Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. - book review

PAMELA M. LEE

Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 280 pp.; 99 ills. $35

The intentions of Object to be Destroyed are extremely ambitious. The author, Pamela Lee, characterizes as "essayistic" and "commemorative" the contributions that up until this point have been dedicated to the site-specific projects of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Lee promises to remedy this state of affairs. How? In three ways, substantially: first, by discussing the work of this artist against the background of the artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, including site-specific art, process art, minimalism, and conceptual art; second, by analyzing the work in its multiple articulations, specifically, building cuts, fragments, photographs, performances, and culinary experiments; and, finally, by presenting the work as an alternative to the Hegelian model of progress.

The two catalogues that were published on this artist (from the retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1985 and at the IVAM in Valencia in 1992) analyze the individual works in all their inflections and contain a remarkable number of the most significant interviews and essays written on the artist, several of which, such as the contributions by Judith Russi Kirshner and Dan Graham, are excellent. The catalogues are furnished with magnificent illustrations both in color and in black-and-white. These publications, in short, fulfill the task of a catalogue and should not be faulted for lacking a unified thematic approach.

Lee, by contrast, organizes her monograph around six themes, which she develops in the introduction and five chapters and supplements with black-and-white reproductions of a few works. Through these means, together with long historical and theoretical digressions, the author attempts to demonstrate her thesis. While the book enriches the reader from the perspective of information and stimulates reflections on places, characters, movements, and poetics, the impression that remains in the end is of a rift between the theoretical apparatus and the work. The digressions, often too drawn out and self-indulgent, do not in fact seem to foster our comprehension of the work but rather almost take us further away from it.

"How does one approach an artist whose mode of production is bound up with the work's destruction?" (p. xiii). The question posed by Lee at the opening of the text remains largely unanswered. Maintaining a balance between the reading of the artist's work and the thematic openings suggested by it is, to be sure, extremely difficult. As a comparison, one may think of Rosalind Krauss's 1993 essay dedicated to Sol LeWitt, "The LeWitt Matrix." Krauss's point of departure is a work entitled Autobiography and the way in which LeWitt employs the grid as a container of the image. She leads us back to this same theme at the essay's conclusion. Her central discussion, articulated through a series of points, enlarges the general scope without ever detaching itself from the work. The only exception to this accomplishment occurs in her fourth point, where LeWitt's sketches of 1958, inspired by Piero della Francesca's cycle on the Legend of the Cross, become a pretext for an overly long dissertation on the master of Arezzo.

Let us now follow Matta-Clark along the path that Lee has mapped out for us. The theme of the introduction is "Gordon Matta-Clark and the question of 'work.'" Lee maintains that to speak of "work" in relation to Matta-Clark is a paradox: the artist in fact preaches an "unbuilding"; he offers us not a "total, finished and whole" product, according to the rules of Western aesthetics, but only residues, fragments, films, documents. He compels us, finally, toward a dynamic and temporalized fruition, "radically destabilizing the terms of aesthetic experience through their dramatic shifts in scale and vertiginous mode of address" (p. xiv). And she concludes, "Matta-Clark's art forcefully registers its workless character ... in contrast to an artistic 'work' he offered instead a kind of artistic play--an idea of art as practice or use" (pp. xiii, xiv). While his projects with buildings in the process of destruction could lead us to assimilate Matta-Clark's work with performance, and despite the fact that the posthum ous photographic testimony might position his work within the realm of conceptual "dematerialization," Lee points out to us, "His practice frustrates the conventions of 'work' without reifying absence as popular conceptualist accounts were wont to do" (p. xv).

I believe, rather, that the work of Matta-Clark remains absolutely rooted in its time, and in the contradictory events that characterize that time. Already in 1965, for example, when Matta-Clark was still a student at Cornell University, the philosopher Richard Wollheim introduced for the first time the term minimal art, by which he meant a minimal artistic content. I suspect that the principal cause of our resistance derives from the fact that those objects do not present that which for centuries has been considered a fundamental ingredient: work, that is, a manifest effort." (1) According to Wollheim, we need to reconsider the significance of "making a work of art" and to introduce a new category, one that would be simultaneously "destructive and creative, consisting in the demolition of that which the artist deems in excess. (2) The "workless" aspect, then, is already inherent in the three-dimensional minimalist object. In regard to the destabilization produced by the dramatic shift in scale, Robert Morris explains to us in his "Notes on Sculpture" (1966) that, despite its geometric and assertive appearance, the form of minimalist objects is not constant but varies according to the movements of the viewer and according to the conditions of the surrounding environment. And he explains that "there are two distinct factors: the known constant and the experienced variable. Only the apprehension of the gestalt is immediate while the experience of the work remains necessarily in time." (3) Richard Serra echoes Morris in discussing his work Shift from 1970: "I was searching for the dialectic between the perception of place in its totality and the relationship established with it while one walks." (4) Finally, regarding the "not finished, not total, not whole" character of Matta-Clark's work, the manifesto "Anti Form," written by Morris in 1968, had established the primacy of process over result and the choice of organic refuse as materials, organized in open, precarious, reversible, and perishable configurations.