That man’s cousin was the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, the subject of a sharp and splendid new show titled “Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Matta-Clark was born in New York in June 1943 to the American artist Anne Clark and the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, and his boyhood was spent surrounded by artists. (His godmother was Teeny Duchamp, Marcel’s wife.) In 1962, he went to Cornell University to study architecture; he graduated in 1968 and moved back to New York the following year, having determined that architecture was a useless pursuit, but that the derelict landscape of his hometown might provide the ideal blank canvas for whatever came next.

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Gordon Matta-Clark and Gerry Hovagimyan working on “Conical Intersect,” 1975
Gordon Matta-Clark and Gerry Hovagimyan working on “Conical Intersect,” 1975 © 2017 ESTATE OF GORDON MATTA-CLARK/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK

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The traditional top-down, centrally planned fantasias of architects such as Minoru Yamasaki had imploded. A year before Yamasaki’s World Trade Center opened in the Financial District, all 33 of his Pruitt-Igoe housing block buildings in St. Louis were torn down after years of failing elevators, poor ventilation, declining population, and rising crime — conditions not unfamiliar to residents of the South Bronx. 

In contrast to Yamasaki, Matta-Clark was after an organic, vernacular style, an architecture for and by the local population, adapted according to their own imaginations. Graffiti, which he’d started to document in photographs, occurred to him as a flash of possibility — a reclamation of public space by the citizens it was intended for. When he began taking pictures of concrete walls covered in street tags in 1973, graffiti was in its infancy, and his pictures — presented together for the first time in this exhibition — are cursory, fragmentary snapshots, casually framed, informal. Their value is largely documentary, but for the artist, they were markers of a community’s creative capacities.

This spirit was at the heart of Matta-Clark’s ambition. It was what led him to found Food, an affordable, community-oriented restaurant in Soho, with the artists Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard in 1971. But his goals were not necessarily constructive. More often, as with the “Bronx Floors” series, wherein he carved his way through the city, his approach was, if not destructive, at least deconstructive. “Anarchitecture attempts to solve no problem,” he said in 1973; it was just an artist’s way of seeing the world and reorganizing its puzzle. This was the opposite of the social programs of Yamasaki or Le Corbusier, who designed utopian models to which everyone was meant to conform. Instead, Matta-Clark offered an artist’s singular, idiosyncratic vision.

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