Exceptional Works: Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark, 1972

“Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing.”

—Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark

Splitting, 1974

Collaged gelatin silver prints

32 1/4 x 27 3/4 inches (81.9 x 70.5 cm)
Framed: 40 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches (103.5 x 78.1 cm)

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Gordon Matta-Clark, the son of the surrealist painter Roberto Matta, studied architecture at Cornell University in the 1960s. While there, he met sculptor Robert Smithson who greatly impacted his artistic interests in land art and the built environment. Upon his graduation in 1968, Matta-Clark relocated to New York City and became a central figure of the downtown art scene. In the 1970s, he pioneered a radical approach to art-making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it. Through his many projects—including large-scale architectural interventions in which he physically cut through buildings slated for demolition—Matta-Clark developed a singular and prodigious oeuvre that critically examined the structures of the built environment.

Outside view of 322 Humphrey Street, Englewood, New Jersey (site of Splitting), 1974

View of Splitting in progress, Englewood, New Jersey, 1974

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

Matta-Clark experimented across a wide range of media, transcending the genres of performance, conceptual, process, and land art. In the 1970s, his groundbreaking practice caught the attention of collector and future gallerist Holly Solomon. “He called me one day [in the early 1970s] and said, ‘Holly, I need a house.…’ And I, like a nice housewife, called [my husband] Horace and said, ‘Gordon needs a house.’” A few weeks later a suburban house, slated for demolition, located at 322 Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey, was purchased by the Solomons for Matta-Clark. As Solomon described years later, “Gordon took the house and cut it in half, literally, with a hacksaw he cut the house in half. He was a master architect so when he cut a house in half it stood.”

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

Matta-Clark and several of his friends laboriously sliced open the abandoned two-story house over a period of several months, making two parallel vertical cuts through all of the house’s structural surfaces. Matta-Clark then removed several of the foundation blocks on which it stood, making one half of the house lean slightly away from the other, creating a wedge-shaped interstice between the two sides. Splitting (1974) represents one of Matta-Clark’s most well-known “building cuts,” which he undertook from 1972 to1978. Previous “building cuts” include such projects as Bronx Floors (1972–1973) and A W-Hole House (1973) in Genoa, Italy, which anticipated the radical intervention he undertook in New Jersey. Matta-Clark referred to these spatial transformations as “anarchitecture.”

Gordon Matta-Clark working on Splitting, Englewood, New Jersey, 1974 (both)

“Gordon, and many of his peers ... stepped out of the white-cube gallery space into their urban environment, making work in and of the stuff of everyday life, making it in the hope it could change the everyday for the better. No longer art for art’s sake but art for society’s sake—for the people.”

—Jessamyn Fiore, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974, 16mm film

Matta-Clark referred to the house at 322 Humphrey Street as “like a perfect dance partner.” Meaning, his physical and mental engagement with the decaying architecture was responsive, never knowing how the structure might react to his cutting, poking, and prodding, thus highlighting the delicate relationships between structures and their inhabitants. As Jessamyn Fiore described, “There is a very important performative element to Matta-Clark’s art practice. Performance is within the large architecture cuts, with him physically laboring over those transformations.”

Gordon Matta-Clark working on Splitting, Englewood, New Jersey, 1974

“The very nature of my work with buildings takes issues with the functionalist attitude to the extent that this kind of self-conscious vocational responsibility has failed to question or re-examine the quality of life being served.”

—Gordon Matta-Clark, Quoted in Pamela Lee’s Object to Be Destroyed

Installation view, Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, MCA Chicago, 2008

Installation view, Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007

Installation view, Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, MCA Chicago, 2008

Installation view of the gallery "Building Citizens" in the exhibition Collection 1970s–Present. Photo by John Wronn.

After the completion of Splitting, Matta-Clark invited visitors by bus to come and view the house-turned-sculpture. Three months later the house was leveled. Before the building was finally removed in September 1974, Matta-Clark extracted the four upper corners of the structure, subsequently exhibiting them as free-standing works of art (now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting: Four Corners, 1974

Throughout his time with the structure, Matta-Clark photographically captured the transformation of the space and used those photographic pieces to, in a way, re-create the building he himself had delicately and beautifully taken apart. The present work is a unique collage of those photographic fragments, spliced together to create an interior view of Splitting. Only a small group of works executed in 1974 exist that document the lifecycle of 322 Humphrey Street; related works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland. A short, eleven-minute film, Splitting (1974), documents the project as well.

The documentation of the transformation of this vacant, quintessential suburban home—which for Matta-Clark represented the decay of the American dream—generated a series of photographs that express the multiplicity of perspectives that his architectural cuts afforded.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974 (detail)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

View of Splitting, Englewood, New Jersey, 1974

“Photographs will be taken and a grainy, noiseless film will bear witness to its making … but save for some fragments of architecture the artist preserved—and save for the documentation itself—the work in question, Splitting, has all but ceased to exist.”

—Pamela Lee, Object to Be Destroyed

Consign With David Zwirner

Exceptional Works: Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark

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Gordon Matta-Clark

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