#matta-clark

Conical Intersect - Gordon Matta-Clark

“To be sure a cityscape is not made of flesh.” 

Gordon Matta-Clark — Conical Intersect 1975

 “...J’amerais beaucoup (...) explorer le monde souterrain. Partir à la recherche de ces lieux oubliés, enfouis sous la ville, qu’il s’agisse de zones historiques ou des traces soubsistantes de projets et de fantasies perdu (...) Je cartographierais ces endroits perdus, je percerais des trous dans les fondations, avant de rejoindre la société à partir du monde souterrain (...) Il s’agirait de faire sortir l’art des galeries et de la conduire dan les égouts...”

She usually doesn’t go this way home, but since there is an exhibition she had long been waiting for near the house she lived in, she took a detour home. She browsed the brochure, which by chance had caught her eyes three months ago, and that she had been carrying with her ever since. It was Gordon Matta-Clark’s exhibition Anarchy and Architecture, which was to take place in the area behind the houses at Rådmansvången in Lund.

According to the artist, the exhibition itself was a way of exploring monstrous constellations, different occasions and buildings that were worn and cut out, all to highlight voids, gaps and leftovers that constituted and characterized buildings’ different constellations. The monstrous spaces that the deconstructed buildings created would be a new context that she could not even imagine where she was sitting on the bus. Monstrous spaces as concepts applied to architecture, architect Fredrik Linander and architect collective Mosaik write in the contest proposal Monster Planning (Europan 13, 2013). Monstruous architecture protects the complex and avoids simplifications, architecture seeks to grasp processes in progress as well as inside constructions (a.a.). It is an unconditional proposal of something temporary that gives room for thoughts to thrive, develop and investigate. The boundary between the already built and the planned construction is being investigated by focusing on our interactions.

She went off at the side road, which was near the area where the exhibition took place. All she saw were trees that stretched along the one side of the lawn, the tree crowns were so high that they conceived most of the sight, but she could glimpse shapes and objects hidden in the background. She hurried on the ladder and walked between trees and bushes, but stopped abruptly, in the midst of her excitement, she had almost tumbled into a big hole. What was in front of her was at first glance a gaping black hole, but as with closer inspection it turned out to be the basement of a former house, but also part of the art installation she realized. The walls of the building have been leveled with the ground and all that was left to see was a room one and a half meters down the ground. She walked over to the one side of the basement where a stairway down to the room was and without having reflected more about whether it was allowed to interfere with the art installation, she found herself standing down at the bottom. She stroke her hand along the basement's wet and cold walls as she walked around the room. The fear that somebody would come to tell her to get up from there was reminded while at the same time feeling a thrill in her gut of excitement that she could walk around and touch the art. It was a lovely scary feeling that she hadn’t experienced before. The monstrous room made itself reminded.

Parts of buildings are scattered on the lawn like an autopsy or a murder. Each part available for close inspection and completely out of context. She walked past lonely walls, stairs that did not lead somewhere and at one time half a house. The total lack of order and hierarchy among the building blocks made the thought of anarchy and chaos so worryingly accurate that she wondered if Matta-Clark did not lure somewhere and whisper to break the current structures to her subconscious.

She recalled that in Encoding/Decoding by Stuart Hall (1973) the recipients of a message or new information were investigated. Hall writes that the recipients are not passive individuals who are being fed information, but as the viewer, we interpret the message or information that someone else wants to obtain based on our own experiences and backgrounds (a.a.). In this way, an artist’s basic idea can be interpreted in a variety of ways by different people. It is this encoding/ decoding process that helps the viewer to translate the message in a way that is understandable to one’s own. Matta-Clark’s original concept of thought may never reach any of the people who visit the Rådmansvången in Lund, but these people, on the other hand, will leave with unexplored new thoughts that have begun to grow. She sat on the top of the stairs that did not lead anywhere and looked out over the area. There was hardly anyone here. She saw some youngsters who walked with exploding feet between walls, through windows and on the roofs. They stretched the boundaries to see when they were going to burst. She thought about the house she lived in as the exhibition, whose building parts actually made up a home, was a temporary home. People would occupy space and buildings for different reasons and different lengths of time. People came and went, lived in a place for some time to move and claim another space afterwards.

She wondered if this was the chaotic temporal space that the exhibition created that the artist wanted the viewer to have in mind. That the reason she, like all the other visitors, were allowed to move freely and use the space on their own terms, actually called for a questioning of the spaces in society. She wondered if Matta-Clark really tried to force us to buy the message, but that it really is when we ourselves begin to think and question the structures that the message can get comprehended.