Gordon Matta-Clark: ‘Somewhere Outside the Law’

Abstract

‘Nobody could construct buildings the way Gordon destructed them’, we read in the issue of Flash Art published shortly after the artist’s death. In this article the author sets out from the at once physical and social violence of Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions (their ‘cleanlined brutality’) so as to introduce the relation – and to introduce the negation in the relation – between Matta-Clark and the architects whom he places ‘at opposite ends of the pole’ from his own anarchitectural operation. But Matta-Clark proposes not so much an alternative usage of the enclosure of space as the diagram of a new spatial enunciation which, as the author tries to show, sheds new light on the very terms in which the question of art was posed at the end of the 1960s.