Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (video still); Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.; © 2023 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

It may be difficult today to understand how important the artist Gordon Matta-Clark was, prior to his premature death 45 years ago. His career coincides with Earth Art, which can be dated to the show of that name held at Cornell University in 1969, when the curator, Willoughby Sharp, invited the resident architecture student, then known as Gordon Roberto Matta-Echaurren, to assist the artists in setting up their exhibits. In the less than a decade remaining to him, he would reverse the course taken by Robert Smithson and other Earth artists, who began as gallery artists, but aspired to move art out of the gallery and into the landscape. On the other hand, Matta-Clark — he added his mother’s name to his in 1971 — chose not to practice architecture, but instead to work with buildings scheduled for demolition, ultimately with the aim of bringing genuine and accessibly illustrative examples of architecture into the gallery.

Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting: Four Corners 1974 322 Humphrey Street, Englewood, New Jersey courtesy of David Zwirner, NY and the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

In 1973, the year Smithson died while working on the project that was to follow Spiral Jetty, Matta-Clark — then halfway through his meteoric career — began two of his signature works: “Splitting,” the film part of which is now showing at UMOCA (the actual split house was soon demolished), and “Splitting: Four Corners.” The two projects demonstrate his influential range. “Splitting” involved the hazardous and temporary cutting of a section all the way through a house, then tilting one half slightly to lean away from the other. That the house was in a mostly Black neighborhood in Englewood, New Jersey, and had been condemned as part of an urban renewal project was part of the artist’s overall concern. “Splitting: Four Corners” resulted from cutting the four upper corners off of the house, then setting them in the proper orientation on the floor of a gallery. In the optical illusion that results, the mind and eye of the viewer then try to imagine the complete, albeit diminutive house.

Matta-Clark coined the words “anarchitecture,” a melding of anarchy and architecture, to describe his own work, and “non.u.mental” to identify the sort of commonplace, workaday buildings that appealed to him. He felt the voids and unusable spaces of structures were interesting in their own right, and found a use for the plots of land adjacent to construction projects that couldn’t be built on: these marginal left-overs created by poor planning were just one way he called attention to urban spatial abuse. Speaking of left-overs, in the middle of his career he became interested in food service as an artistic act, a topic that quickly became in artistic movement in its own right.

Gordon Matta-Clark, “Splitting: Four Corners” © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

As interest in his anarchitecture grew, he was able to complete larger projects in otherwise unobtainable locations. In one instance, titled “Conical Intersect,” the French government’s plan to demolish some irreplaceable 17th-century buildings in order to allow the Pompidou Center to be built gave him the chance to bore a tornado-shaped hole through their multiple floors, exposing their structure and, at the same time, creating a frame through which to view the neighborhood.

Much of Matta-Clark’s artwork was documentary as well as aesthetic. He photographed or filmed extensively, and retrospective exhibitions of his career rely heavily on this legacy. Given that he worked before the advent of accessible video equipment, his films are as likely as not to be silent, and blown up from Super-8 millimeter originals. Still, interest in his work continues to grow and high-quality versions can be found online, as well as in museum collections. The opportunity to see “Splitting” at UMOCA is part of a renewal of interest in his career and his ideas, and perhaps more importantly, his values. Gordon Matta-Clark did not live to see this age of prohibitively high rental and sales prices, nor the present style of disposable building, where developers build with the expectation that their works will be torn down and replaced as fashion dictates and needs change, so they need be neither thoughtfully conceived nor well constructed. No doubt, if he had, he would have found some way to let light into the present fabric of society, just as he let the light into so many wasted and doomed structures.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting, 1974, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through July 15

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.