Performative Deconstruction and The Founder of Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-clark

Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Gordon Matta-Clark, an architect, artist, and the James Dean type rebel. Recognized as a key contributor to the Conceptual, Process and Performance art that emerged from New York City in the late 1960s and 70s, Matta-Clark is a pretty big deal in the context of the underground art world. In the latter half of the 1900s, New York City had seen better days. With crime and financial crisis as the dominant themes of the decade, Gordon Matta-Clark declared himself an “Anarchitect. ” Like any good anarchist, he blamed capitalism and what he described as the failures of institutionalized architecture as well as the modernist movement for what was happening to his city. Capitalism - that one we’ve heard before. But how could you blame the beautiful, geometric simplicity of modernist architecture? In the words of a bitter and comically named Marxist, Mikhail Lifshitz explained in 1966: “Among them (the modernists) are a cult of power, a joy at destruction, a love for brutality, a thirst for a thoughtless life and blind obedience. ” Was it the words of this seemingly unhinged critic that inspired Matta-Clark to take a swing at the architectural institution?

To the best of our knowledge, the answer is maybe. Matta-Clark’s work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works. His most famous "building cuts,” as the name suggests, involved cutting large sections out of the facades of structures and playing with the light that shone through the new openings. Seen from the street, the impressively deconstructed buildings disrupted the realities of the people living in New York. Forty years after his passing at the age of 35, society is still experiencing similar problems. Hyper-gentrification, growing inequality, a general doubt in institutional authority to name a few, 2018 has been a wild ride we’d probably all like to get off. Inspired by the iconic work of Gordon Matta-Clark, architects and artists today have realized manipulating buildings or riffing off old structuresis an effective way to communicate messages. A London based artist and architect, Alex Chinneck, uses his pieces to challenge the preconceived perspectives viewers have as they walk down the streets of cities in England. His most recent piece (just went up in August), ‘Open to the Public’ is a converted abandoned office building in Ashford, Kent. Chinneck cheekily added two zippers that appear to unzip the exterior of the building, revealing a dilapidated space within. Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen created a replica of Villa Savoye, one of Le Corbusier's most famous buildings, and sunk it in a Danish fjord.

Villa Sovoye is hailed as the poster child of the modernity movement. According to the artist, sinking it is a commentary on the current political landscape and representational of the values of modernity that have been swamped by technology in both the United States and Britain. Over on the coast of Taiwan, a team of artists has transformed a 30 ft brutalist concrete loudspeaker, formerly used to broadcast anti-communist propaganda to China, into an art installation. The artists intend the project to "play with the idea of territory as geographic, but also as sonic and mental entity. ” With just enough vagueness to give us some idea of what he is talking about, Augustin Maurs, explains: ”Art doesn’t have to be explicitly political to be political. ” This installation is most likely a commentary on the ever-present tensions between China and Taiwan. When an artist creates work that distorts the reality the observers live in, it sparks insightful reflection. 40 years ago, Matta-Clark understood by challenging people’s perceptions, he could bring about change. Like him, current artists use the scale, visibility, and power of these large pieces to drive conversations. These installations attempt to transform otherwise stationary monoliths and reshape them through a performative deconstruction.