A HOUSE DIVIDED:
Curator Elisabeth Sussman on the
great Matta-Clark retrospective in the Whitney Museum, New York
You
Are The Measure is the programmatic subtitle of the grandiose Gordon
Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney Museum. With his radical
architectonic interventions, performances, and actions, Matta-Clark made
an indelible mark on the '70s art scene and inspired generations to come. Cheryl
Kaplan spoke with the exhibition's curator Elisabeth Sussmann about
the New York artist legend.
Splitting:
Four Corners, 1974
©Estate of
Gordon Matta-Clark,
Courtesy the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
When in
1974 Gordon
Matta-Clark visited the home of his dealer Horace
Solomon in New Jersey, the sparks flew. The artist had brought along
his power saw and immediately set about cutting a slice through the
crumbling outer wall. But Solomon didn't mind, because the abandoned house
was scheduled for demolition. And so he gave it over to the young
chain-saw-wielding artist for his actions. Matta-Clark had quite a task
with his work Splitting, for which he made a single cut through the
entire building from the living room through the staircase and up to the
roof. While no one really knew what the architectonic intervention was
supposed to mean at the time, everyone thought the piece was fantastic: it
cut right through the wilted dream of middle-class America like a stick of
old butter.
Gordon
Matta-Clark: Hair, 1972 (Detail)
Photo:
Carol Goodden,
Courtesy the
Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York
Matta-Clark's
Cuttings, in which he sliced open numerous condemned buildings and
factories throughout the '70s, are considered to be among the most
subversive of what American post-war art has to offer. Now, for the first
time in 20 years, a large retrospective
at the Whitney Museum in New York
provides an overview of the artist's work, who died from cancer in 1978 at
the age of 35. You are the Measure, the show's subtitle, refers to
the fact that although Matta-Clark labored over buildings, it was always
society that he had in mind. The artist's heightened sensibility for the
social conditioning of space is another reason why Deutsche
Bank is sponsoring the retrospective: "Gordon Matta-Clark called our
attention to the potential of our constructed environment. He changed our
understanding of the everyday," as Gary Hattem, President of the Deutsche
Bank Americas Foundation, explains.
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Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, and Gordon
Matta-Clark
in front of Food
restaurant, Prince Street
at
Wooster Street, New York 1971
Photo: Richard Landry, alteration by Gordon Matta-Clark
Collection
of Caroline Goodden McCoy,
Courtesy
the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and
David
Zwirner, New York
The retrospective marks the
artist's return to his native city; Matta-Clark grew up in Greenwich
Village as the son of the famous Chilean Surrealist Roberto
Matta, and his work was closely tied with New York of the 1970s. A
dirty, gritty, but also very vibrant New York that has since fallen victim
to urban gentrification. Duchamp's
godson explored the city's free spaces; he was one of the first to serve
Sushi and other strange dishes in the experimental restaurant collective Food,
and together with friends he founded the group Anarchitecture
as a counter-movement to ordinary architecture. Elisabeth Sussmann,
curator of the Matta-Clark retrospective, spoke with Cheryl Kaplan about
the multi-talented artist.
Eve
Sussmann bei der Eröffnung der
Gordon
Matta-Clark Retrospektive
im
Whitney Museum, New York
CHERYL KAPLAN:
When you think of Gordon, he's eternally 35, but he was born in 1943 in
New York, in the midst of WWII. What was Gordon's relationship to the
destruction in Europe?
ELISABETH SUSSMAN: He loved old Europe. Keith
Sonnier said that Gordon knew Europe when it was still in ruins. Early
in his life he was taken to Paris to visit his father, and then, in 1948,
Gordon developed tuberculosis and was taken to a sanatorium in Switzerland
for a year.
His father, Roberto Matta, had abandoned him and his
twin brother only a few months after their birth. How did this loss shape
Matta-Clark's art?
It shaped his art profoundly. Yet the way it
comes out isn't melancholic at all. Gordon's extreme energy must have been
an adjustment to a very forlorn sense of his father not being interested
in him. He was trying to stave off the loss.
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