Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist best known for site-specific artworks and food art he made in the 1970s. He pioneered a radical approach to art-making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it. He studied architecture and graduated from Cornell University in 1968, and studied French literature for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the 1969 exhibition Earth Art at Cornell, he met artist Robert Smithson and helped Dennis Oppenheim construct two projects, including Beebe Lake Ice Cut. Like most earth artists of the time, Matta-Clark rejected the commodification of art – eventually working in photography, film, video, performance, drawing, photo collage, and sculpture in the form of large-scale interventions into existing architecture.

Upon graduation from university, Matta-Clark explored the metamorphic possibilities of cooking, beginning by frying Polaroid photographs in oil with gold leaf. He also collaborated on FOOD, a combined restaurant and performance piece managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at FOOD helped outline how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan. He then made Garbage Wall, a prototype shelter for the homeless; and was active in building SoHo as an artists' community. He addressed popular culture in the 1973 Photoglyphs, hand-colored black-and-white photographs depicting New York's burgeoning graffiti scene.

During the 1970s, Matta-Clark made the works for which he is best known: his "anarchitecture." These were temporary works created by sawing and carving sections out of buildings, most of which were scheduled to be destroyed. He extensively captured these works with photography and film. In 1974 he started his artist residency at Artpark, it was there that he created Bingo (Bingone). In Day's End (1975), Matta-Clark removed part of the floor and roof of an abandoned pier in Manhattan, creating a "sun and water temple." After he worked, undiscovered, on the project for two months, the City of New York filed a lawsuit against him; it was eventually dropped. [1] The following year Matta-Clark created his own controversy. Instead of taking part in an exhibition alongside well-known fellow architects as originally planned, he opted to be shot out the windows of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. This act has since been construed as a protest against the architectural establishment.

Throughout the 1970s, Matta-Clark’s work was shown in several solo shows at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile (1971), Neue Galerie der Stadt in Aachen, Germany (1974), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1974), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1978).  

On August 27, 1978, Matta-Clark passed away from complications caused by cancer, at the age of 35 years old.

[1] https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/gordon-matta-clark