This film documents one of Gordon Matta-Clark’s signature ‘deconstructions’, a sculptural intervention into a modest house in a New Jersey suburb. He cuts through the centre of the house, splitting the structure in two, and allowing a sliver of light to penetrate the interior. He then chisels a gentle slope into the foundation under one half of the building, angling it away from the other. Alongside the footage of the work process, title cards explain that the house was part of a majority-Black neighborhood whose residents were displaced and houses scheduled for demolition as part of a larger urban development project. In this light, Matta-Clark’s act of slicing the house apart suggests a larger critique of the ways top-down architecture and planning efforts can split communities apart.
Matta-Clark studied architecture, though he never practiced as a conventional architect. Instead he forged his career in the context of the vibrant conceptual and performance art scenes of 1970s New York. Documentation through film, photography, maps, administrative documents, and other kinds of writing were key complements to his large-scale, sculptural interventions in buildings and urban spaces. His practice of what he called ‘anarchitecture’ (a portmanteau of ‘anarchy’ and ‘architecture’) proved deeply influential for a wider community of artists, architects, and activists who sought to resist the orderly, strictly regulated spaces and social structures of modern life.
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–-1978, United States) originally trained as an architect and became active in the conceptual and performance art scenes of 1970s New York. Believing that architecture reflects dominant social structures and thus is fertile ground for artist actions and interventions, Matta-Clark's practice of ’anarchitecture’ employed film, photography, and textual documentation to record and complement his large-scale architectural cuts in urban spaces, offering a language that could capture his physical and sculptural interventions in all their complexity.