Cordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism

摘要

Literary deconstruction has nothing on the literal deconstructions of artist Gordon Matta-Clark. His unsettling slices and incisions into familiar, frequently domestic, buildings in the 1970s were recorded in photographs since published widely, much to the intrigue of architects and architecture students. This surgeon of space reportedly sought to subvert and resist the formalism he came to detest during his architectural education at Cornell, cutting out floors and walls as if by some cathartic act of revenge. The artist's practice is often understood as a rejection of the tenets of Modernism. Stephen Walker's intriguing thesis - drawing from the thinking of Henri Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari among others - is that Matta-Clark's attitude to architectural heritage was more ambivalent than is commonly assumed. Locating Matta-Clark's 'discrete violations' both 'within and without modernism', Walker argues for a less binary, more differentiated understanding of his work, claiming his ongoing relevance to contemporary art, architectural and academic production.