Review: Urban Alchemy: Gordon Matta-Clark

Abstract

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is a seductively self-contained private museum set in an urban wasteland. Established by Emily Rauh Pulitzer, who came to St. Louis in 1964 as a curator, its 2001 building was designed by the Japanese Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando.Charged by his client to eschew curatorial conventions, Ando's is not an easy environment in which to set exhibitions. Long expanses of glass in galleries cause some to be too bright for fragile paper; interiors feel oversized-or intensely intimate. Visitors enter the Main Gallery and turn so as to look toward Ellsworth Kelly's eye-catching Blue Black, permanently positioned at the opposite end. This painting is made even more pronounced by a line of daylight falling from above, yet in designing exhibitions, curators often isolate it, as it is generally unrelated to what they are showing.Blue Black faces a broad, cascading stair leading downward; here audiences regularly sit for symposia, musical offerings, or other events that are also part of the institution's core mission; otherwise this area remains open. The art and architecture in the Main Gallery thus conspire to establish an assertive emptiness within the institution's largest exhibition space. Catalogs from past exhibitions, in fact, underscore the Pulitzer's tendency to avoid hanging art along the walls near the stair, likely based on both the desire to isolate the Kelly piece visually and an understandable effort to avoid distractions that might make traveling down the stair unsafe.Until June of 2010, two large photographs of Gordon Matta-Clark's 1975 Day's End (Pier 52) had been tucked away at the bottom of the Main Gallery's stair: illegal cuts in the corrugated steel skin of an unused industrial interior brought forth an improbable -basilica. The sensitive siting of these photographs avoided heavy-handed assertions about links between Ando's space and Matta-Clark's, allowing their congruence to catch up with visitors-an approach that is typical of the Pulitzer, which fastidiously forgoes affixing text of any kind to its walls.Urban Alchemy: Gordon Matta-Clark, curated by Francesca Herndon-Consagra, featured works from the artist's most prolific and provocative period, 1973 to 1977, along with pieces that were assembled posthumously. Herndon-Consagra was formerly curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum; this, her first show at the Pulitzer, reflected the greater freedom of her position as their senior curator. The choice of Matta-Clark originated in part from her familiarity with his father, Surrealist Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren, but she also discovered an odd coincidence between Ando and Matta-Clark: they were both twins. In fact, these two men, born within two years of each other (in 1941 and 1943), were each the eldest twin and, intriguingly, both separated from their fathers and far-more favored siblings early on.Is this the reason that each is also inclined to create a charged emptiness, what Matta-Clark once described in a scribbled note as