Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical PoeticsBringing a poet’s perspective to an artist’s archive, this highly original book examines wordplay in the art and thought of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978). A pivotal figure in the postminimalist generation who was also the son of a prominent Surrealist, Matta-Clark was a leader in the downtown artists' community in New York in the 1970s, and is widely seen as a pioneer of what has come to be known as social practice art. He is celebrated for his “anarchitectural” environments and performances, and the films, photographs, drawings, and sculptural fragments with which his site-specific work was documented. In studies of his career, the artist’s provocative and vivid language is referenced constantly. Yet the verbal aspect of his practice has not previously been examined in its own right. Blending close readings of Matta-Clark’s visual and verbal creations with reception history and critical biography, this extensively researched study engages with the linguistic and semiotic forms in Matta-Clark’s art, forms that activate what he called the “poetics of psycho-locus” and “total (semiotic) system.” Examining notes, statements, titles, letters, and interviews in light of what they reveal about his work at large, Frances Richard unearths archival, biographical, and historical information, linking Matta-Clark to Conceptualist peers and Surrealist and Dada forebears. Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics explores the paradoxical durability of Matta-Clark’s language, and its role in an aggressively physical oeuvre whose major works have been destroyed. |
Contents
Introduction CONFUSION GUIDED BY A CLEAR SENSE | 1 |
GORDON MATTACLARK | 6 |
Walking and Reading | 14 |
WORKING AT SEVERAL DEMENTIONS | 22 |
A step taken in the fog | 33 |
Kool Killer or the Insurrection of Signs | 45 |
2 | 81 |
BEST LATED WISHES | 100 |
LAYERED REALITY Thin Edge and Space Between | 231 |
Immune versus Cancer Cells | 249 |
Psychological Morphology | 262 |
Noguchi | 278 |
Étant | 296 |
Bullet Holes | 309 |
The Alchemical Pun | 337 |
AND THE POLITICAL | 351 |
Another name more or less the same | 125 |
Venn Diagram | 143 |
TO THE MEETING and THE MOB AGAIN | 156 |
MAKING NOT SOLVING PROBLEMS | 171 |
The Irrational Village and the Nonument | 186 |
Monument Nonument and SiteNonsite | 201 |
The Islands | 216 |
SPACISM | 367 |
Window BlowOut | 385 |
Violent Space SECURITY MEASURES and THE SIGN POST ANARCHIE | 402 |
A finetuned language and logic of the body | 422 |
Acknowledgments | 437 |
List of Illustrations | 505 |
Common terms and phrases
112 Greene Street Alchemy American Anarchitecture archive artist Batan Bingo building cuts Clark Conical Intersect Corbusier Cornell Crawford Dan Graham dance documents Donald Wall downtown drawings Duchampian entry Estate of Gordon exhibition Fake Estates film floor French Fresh Kill friends gallery Girouard Glass Goodden Gordon Matta Gordon Matta-Clark graffiti Humphrey Street Ibid idea index card note infra infrathin installation interest intertitles interview IVAM Jane Crawford Kirshner language letter living Liza Béar Malitte Marcel Duchamp Mark Wigley material Monuments Museum non-site non-u-ment Nonas notebook Office Baroque painting paper Paris performance photographs piece poetic Poetry Project political Postminimal punning ready-to-be-unmade readymade relation Robert Smithson Roberto Matta Rosalind E sculpture sense social Soho space spatial Splitting structure Surrealism Surrealist tecture Ted Greenwald thin edge things tion Tree Trisha Brown ture urban verbal viewer visual voids Wigley window word writing York