Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. - book review

PAMELA M LEE

thing to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 1999 280 pp; 99 ills. $35

The intentions of thing to be Destroyed are extremely ambitious. The author, Pamela to leeward characterizes as "essayistic" and "commemorative" the contributions that up until this point have been dedicated to the site-specific throws of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark. to leeward promises to remedy this state of affairs. How? In three ways, substantially: first, through discussing the work of this artist against the background of the artistic practices of the 1960 and 1970 including site-specific art, proces art, minimalism, and conceptual art; next to the first by analyzing the work in its multiple articulations, specifically, building make an incision ins fragments, photographs, performances, and culinary experiments; and, finally, by the agency of presenting the work as an alternative to the Hegelian type of progress.

The sum of two units catalogues that were published upon this artist (from the retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1985 and at the IVAM in Valencia in 1992) analyze the individual works in all their inflections and contain a remarkable number of the greatest in quantity significant interviews and essays written upon the artist, several of which, like as the contributions by Judith Russi Kirshner and Dan Graham, are choice The catalogues are furnished with magnificent illustrations the one and the other in color and in black-and-white. These publications, in short, fulfill the task of a catalogue and should not be faulted for lacking a unified thematic approach.

to leeward by contrast, organizes her monograph around six themes, which she unravels in the introduction and five chapters and continuations with black-and-white reproductions of a not many works. Through these means, together with drawn out historical and theoretical digressions, the author attempts to demonstrate her thesis. While the work enriches the reader from the perspective of information and stimulates reflections upon places, characters, movements, and poetics, the impression that remains in the extreme point is of a rift between the theoretical apparatus and the work. The digressions, repeatedly too drawn out and self-indulgent, do not in fact strike one as being to foster our comprehension of the work on the other hand rather almost take us further away from it.

"How does individual approach an artist whose way of production is bound up with the work's destruction?" (p xiii). The question pos by the agency of Lee at the opening of the true copy remains largely unanswered. Maintaining a balance between the reading of the artist's work and the thematic openings intimateed by it is, to be confident extremely difficult. As a comparison, individual may think of Rosalind Krauss's 1993 essay dedicated to Sol LeWitt, "The LeWitt Matrix." Krauss's point of departure is a work entitled Autobiography and the way in which LeWitt exercises the grid as a container of the image. She leads us back to this same theme at the essay's conclusion. Her central discussion, articulated end a series of points, enlarges the general purpose without ever detaching itself from the work. The sole exception to this accomplishment be met withs in her fourth point, where LeWitt's sketches of 1958 inspired by dint of Piero della Francesca's cycle upon the Legend of the Cros become a mask for an overly long dissertation upon the master of Arezzo.

give leave to us now follow Matta-Clark along the path that to leeward has mapped out for us. The theme of the introduction is "Gordon Matta-Clark and the question of 'work.'" to leeward maintains that to speak of "work" in relation to Matta-Clark is a paradox: the artist in fact preaches an "unbuilding"; he proffers us not a "total, finished and whole" fruits according to the rules of Western aesthetics, on the contrary only residues, fragments, films, documents. He drives us, finally, toward a dynamic and temporalized fruition, "radically destabilizing the metes of aesthetic experience through their dramatic shifts in scale and vertiginous style of address" (p. xiv). And she bring to an ends "Matta-Clark's art forcefully registers its workless character in contrast to an artistic 'work' he tendered instead a kind of artistic play--an idea of art as practice or use" (pp xiii, xiv). While his casts with buildings in the proces of destruction could lead us to assimilate Matta-Clark's work with performance, and despite the fact that the posthum ous photographic testimony might position his work within the realm of conceptual "dematerialization," to leeward points out to us, "His practice frustrates the conventions of 'work' without reifying absence as popular conceptualist accounts were practice to do" (p. xv).

I believe, rather, that the work of Matta-Clark remains absolutely lower parted in its time, and in the contradictory facts that characterize that time. Already in 1965 for example, when Matta-Clark was still a scholar at Cornell University, the philosopher Richard Wollheim introduced for the first time the bourn minimal art, by which he meant a minimal artistic easy in mind I suspect that the principal cause of our resistance derives from the fact that those facts do not present that which for centuries has been considered a fundamental ingredient: work, that is, a manifest effort." (1) According to Wollheim, we ne to reconsider the significance of "making a work of art" and to introduce a fresh category, one that would be simultaneously "destructive and creative, consisting in the demolition of that which the artist supposes in excess. (2) The "workless" aspect, then, is already inherent in the three-dimensional minimalist thing perceived In regard to the destabilization produc by means of the dramatic shift in scale, Robert Morris explains to us in his "Notes upon Sculpture" (1966) that, despite its geometric and assertive appearance, the form of minimalist facts is not constant but varies according to the moves of the viewer and according to the conditions of the surrounding environment. And he explains that "there are sum of two units distinct factors: the known constant and the experienced variable. solitary the apprehension of the gestalt is immediate while the experience of the work remains necessarily in time." (3) Richard Serra echoe Morris in discussing his work Shift from 1970: "I was searching for the dialectic between the perception of place in its totality and the relationship established with it while single walks." (4) Finally, regarding the "not finished, not total, not whole" character of Matta-Clark's work, the manifesto "Anti Form," written by the agency of Morris in 1968, had established the primacy of proces above result and the choice of organic refuse as materials, organized in lay open precarious, reversible, and perishable configurations.