Gordon Matta-Clark Reviewed in The Village Voice

In 1973, New York was crumbling. That December, the elevated West Side Highway near the present-day Whitney Museum of American Art collapsed under the weight of a dump truck carrying ten tons of asphalt. A few months earlier, a gas leak caused an explosion on Bedford Street in the West Village, injuring five people. A similar explosion killed a mechanic in Queens in March. Then, in August, an apartment building at 673 Broadway suddenly fell down while a man was on the phone with his mother. His last words were “the ceiling’s falling.”

That man’s cousin was the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, the subject of a sharp and splendid new show titled Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Matta-Clark was born in New York in June 1943 to the American artist Anne Clark and the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, and his boyhood was spent surrounded by artists. (His godmother was Teeny Duchamp, Marcel’s wife.) In 1962, he went to Cornell University to study architecture; he graduated in 1968 and moved back to New York the following year, having determined that architecture was a useless pursuit, but that the derelict landscape of his hometown might provide the ideal blank canvas for whatever came next.

The new exhibition (which is organized by Sergio Bessa, the museum’s curatorial and education director, and Jessamyn Fiore, the co-director of the artist’s estate) begins with the artist’s first mature works, which he started in the South Bronx in fall 1972. For months, Matta-Clark ventured into disused tenements and carved out large sections of walls and floors, capturing the surviving gaps in disorienting photographs. Eight of these images are on show, alongside one of the few remaining cutout sculptures, which he showed with his pictures at 112 Greene Street, an early Soho exhibition space, in 1973.

Read more at The Village Voice.