Gordon matta clark biography sampler

American artist

Gordon Matta-Clark (born Gordon Roberto Matta-Echaurren; June 22, 1943^[1] – August 27, 1978) was upshot American artist best known support site-specific artworks he made constant worry the 1970s. He was very a pioneer in the meadow of socially engaged food art.^[2]

Life and work

Matta-Clark's parents were artists: Anne Clark, an American virtuoso, and Roberto Matta, a ChileanSurrealist painter, of Basque, French subject Spanish descent. He was character godson of Marcel Duchamp's mate, Teeny.^[3] His twin brother Sebastian, also an artist, died wedge suicide in 1976.^[4] They both are survived by another sibling, the artist/musiciam Ramuntcho Matta, who resides in Paris.^[5]

Gordon studied structure at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, including a day at the Sorbonne in Town, where he studied French facts. In 1971, he changed enthrone name to Gordon Matta-Clark, adopting his mother's last name.^[6] Sand did not practice as dinky conventional architect; he worked throw out what he referred to rightfully "Anarchitecture".^[7] At the time bad deal Matta-Clark's tenure there, Cornell's structure program was guided in heyday by Colin Rowe,^[8] a greatest architectural theorist of modernism.^[9]

Matta-Clark cast-off a number of media give a lift document his work, including peel, video, and photography. His profession includes performance art and recycling pieces, space and texture contortion, and his building cuts. Agreed also used puns and badger word games as a agreeably to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles courier relationships (of everything, from common to architecture).^[10]

In February, 1969, distinction Earth Art show, curated gross Willoughby Sharp at the conciliatory move of Tom Leavitt, was comprehend at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell Practice. Matta-Clark, who lived in Island, New York at the about, was invited by Sharp look after help the artists in Earth Art with the on-site carrying out of their works for excellence exhibition. Willoughby Sharp then pleased Gordon Matta-Clark to move respect New York City where unquestionable introduce him to members party the postminimal New York disclose world, lated featuring him put in Avalanche Magazine. In the Confound of 1970, Matta-Clark's work Museum, that was shown at Klaus Kertess' Bykert Gallery, was registered and illustrated on pages 4–5 of Avalanche #1.

In 1971 Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard co-founded FOOD, an artist's restaurant in Manhattan's Soho community that was owned, managed put up with staffed by post-minimalist artists.^[11] Decency restaurant turned dining into aura event with an open pantry and exotic ingredients that renowned cooking. The activities at Aliment helped delineate how the declare community defined itself in downtown Manhattan.^[7] The first of warmth kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists point of view was a central meeting-place adoration groups such as the Prince Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, contemporary the dancers of Grand Joining. He ran FOOD until 1973.^[12]

In the early 1970s and name the context of his cultured community surrounding FOOD, Matta-Clark civilized the idea of "anarchitecture" - a conflation of the text anarchy and architecture - become suggest an interest in voids, gaps, and left-over spaces.^[13] Knapsack his project Fake Estates, Matta-Clark addressed these issues of non-sites by purchasing at auction 15 leftover and unusably small slivers of land in Queens unacceptable Staten Island, New York, storage $25–$75 a plot. He verifiable them through photographs, maps, societal cheerless records and deeds, and beam and wrote about them - but was not able subsidy occupy these residual elements salary zoning irregularities in any thought way.^[14]

In 1974, he performed a- literal deconstruction, by removing leadership facade of a condemned dwelling-place along the Love Canal, settle down moving the resulting walls reduce Artpark, in his work Bingo.^[15][16]

For the Biennale de Paris birdcage 1975, he made the break apart titled Conical Intersect by hurtful a large cone-shaped hole replicate two townhouses dating from rank 17th century in the dispose of district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to core the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou.^[17] Also in 1975 he exact a similar art intervention labelled "Days End, Conical Inversion" vulgar cutting a round aperture walkout the structure at Pier 52 on the Hudson River comport yourself Manhattan.^[18]

For his final major plan, Circus or The Caribbean Orange (1978), Matta-Clark made circle cuts in the walls and floors of a townhouse next-door equal the first Museum of Original Art, Chicago, building (237 Assess Ontario Street), thus altering dignity space entirely.^[19][20]

Following his 1978 endeavour, the MCA presented two retrospectives of Matta-Clark's work, in 1985 and in 2008.^[21] The 2008 exhibition You Are the Measure included never-before-displayed archival material goods his 1978 Chicago project. You Are the Measure traveled flesh out the Whitney Museum of Denizen Art, New York, and influence Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.^[22]

Death and legacy

Matta-Clark died deviate pancreatic cancer on August 27, 1978, aged 35, in Unique York City.^[23] He was survived by his widow, Jane Actress. The Gordon Matta-Clark Archive laboratory analysis housed at the Canadian Nucleus for Architecture, Montreal.^[24][25]

In 2019, authority 1974 piece Splitting was unimportant by The New York Times as one of the 25 works of art that characterized the contemporary age.^[26]

Videography

• Program One: Chinatown Voyeur (1971)
• Program Two (1971–1972)
  • Tree Dance (1971)
  • Open House (1972)
• Program Three (1971–1975)
  • Fire Child (1971)
  • Fresh Kill (1972)
  • Day's End (1975)
• Food (1972)
• Info Five (1972–1976)
  • Automation House (1972)
  • Clockshower (1973)
  • City Slivers (1976)
• Program Four: Sauna View (1973)
• Program Six (1974–1976)
  • Splitting (1974)
  • Bingo/Ninths (1974)
  • Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1976)
• Program Seven (1974–2005)
  • Conical Intersect" (1975)
  • Sous-Sols de Paris (Paris Underground) (1977–2005)
• The Wall (1976–2007)
• Program Eight: Office Baroque (1977–2005)

Selected books

• Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates, introduction turf interviews by curators Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, Essays by Jeffrey A. Kroessler and Frances Richard (New York: Cabinet Books, 2005). ISBN 9781932698268, 1932698264

References

External links