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

by Pamela M. Lee

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Although highly regarded during his short life--and honored by artists and architects today--the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space.

Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction--suggest about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the 1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making--that the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do these projects address the very writing of history, a history that imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of progress?

In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s--particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices--and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.

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Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars

2 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

Great Artist. Nearly Great Book., 2000-10-24
This book is about all there is on this guy. Kudos to Pamela Lee for sticking her neck out and getting a book out on him. It's WAY overdue. At times the analogies and stuff are a bit tiring... though maybe I mowed through it in too much of one sitting.

This guy cut up buildings and would jack parts of them up with foundation jacks for chrissakes. Damien Hirst on steriods 20 years early.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars an object to be preserved, 2000-04-21
Gordon Matta-Clark is one of those artists largely understood lightly, if at all, partially because of the lack of coverage of his work in most of art history. Lee's book goes a long way toward building a scholarship of G.M-C's work, especially in terms of its conceptual and analytical underpinnings.

When seen in conjunction with P.S. 1's retrospective of his drawings in 1998, and the recent republication of the only big monograph, G.M-C seems poised to be included in newer histories of art, which does a great service to everyone.

I read a good chunk of this book flying from JFK to SFO, and I found it to be well-written, cogent, and compelling as a document of G.M-C's work. I came away inspired. Hopefully his films will be the next portion of his oeuvre to be rereleased.

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