Perfect Structures: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Anarchitecture Project

Cheng 1 Mimi Cheng New York in the 70s Professor Douglas Crimp Fall 2015 PERFECT STRUCTURES Gordon Matta-Clark and the Anarchitecture Project This essay is an exploration of Gordon Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture project. To explore anarchitecture is to confront the slippages of memory, the limits of the archive, and the role of the researcher in the reconstitution of an unfulfilled artistic endeavor. Anarchitecture, as stated by those who have spent time with the artist’s archive, becomes increasingly elusive the further one digs, its meanings and associations surfacing in new forms through the memories of those who were close to the project as well as through Matta-Clark’s own thoughts on the matter. Any substantive writing about Matta-Clark will include the term “anarchitecture,” but there is rarely consensus on its role in the artist’s collective body of work. Some refer to it as merely being a collaborative endeavor that resulted in a sparsely attended and undocumented exhibit at 112 Greene Street. Others dedicate substantial sections of their texts to exploring the origins of the term and the way Matta-Clark employs it to confront the rigidity of not just architectural form, but the social relations it engenders. Matta- Clark worked with the concept of anarchitecture almost obsessively throughout his ten years as an artist living in New York City, until his death in 1978 at the age of thirty-five.  Cheng 2 His tragically short but vibrant life also contributes to this myth that has been constructed around the anarchitecture project. Who knows what it could have become if he were still with us? In considering anarchitecture’s morphology, I am reminded that even those who have spent years re-tracing its history that there will always be elements that are either lost or deliberately hidden from view.1 Mark Wigley has gone the furthest in that he has created the most comprehensive archive, which purportedly contains all the archival material that associates Gordon Matta-Clark with anarchitecture, but, as someone who has dedicated years to exploring the artist’s archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, even he cannot claim the position of actually being able to pinpoint exactly what it is.2 He says that explaining anarchitecture is like “trying to draw the silhouette of a ghost, trying to delineate or even materialize something that is essentially blurry.”3 While I am attracted to Mark Wigley’s characterization of anarchitecture as a ghost that haunts our conception of the artist, I want to also give credence to Matta- Clark’s own suggestion that anarchitecture is an attitude,4 one that I will argue pervaded the artist’s thinking before he even gave it a name. I am also partial to Phillip Ursprung’s 1 Philip Ursprung recalls that the complications that arose while researching anarchitecture were due in part to the difficulty of extracting information from some members of the anarchitecture group. See his essay in Lydia Yee, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s (New York: Prestel) pp. 131-41. 2 At the time of this writing, Wigley’s book has not yet been published. 3 Mark Wigley, “Anarchitectures: The Forensics of Explanation,” Log 15, no. Winter (2009): p. 112. 4 See letter from Gordon Matta-Clark to Robert Ledenfrost from January 21, 1975. Transcript is available in Gloria Moure, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006) p. 369 and Liza Bear, “Gordon Matta- Clark: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building,” Avalanche (New York, December 1974).  Cheng 3 conclusion that “anarchitecture is everywhere. It’s a mirror image that keeps both attracting and repelling us.”5 In this sense, anarchitecture can be seen throughout Matta-Clark’s work, but comes into clearest view three years after his graduation from the architecture program at Cornell University. Understanding Matta-Clark’s relationship with architecture, particularly Modern architecture, is crucial for considering anarchitecture. I will highlight two aspects of his time at Cornell that I believe were formative first in his disavowal of architecture as a profession and second in his development as an artist whose works and writings continually demonstrate a concern for those who are negatively affected by architectural theory and power. Jane Crawford, whom he married just months before his death, recalled during an interview that as a teenager with his mother in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, he was “actively involved” in meetings and sit-ins to protest Robert Moses’s proposals to reshape the neighborhood.6 His awareness of spatial conflict and resistance in the face of power-hungry developers and architects only grew stronger as he matured. His relationship with architecture and architects is perhaps best encapsulated in Window Blow-Out, an unsanctioned act of defiance at the offices of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in 1976. Like anarchitecture, the work suffers from a lack of documentation and survives through the patchwork of various testimonies and anecdotes of those who were present. It is also a work that benefits from a close contextualization within the artist’s personal development and the socio-political conditions under which he worked. 5 Yee, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s. (New York: Prestal, 2011) p. 140. 6 Ibid, p. 70.  Cheng 4 I would like to begin not chronologically, but by presenting what we do know about the collective meetings and development of the “Anarchitecture Show” that took place in March 1974. There is very little by way of documentation, so much of the information I present here is transmitted through interviews previously conducted with the participants and the letters they received from Matta-Clark.7 Sometime in 1973, a series of weekly anarchitecture meetings began at Jene Highstein’s home on Chambers Street. The meetings were like many of the others that were taking place at the time in that there was no formal list of participants.8 However, Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaum, and Richard Landry are frequently listed among those who were present. Matta-Clark also listed the sculptor Alan Saret and artist and musician Max Neuhaus as members of the group in later documents. Because of the informal nature of the meetings, anarchitecture's sphere of influence is amorphous, but the conversations that took place around the table were quite serious. The participants came from various creative backgrounds and, according to Tina Girouard, became “a kind of think tank, and we each had our various interests and benefited from the dialogue. But I would say that Gordon benefited most and was head cheerleader.”9 This comparison is echoed by Jane Crawford, who goes on to say, “he used anarchitecture as a think tank to define and refine the ideas that shaped his career.”10 7 Reproductions of these letters can be found in Gloria Moure, ed. Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006). 8 Yee, p. 70 9 Ibid, p. 2. 10 Ibid, p. 89  Cheng 5 In a recent interview, Richard Nonas claims that the term “anarchitecture” was “more or less invented by Gordon.” It is generally understood that the term “resulted from a wordplay that combines “anarchy” with “architecture.”11 Matta-Clark was obsessed with the construction of the word, continually iterating on its lexical possibilities through wordplay. Laurie Anderson greatly admired Matta-Clark’s ability to play with words, calling him a poet who never got credit as a poet.12 She recalls that, Anarchitecture group is a completely literary thing. It didn’t have to do with structures that we eventually came up with. Suzy Harris did a big glass pyramid that shattered as we were installing it at 112. It was really frightening, and we decided that that was a true anarchitectural event.13 Some permutations of the word include “onarchitecture,” “anarchylecture,” “akneecapfracture,” and “anassreflector.”14 While some of these constructions may be attributed to the liberal amounts of herbal stimulants present during the group meetings, it is clear that Matta-Clark was invested in unearthing its full potential. In the dozens of “art cards” that he produced during this time, he continually articulates what anarchitecture does and does not do. In his bold handwriting, he explains, WE DON’T GO FISHING TOGETHER. WE DO THIS TO GETHER. ANARCHITECTURE IS A GAME WE ENVENT TO ENDEAR OURSELVES EACH TO EACH OTHER AND TO OUR IDEAS and 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid, p. 89. 13 Ibid. 14 Reproductions of the art cards produced by Matta-Clark are transcribed throughout this essay and can be found in Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, edited by Gloria Moure.  Cheng 6 ANARCHITECTURE ATTEMPTS TO SOLVE NO PROBLEMS BUT TO REJOICE IN AN INFORMED WELL-INTENDED CELEBRATION OF CONDITIONS THAT BEST DESCRIBE AND LOCATE A PLACE. Then there are cards that can be read alongside his building cuts, like Day’s End and Threshole: MUSIC IS A NON-LUMINA SPACE – ANARCHITECTURE IS CLOSER TO THE PERFECT PLAY OF VOIDS. Months before the show at 112 Greene Street, in late 1973, Matta-Clark was already throwing his full energy into developing an undefined anarchitecture project in Europe. During his time working on a separate project in the Netherlands, he wrote several letters to the group that contained numerous anarchitecture project ideas for consideration.15 Among these projects are the descriptions of Reality Properties: Fake Estates, which he had begun that same year, an idea for a project in the recently completed Word Trade Center towers, as well as more comical suggestions, such as a small drawing of two dogs with the caption, A PHOTO OF DOGS SNIFFING EACH OTHERS [SIC] BOTTOMS ASSHOLES. Numerous suggestions are thought exercises on the concept of modern urban dwelling. In one particularly pointed idea, he wrote: 15. MACHINE FOR NOT LIVING (RICHARD KNOWS) WITH AN EXTRACT FROM CORBUSIER’S VERSO UN ARCH [TOWARDS AN ARCHITECTURE] SHOWING THE VIRGIN MACHINE HE WANTS US ALL 15 Letters to Carol Goodden and Richard Nonas can be seen reproduced and transcribed in Moure, pp. 370-5.  Cheng 7 TO LIVE IN. A FEW NEWSPAPER PHOTOS OF CLASSIC PLANE-TRAIN-AUTO BUILDING CRASHES-CALL IT TABLE RASÉ- A CLEAN SWEEP He is making direct reference to Le Corbusier’s 1923 book Vers une architecture, which he translates, un-coincidentally, to Towards an architecture.16 More of these dwelling concepts emerge in other letters. Richard Nonas, whom Matta-Clark affectionately refers to as Ricky Nose-Nas and Ricardo, received one that contains a repeated idea for a structure that would allow commuters to dwell with their own rats. He also expresses his thoughts on what he thinks the tone the Anarchitecture Show should take on: IT IS WAXING CRYSTAL CLEAR, INNER CLEAR, THAT SOMETHING JUST A ITTSY BITTSY SHORT OF INTEL-LEX-STOOL. MANIFESTO-FESTATION-FESTER IS WHAT WE SHOULD DO – YOU AGREE? IF WE CAN REMAIN PERFECTLY CLEAR WITHOUT SQUASHING THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG FOR SAY-30 OR 40 OR 50 DEFINITELY UNWORDY PAGES. The reference to “pages” indicates that perhaps the show, rather than taking the form of an exhibit, was actually considered as a catalog or book. This possibility is affirmed by a brief mention of the project in the Rumbles section of the Summer/Fall 1973 issue of Avalanche. Under a picture of Jeffrey and Rachel Lew's newborn twins, the notice reads, "Onrubble mention should go to the early murmurings of Anarchitecture, a 16 The book is sometimes translated as Towards a New Architecture. It should be noted that Matta-Clark’s father, the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, once worked for Le Corbusier and considered architecture, rather than art, as a suitable pursuit for his son. In an interview with Carol Goodden, she recalled that, “More than anything he wanted to have his father’s respect and admiration, which, sadly, he never got until he was on his deathbed, and then it was too late to play with his father.” From Mary Jane Jacob, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1985) p. 40.  Cheng 8 group effort by T. Girouard, S. Harris, R. Nonas & G. Matta-Clark. A catalogue of their neither art nor architectural living spaces will be shown in New York later this winter.”17 An invitation card for the show also survives. Matta-Clark initially also asked the group to provide 16x20 black and white photographs that would be displayed in the gallery under the collective name “Anarchitecture Group.” These instructions were generally disregarded. While there were photographs that met Matta-Clark’s requests in the show, the group members also created annotated photographic collages. Some of these still images in the exhibit were shown in an issue of Flash Art Magazine three months later, in June 1974.18 There does exist a series of black and white “Anarchitecture” photos, all of which are untitled, attributed to the Anarchitecture Group, and assigned 1974 as the year of creation.19 Anarchitecture group members recall that Matta-Clark developed the photos and also dug through city archives and that of the New York Times.20 Among the photographs are aerial shots of de- railed trains, sinking ships, and collapsed buildings, juxtaposed against studies of urban detritus, such as empty liquor bottles and piles of trash bags on the curb. They are diverse in style – some are quite poetic, others are more narrative, while the rest, most likely taken from an archive, accompanied news events. The complete lack of documentation of the show in the gallery can be attributed to the group's general sense of disappointment towards the project's realization. 17 Avalanche, Summer/Fall (New York, 1973), p. 62. 18 James Atlee, “Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and,” Tate Papers. Spring, no. 07 (2007). 19 These photos are reproduced in Moure, pp. 388-409 20 Yee, p. 135  Cheng 9 Richard Nonas went as far as calling it "an utter failure.”21 The meetings ceased after the exhibit, and group members began to distance themselves from the project. One reason for this is simply that personal relationships fell apart. Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden, with whom he had founded the restaurant project Food, broke up. Matta-Clark was beginning to receive widespread recognition for his work; Laurie Anderson was the only other member of the initial group that reached a similar level of recognition. But “Anarchitecture Show” would not be relegated to the archives. It has piqued the interest of numerous contemporary curators who have attempted to re-stage the show. In 2005, the Tate Modern mounted an exhibit called Open Systems: Rethinking Art in the 1970’s curated by Donna de Salvo. In one corner of the gallery, over a dozen anarchitecture photographs, photo-collages, and art cards were displayed on the wall. More recently, in 2009, Pulitzer Arts in St. Louis displayed a small group of twenty-five anarchitecture photos in an exhibit called Urban Alchemy. In February 2006, an exhibit called Gordon Matta-Clark and Anarchitecture: A Detective Story was presented at the Arthur Ross Architectural Gallery at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Curated by Mark Wigley, Phillip Ursprung, and Gwendolyn Owens, the aim of the show “…was not to reconstruct the original exhibition but to shed light on the process that led up to the show and to reconstruct Gordon Matta- Clark’s working method.”22 The curators conducted interviews with the members of the 21 Hubertus von Amelunxen, Angela Lammert, and Philip Ursprung, eds., Gordon Matta- Clark: Moment to Moment Space (Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, 2012) p. 34. 22 Yee, p. 2.  Cheng 10 original group, which were presented alongside Matta-Clark’s art cards and “other published material and words of art from the members of Anarchitecture.”23 According to the group’s exhaustive detective work, the first association of the word "anarchitecture" with Matta-Clark's own work occurs in an interview he did with Liza Béar in May 1974 about his work Splitting in Englewood, New Jersey, which was completed within a few weeks of the Anarchitecture Show.24 The interview can be found in the December 1974 issue of Avalanche. In response to Béar’s comment that she had “always thought of you as working within an architectural context,” Matta-Clark responded by saying, “Not architectural in the strict sense. Most of the things I’ve done that have ‘architectural’ implications are really about non-architecture, about something that’s an alternative to what’s normally considered architecture. The Anarchitecture show at 112 Greene Street last year – which never got very strongly expressed – was about something other than the established architectural vocabulary, without getting fixed into anything too formal.”25 Matta-Clark seems to be unconsciously distancing himself from “Anarchitecture Show” in his response – Ursprung refers to his mistakenly referring to the show as having happened “last year,” as opposed to a few weeks ago, as a Freudian slip.26 Matta-Clark goes on to assert that Splitting was not a piece of anarchitecture, countering the 23 Ibid. 24 Wigley, p. 125. 25 Béar, p. 34. 26 Philip Ursprung, “Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Legacy of the 1970s” (Lecture in Singapore: FCL: Future Cities Laboratory, 2012), http://www.fcl.ethz.ch/fcl- gazette/gazette-17-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-the-legacy-of-the-1970s-pdf/.  Cheng 11 association made by critics such as Yves-Alain Bois.27 Matta-Clark’s reasoning should be considered in full, “Our thinking about anarchitecture was more elusive than doing pieces that would demonstrate an alternate attitude to buildings, or, rather to the attitudes that determine containerization of usable space. Those attitudes are very deep- set…Architecture is environment too. When you’re living in a city the whole fabric is architectural in some sense. We were thinking more about metaphoric voids, gaps, left-over spaces, places that were not developed.”28 On Béar’s prompting on the term “metaphoric gaps,” Matta-Clark goes on to talk about Reality Properties: Fake Estates, a process-based project that not only expanded the artist’s physical footprint into neighborhoods in Queens, but also highlighted the irony of acquiring slivers of land that had no use value, while playing with the logic that governed land partition and ownership. The existence of these properties was predicated on oversights on the part of architects and urban planners. Matta-Clark’s expanded definition of architecture coincides with the birth of urban design as a new field of theory and practice. The Cornell Urban Design Studio, headed by the architect Colin Rowe, was established in 1963, the same year that Matta- Clark began his architecture studies the university. Little is known about Matta-Clark’s activities as a student at Cornell, but Rowe’s influence on the department as a whole is demonstrably immense. Distinct from both architecture and urban planning, urban design “was proposed as a time-honored and synthetic art, necessary conjunctive to analytics, 27 Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1997) p. 190. 28 Béar p. 34.  Cheng 12 socioeconomic, regulatory, and administrative process of planning.”29 Its establishment reflects, in part, the discontent fueled by the immense post-war urban renewal efforts in which entire neighborhoods were demolished to make way for monolithic structures. Jane Jacob’s now classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities condemns the subsequent issues of segregated land use and wide expanses of open space that plagued urban centers around the country. Modern architecture and urban planning, according to Steven Hurtt, had “imploded time and exploded space.”30 Rowe, as the head of the Urban Design Studio, continues to be a hugely influential figure in architecture and urban design. The three concepts attributed to him – Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City – were developed as a response to the symptoms of Modern architecture and urbanism and exist in relation to each another.31 In the introduction to Rowe and Fred Koetter’s 1978 book Collage City, under a drawing of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine from 1922, the authors compose truculent arguments against the city of modern architecture by saying, “And now, even though the weight of the idea persists, it is a city which has shrunk to very little – to the impoverished banalities of public housing which stand around like the undernourished symbols of a new world refused to be born…the city of modern architecture, both as psychological construct and physical model, has been rendered tragically ridiculous.”32 29 Editors’ introduction to Steven Hurtt, “Conjectures on Urban Form/Studio Projects,” in The Cornell Journal of Architecture 2 (Ithaca: Cornell University Department of Architecture, 1982) p. 52. 30 Hurtt, p. 54. 31 A concise definition of these three concepts can be found in Hurtt, p. 55. 32 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978) p. 3-4.  Cheng 13 While each of the concepts has its own particular emphasis, they share an underlying opposition to the object fixation associated with Modern architecture and counter this tendency through a consideration the city as “a holistic perceptual entity.”33 The influence of gestalt psychology, especially in the relationship between figure and ground, is keenly felt in the drawings produced by the studio. In both theoretical and pedagogical approach, Rowe stressed that design thinking should emphasize synthesis rather than particulars, and that the studio should approach projects that “explored or elucidated problems, however vague or undefined.” Hurtt explains that “[t]o confront the biases of modern thought, Rowe often assigned sites for study without preset programs. This strategy directly resisted the deterministic, socioeconomic, program-dominant mode of thought so pervasive in our society and especially in Modern architecture and planning.”34 Take, for example, the Bronx Redevelopment Project that was completed by the Urban Design Studio in 1967. While only a pedagogical exercise, the students’ work demonstrates their absorption of Rowe’s theories. The site is located on a hillslope along the Major Deggan Expressway in the Upper Bronx, where the concrete hulks of public housing projects towered over row homes. Two schemes are presented – the first, by Arthur Valk, includes a large, curvilinear apartment building that is juxtaposed against smaller structures that are diverse in their scale. The second, by Michael Schwarting, has a long, rectilinear apartment building that echoes the typology of row homes in the neighboring blocks. Both schemes have defined semi-public space, provide gardens and 33 Hurtt p. 56. 34 Hurtt p. 55  Cheng 14 terraces to apartment dwellers, and attempt to create high-density housing while not disrupting the existing scale of the surrounding neighborhood.35 Rowe’s appropriation of collage and bricolage from artistic practice was further appropriated by a wide range practitioners across the ideological spectrum, from the (neo-)avant-garde to neoconservatives. Emmanuel Petit places Rowe at the center of what he calls “the urban turn in the early post-modern architectural theory.” The main issue, he says, was that the metaphor of “collage” was used as a way to tolerate difference. Its origin is as an artistic technique that was invented “to the preserve the psychological integrity of the ‘modern’ subject in a world that started to lose its coherence – and to deal with the shock of encountering the modern city.”36 Individual components of a collage are torn and ruptured from their previous form, only to be re-constructed into a coherent whole by the artist on a canvas. In architectural and urban design practice, the practical result of this technique is a diluted, depoliticized attempt to address the plurality of interests and ideologies that constitute a city through the juxtaposition of singular buildings of different scales. More critically, Petit posits that the proliferation and enduring application of Rowe’s theories seem “out of place with regard to today’s actual politics of private ownership, limited public land control, and decentralized and international decision-making.”37 I offer an overview of Rowe’s theories and its associated criticisms in order to sketch the theoretical and pedagogical environment in which Matta-Clark learned how to be an architect. The irony is that while his own distaste for the architectural profession is 35 Ibid p. 95. 36 Petit pp. 5-8 37 Ibid.  Cheng 15 well documented, Matta-Clark now enjoys the characterization of being both an artist’s artist and an architect’s artist. His career as an architecture student was not smooth – he earned straight D’s in his first few semesters, but eventually graduated with honors.38 Between 1963 and 1964, after being involved in a fatal car crash, he left Ithaca and studied French literature at the Sorbonne.39 In early 1969, after he graduated from Cornell, Matta-Clark returned to Ithaca to work as an assistant on the Earth Art show, which was curated by Willoughby Sharp and, in Sharp’s typical curatorial fashion, included a cast of all male, and (with the exception of Filipino artist named David Medella) all white artists, including Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Jan Dibbets, and Hans Haacke. Gwendolyn Owens, a co-curator of the show at Columbia, has spent time in the Gordon Matta-Clark archives in order to better understand the influence of the show on the young artist. In her essay “Schooling for Scandal,” she explains that while there is no mention of the show in Matta-Clark’s own letters, writings, or notes, she was able to “stitch together a more complete picture” through “reminiscences of people involved in the exhibition, and interviews with participants (and witnesses) to the event.”40 Matta-Clark contributed two pieces to the show. One was Rope Bridge, which hung over a deep gorge in Ithaca, and the other was a massive, inflatable, segmented plastic tube called Deflation. Neither project was officially included in the exhibit, but Matta-Clark clearly felt inspired enough by the work and conversations that were happening around him to respond with works of his own. Rope Bridge existed in close 38 James Atlee and Lisa Le Feuvre, Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between (Tuscon: Nazraeli Press, 2003) p. 14. 39 Ibid, p. 25. 40 Amelunxen, et al. p. 180.  Cheng 16 dialogue with Hans Haacke’s piece for the show in which he “stretched a piece of rope across Fall Creek just below the waterfall so that icicles were formed along it and appeared to be suspended in mid-air.”41 Matta-Clark’s involvement in the creation of the exhibit is documented through photographs and film. In one photograph, he is seen helping Dennis Oppenheim create Accumulation Cut, which required the artist and his assistants to wield a gasoline powered chain saw in order to cut a 100-foot long trench into the frozen ice of a stream that was located perpendicular to a waterfall. It would then take twenty-four hours for the water to re-freeze. In an essay for the exhibition catalog, Willoughby Sharp writes, “The whole work cannot be taken at a single glance. The spectator has to experience the different stages of the system if he wants to experience the whole work, which has its own lifespan. Neither can such works be fully understood through single photographs in the manner of traditional painting or sculpture.”42 One cannot deny that there are striking similarities between Accumulation Cut and Matta- Clark’s building cuts; Sharp’s description would not be contested if used to describe Day’s End. The influence of Earth Art went beyond merely artistic inspiration; it was also an opportunity for Matta-Clark to establish relationships with other, more mature artists working in New York City. He kept in contact with the artists, especially after his move to the city after the show. Eight months after Earth Art, in December 1969, Robert Smithson was the recipient of a Photo Fry with the accompanying holiday greeting “A 41 Nita Jager, ed., Earth Art (Ithaca, NY: Office of University Publications, Cornell University, 1970) p. 2. 42 Jager p. 11.  Cheng 17 GOLD LEAFED PHOTO-FRIED XMASS TREE & BEST LATED WISHES. GORDON.”43 He quickly became friends with figures such as Trisha Brown and Joan Jonas. He was a frequent participant in their works, for he loved to dance and was, by all accounts, a fantastic dancer.44 Despite the burst of creative energy that was happening within this circle of friends, one cannot overlook the overwhelming social and economic upheaval that faced the city. John Lindsay, then a Republican, took mayoral office in 1965 and promised to restore New York City’s shine. The city was in decline. Polarized race relations, the unprecedented financial crisis of 1975, teacher and sanitation strikes, rampant crime and drug abuse, empty tenements, and a staggering 1.25 million residents on welfare in 1973 are just some of the crises that the city and its citizens faced.45 Anarchitecture, viewed this blinding light, is also a strong critique of the architectural profession and its complicity in the processes of urban renewal and displacement. Phillip Ursprung, who worked with Wigley and Owens on the show at Columbia, has written cogently and generously on the subject of anarchitecture, this time in relation to Matta-Clark’s work in the context of the social and economic climate of the 1970’s. His argument is that anarchitecture occupies a central role in the career of the artists associated with the group and that it actually “marks a crucial moment in the recent 43 Amelunxen, et al., p.100. 44 This observation is mentioned almost universally in the artist’s monographs. For specific reference, consult an interview conducted with Laurie Anderson, Jane Crawford, Trisha Brown, RoseLee Goldberg, Alana Heiss, and Lydia Yee in Yee, pp. 71-2. 45 See essay by Jane Crawford in Amelunxen et al. pp.152-3 and Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, eds., Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (New York: Cabinet Books, 2005.) p. 30.  Cheng 18 history of visual culture.”46 It was not just Matta-Clark, but also the rest of the artists in the downtown scene who stood, “…at the intersection between total freedom and a dependence on the political and economic context. They were both observers and the protagonists of what was happening around them. Anarchitecture embodied a radical alternative to existing power structure, but it was also a dry run for gentrification and thus paved the way for the establishment of new power structures.”47 I don’t doubt that Matta-Clark would have been pleased with Ursprung’s analysis as it recognizes the political nature of the project, but is prescient enough to see its implications. In a typewritten statement titled “My understanding of art” that he produced around 1975, he writes, “My understanding of art in a social context is an essentially generous human act, an individual positive attempt to encounter the real world through expressive interpretation. The value of art as it services and sometimes flourishes in our system is so closely related to occidental beliefs in individual rights of free expression that one can accurately speak of the state of art as a measure of the state of freedom in our society. It is upon such fundamental convictions that I approach my work hoping herein to clarify through a discussion of artistic intervention in the urban fabric of New York these convictions.”48 46 Yee p. 139. 47 Ibid. 48 Moure, p. 204.  Cheng 19 This quote is particularly potent if read alongside the understanding that throughout his career as an artist, Matta-Clark was continually plagued by conceptions of his work as being both violent and destructive. Violence and destruction remain frequent qualifiers of his work, with none more polarizing than Window Blow-Out. In 1976, the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) mounted the first of a series of exhibitions called Idea as Model. The Institute’s offices, located on West 40th Street, was what Pamela Lee called a “bastion of ‘Cornelliana’” – its members included many of Colin Rowe’s disciples, the most prominent of which was Peter Eisenman, the Institute’s first Executive Director.49 In addition to organizing exhibitions, IAUS also published a progressive and hugely influential journal called Oppositions, which included the work of Denise Scott Brown, Rem Koolhaas, and Bernard Tschumi. In the preface to the exhibition catalog, Eisenman described the origins of the exhibition as having been born from “a long standing intuition of mine that the model of a building could be something other than the narrative record of a project or a building.”50 The inaugural exhibition only included the work of trained architects, but the introductory essay of the exhibition catalog, written by architectural historian Richard Pommer, cites artists like Alice Aycock, Carl Andre, Barnett Newman, and Sol LeWitt as artists who have “stolen much of the ground from architects.”51 Gordon Matta-Clark was an exception to the lineup; while having been trained as an architect and studying under Michael Graves, John Hejduk, and Charles Gwathmey, all members of the New York Five and participants in the exhibition, he had spent the his post-graduate years in New 49 Lee, p. 115. 50 Richard Pommer, “The Idea of ‘Idea as Model,’” in Idea as Model, ed. Kenneth Frampton and Silvia Kolbowski (New York: Rizzoli International, 1981), p. 3. 51 Ibid.  Cheng 20 York City making artwork rather than models. In having been invited to submit a piece, he would have received a letter, an excerpt of which read, “The purpose of this exhibition is to clarify the new means of investigating architecture in three-dimensional form. We do not seek to assemble models of buildings as propaganda for persuading clients, but rather as studies of a hypothesis, a problem, or an idea of architecture.”52 Matta-Clark’s initial proposal was in line with the work that he had been doing. He had received permission from the exhibition curator Andrew McNair to create a series of small building cuts in the IAUS offices. He had also intended to hang pictures of modernist housing projects in the South Bronx that had their windows broken by residents in the windows of the IAUS office. McNair further granted him permission to break a few of the office windows that were already cracked.53 The details of what Matta-Clark actually did the night before the exhibition opening, however, remain murky. Pamela Lee’s description of the event hinges on McNair’s recollections, who said that Matta-Clark arrived at the offices “incredibly wrecked” on the afternoon of the exhibition opening. Rather than shooting out just a few of the office’s already broken windows, he proceeded to shoot all of them while venting, “these were guys I studied with at Cornell. These were my teachers. I hate what they stand for.”54 Rosalyn Deutsche’s description and analysis of the event, however, portrays it as a piece of social commentary rather than an act of violent, vengeful destruction. She frames it as an action that happened in the middle of the night, and one that “symbolically 52 Peter Eisenman, Preface to Idea as Model. 53 Lee, p. 116. 54 Lee, pp. 114-5, see also Jacobs, p. 96.  Cheng 21 redesigned the segregated city, confronting the center – Manhattan – with what it subordinates and tries to exclude – the Bronx – and so contesting the spatial hierarchy preserved by ‘Broken Windows.’”55 In addition to Deutsche’s generous analysis, I find Jane Crawford’s account of the context that led up to Window Blow-Out incredibly enlightening. She contextualizes the action within the political climate of 1976 in the United States, as well as Matta-Clark’s experience of living in the city. She reminds readers that 1976 was not only the year that the Vietnam War ended and Jimmy Carter was elected president, but also that Abe Beame, Democrat, replaced John Lindsay. Despite changes in leadership, New York City was still in the throes of financial crisis, race riots, and a city-wide blackout. She and Matta-Clark had visited the exhibition during the installation and “watched as the delicate balsa wood and paper models were installed. To Gordon they represented everything that was wrong with architecture, primarily its exclusivity.”56 She further explains that just days before the show’s opening, they had visited the South Bronx, where entire neighborhoods resembled warzones. He took photographs of the windows in housing projects that were shattered by gunshots and other projectiles. Her recollections echo Deutsche’s analysis that by photographing in sections of the city that had been pushed to the periphery and consciously forgotten, he was forcibly re-aligning our vision, and “[w]ith one gesture he had changed the meaning of the exhibition from exquisite proposals for the moneyed classes to inappropriate and impractical proposals for the 55 Rosalyn Deutsche, “The Threshole of Democracy,” in Urban : The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s, ed. John Alan Farmer (The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999), p. 98. 56 Amelunxen, et al., pp. 165-7.  Cheng 22 oppressed.”57 Dennis Oppenheim, whose air gun was used in the act, endorsed the work, saying, “[i]t was such a radical gesture. Such a definitive statement – a metaphor about architecture.”58 There is no official documentation of the Window Blow-Out in the exhibition catalog, which was published after Matta-Clark death. There is however, a brief mention of the project in Pommer’s introductory essay, “The late Gordon Matta-Clark wanted to show photographs of vandalized New York windows against panes broken for the occasion at the Institute, but at the last minute, with the cold air coming in, his exhibit was pulled. A pity, whatever the reasons: it would have called attention to the rival conceptions of younger artists, who often seemed less afraid of social statements than these architects do.”59 Perhaps Pommer’s delicate employment of the term “whatever the reasons” is a calculated move that masks the controversy and anger that Matta-Clark’s actions evoked, out of respect for both the recently deceased artist and the IAUS. The most extreme reaction was that of Eisenman, who was absolutely horrified by the act, going so far as to associate it with Kristalnacht. The reaction to Window Blow-Out was noticeably swift and, in Crawford’s recollection, rather passive-aggressive; she recalls that the windows were replaced within a day, and “the photos were neatly wrapped in brown paper and string. Gordon was not welcomed within.”60 57 Ibid. 58 Mary Jane Jacob, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1985) p. 21. 59 Pommer, “Idea of ‘Idea as Model’.” 60 Amelunxen, et al., p. 167  Cheng 23 Pommer does not mention the actual act of shooting out the windows, nor does he mention the specific locations that the photos depicted; it would not be surprising if the omission were upon the request of members of IAUS, especially Eisenman and McNair. McNair, who was deeply offended by the act, accused Matta-Clark of violating the Institute as a “sacred space” and performing an act that reminded others of the violence that was perpetrated during Kristalnacht.61 What is most revealing about Pommer’s two sentences is that he respected the political nature of the action while simultaneously accusing Matta-Clark’s teachers, whose works were included in the catalog, of being cowardly. In thinking “anarchitecturally” about Window Blow-Out, I would like to return to Laurie Anderson’s recollection of an event that occurred during the installation of the Anarchitecture Show, in which Suzanne Harris’s glass pyramid shattered, frightening the group. In the end, it was concluded that the action was “a true anarchitectural event.” Beyond the similarities of shattered glass, the particular attention paid to intact wholes and hierarchies, whether formal or societal, is one that persists through Matta-Clark’s own work. Another similarity between the works is an act of violence, either processual or performative. Maud Lavin is perhaps the most critical in her reading of Matta-Clark’s work, asserting that much of his process – of possessing, cutting, and splitting – is a 61 McNair’s description of the event and his interpretation of it can be found in interview form in Jacobs, p. 96. It is the only interview in the book in which someone recalls their relationship with Matta-Clark as anything less than positive. He said, “What he ended up doing was a very aggressive and violent act. The outlaw artist against good taste and Mr. Right Architect. Yet it had other implications that created a harsh and nightmarish moment…If I had had any inkling that Kristalnacht would have been one of the readings of the piece, I would have stopped the action immediately.”  Cheng 24 “violation of the feminine order.” Her criticism of Splitting is especially pointed, insisting that Matta-Clark’s work is a form of “possession through destruction.”62 It is worth considering Stephen Walker’s persuasive counterargument, namely that Lavin’s argument rests on the presumption of a “prior wholeness and the priority of wholes,” and that the act of splitting a house, for example, is an alteration to the materiality of the whole.63 Matta-Clark’s alterations were never directed to the surface of a structure, but to the “internal dependencies of its underlying structure system.”64 Similarly, McNair’s criticism of Window Blow-Out was directed towards Matta-Clark’s destruction of a prior whole: the “sacred space” of the IAUS office. It did not consider the already broken societal structures that reinforce exclusion, poverty, and disinvestment, which were the real targets of Matta-Clark’s air gun. This is a critical observation to keep in mind in considering anarchitecture in relation to the artist’s oeuvre. It would not be wrong to read anarchitecture with a particular emphasis on “an” as a prefix meaning “not” or “without.” As Window Blow- Out shows, Matta Clark’s opposition towards architecture was based on the fact that architectural forms existed in a vacuum, outside of the social, political, and economic realities of the city in which he lived. There is a palpable tension, however, between Matta-Clark’s desire for regeneration and an impulse for destruction, an uneasy interdependence that I perceive to be at the heart of anarchitecture, and one that affects its legacy as an unfulfilled artistic endeavor. 62 Lee, p. 114. 63 Walker, p. 123. 64 Ibid.  Cheng 25 In the “Anarchitecture Show,” the group displayed a photo of the World Trade Center Towers. Unlike the other photographs, this one had a name – The Space In- between. Matta-Clark’s time in SoHo coincided with the construction of the towers; he would have had a clear view of the structures every day. The two monoliths both fascinated and repelled him. On January 21, 1975, he wrote a formal letter to Robert Lendenfrost inquiring about a collaborative anarchitecture exhibit at the site. Two weeks later, on February 5, he composed an eloquent letter to Controlled Demolition, Inc., one of the country’s foremost demolition firms, to inquire about possibility of acquiring explosives for an exhibit at the WTC. He signed the letter “a true admirer of your Art.” Luckily, he found a kindred spirit in J. Mark Loizeaux, the president of the company, whose highly personal and engaging response includes this sentiment: “I…find it refreshing to communicate with an individual who is more broad-minded with respect to the definitions of art.”65 In a letter to the anarchitecture group two years prior, on December 10, 1973, Matta- Clark drew a small sketch of two crossed-out rectangular forms that bear an uncanny resemblance to the Twin Towers. They rest on a horizon line, on which a sun is beginning to rise. The caption reads, THE PERFECT STRUCTURE (RETURN TO AN INFINITE HORIZON OFF MAN) 66 ERASE ALL THE BUILDINGS ON A CLEAR HORIZON.” 65 These letters are archived at the Canadian Centre for Art and Architecture but have been published by Cabinet Magazine, Issue 20: Ruins. Winter 2005/06. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/matta-clark_loizeaux.php 66 Replicated in Moure, p. 370  Cheng 26 Bibliography Amelunxen, Hubertus von, Angela Lammert, and Philip Ursprung, eds. Gordon Matta- Clark: Moment to Moment Space. Berlin: Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, 2012. Atlee, James. “Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier.” Tate Papers Spring, no. 07 (2007). http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7297. Atlee, James, and Lisa Le Feuvre. Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between. Tuscon: Nazraeli Press, 2003. Béar, Liza. “Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building.” Avalanche. New York, December 1974. Deutsche, Rosalyn. “The Threshole of Democracy.” In Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960s, edited by John Alan Farmer, 94–101. New York: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1999. Hurtt, Steven. “Conjectures on Urban Form/Studio Projects.” The Cornell Journal of Architecture 2 (1982): 54–141. Jacob, Mary Jane. Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1985. Jager, Nita, ed. Earth Art. Ithaca: Office of University Publications, Cornell University, 1970. Kastner, Jeffrey, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard, eds. Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates. New York: Cabinet Books, 2005. Krauss, Rosalind, and Yve-Alain Bois. Formless: A User’s Guide. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1997.  Cheng 27 Moure, Gloria, ed. Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006. Avalanche, no. Summer/Fall (1973): 62. Pommer, Richard. “The Idea of ‘Idea as Model.’” In Idea as Model, edited by Kenneth Frampton and Silvia Kolbowski, 3–9. New York: Rizzoli International, 1981. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978. Ursprung, Philip. “Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Legacy of the 1970s.” Singapore: FCL: Future Cities Laboratory, 2012. http://www.fcl.ethz.ch/fcl- gazette/gazette-17-anarchitecture-gordon-matta-clark-and-the-legacy-of-the-1970s- pdf/. Accessed October 20, 2015. Wigley, Mark. “Anarchitectures: The Forensics of Explanation.” Log 15, no. Winter (2009): 121–36. Yee, Lydia. Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s. New York: Prestel, 2011.