Gordon Matta-Clark

"This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York, where he initiated a series of site-specific works in derelict areas of the South Bronx. The borough's many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark's raw material. His series 'Bronx Floors' dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of ther ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with 'Conical Interserct', a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of seventeenth-century row houses slatted for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou's construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark's practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics."

"This artist's book reproduces a selection of printed paper strips created for an installation, Walls Paper, at 112 Greene Street in 1972. Walls Paper was only presented once during Matta-Clark's lifetime. It consisted of photographs taken of partially demolished tenements in the Bronx and the Lower East Side which were cropped and the color manipulated, then printed on long strips of newsprint and hung from floor to ceiling. This is a scarce unbroken first edition, a very fresh and bright copy."--Ursus Books & Gallery, New York.

"[A] compilation of new and classic writing and visual art on spatial culture in modernity post-9/11.The work gathered here creates an alternative perspective on the built environment through contemporary culture. Particular attention is paid to spaces that are in some way temporary, contingent, marginal, or fictional in order to critically analyse the meaning of art, and to provide a tenable counter-narrative to architecture's dominant ideologies concerning technological imperatives and the monumental"--P. of cover.

Gordon Matta-Clark used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He carved out sections of buildings in order to reveal their hidden constructions, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition. When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained. He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments. The placement of Matta-Clark's work in the Pulitzer's building by Tadao Ando offers the means to recall the artist's lost interventions.