructing what we are used to seeing into a new way of seeing, a space for poetic imagination.
Absence and presence is constantly allowing givenness to Matta-Clarks work, which creates this unreality that Paul Ricour describes. Unreality allows the imagination to grow, it grows through the absence, the voids that Matta-Clark created. Paul Ricoeur quotes, “… this nothingness proper to the representation of an absent thing, belongs to the mode of givenness of the image, not to its referent” (Ricoeur 126). It’s hard to critique Matta-Clarks work today since all we have are photographs, fragments, and Super 8 films. His much larger, grander works of architecture doesn’t exist anymore, they were all ephemeral projects and Matta-Clark knew that. His work invents and rediscovers itself within its own time and space. He was successful in creating spaces for communication, a space that critiques the modern architecture, allowing the humans to interact with the architecture, if they dare. Just like my artefact, forcing consenting participants to connect with one another through the bondage of clothing, resembling the human interaction of intimacy. Alberto Pérez-Gómez from his Attunement book quotes, “It could be argued that in architecture the subject is not a building, but the meaningful event made present: life itself” (Gómez 180). My artefact raises the tension that Gordon Matta-Clark creates. A performance where someone can miss a step, falling down, taking their companion with them; the staircase could simply break due to the persistent stress of the human weight or even someone from the audience could stop the performance just from the strange performance. Gordon Matta-Clark creates an act. A public role in art while having a critical view of modern architecture. Gordon Matta-Clark creates a contrast between spaces. Inside to outside, public to private, or even legal and illegal. He creates short performances that, today, can only be over-analyzed through film and photography.
Even though Le Corbusier was a great influence on Matta-Clark, he disagreed with Corbusier’s vision to erase the underground infrastructure, such as a subway system. Corbusier loved the automobile and towards the end of his career, designed around them. But Matta-Clark saw the underground as one of the last repositories of history in North America that had not disappeared under parking lots, but he worried that it was now under threat from the ever-deeper foundations of new buildings. Matta-Clark is right, we should celebrate the underground, recreating the space to make it more interesting to commuter or else the streets and vehicular traffic will take over. To overcome this, we must celebrate the unconscious and the irrational; Gordon Matta-Clark praises the forces of society to breakdown at any moment. The public realm is raw and intimidating, which it should be.
Attlee, J. (2007). Tate papers no. 7 – towards anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier. London, UK: Tate Papers.
Ricoeur, P. (1979). Man and world. The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff
Welch, C. & Welch, L. (1979). Man and world. The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff