Gordon Matta-Clark
02 April - 04 May 2013
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GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Above and Below
2 April - 4 May 2013
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of late works by
Gordon Matta-Clark, focusing in particular on his activities as a
filmmaker. Curated by Jessamyn Fiore, the show features the artist’s
explorations in subterranean New York and Paris alongside building cuts
and projects involving aerial elevation. It is on view at the gallery’s
519 West 19th Street space in New York.
The exhibition begins above ground with City Slivers, Matta-Clark’s
fragmented portrait of New York City from 1976. Eschewing a clear
viewpoint and leaving large parts of the screen black, viewers are
offered vertical cuts of bustling streets and skyscrapers interspersed
with panoramas taken from atop the World Trade Center. The shifting
viewing angles, sometimes shown simultaneously, seem at once celebratory
and nervously laden, and contain a poignant, if perhaps subliminal,
reference to the artist’s twin brother, who fell to his death from a
window in their shared apartment that summer. A brief and barely legible
text towards the end of the film includes the words "he just hit the
pavement…face down.”
Made a year earlier, Conical Intersect was filmed in and around
Matta-Clark’s iconic cut through two properties awaiting demolition next
to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (under construction at the
time). The film reveals various stages of the elaborate project, whereby
a large circular shape was sliced from a heavy masonry, street-facing
wall in one building, and a conical space carved out across the other
side at an upward angle, piercing a small hole in the roof. The
laborious digging through several layers of the buildings’ foundations
was complemented two years later with Sous-sols de Paris (1977), where
the camera was taken below ground to multi-level tunnels and structures
long abandoned. Through minimal editing, the underground—illuminated
only by handheld torches—is contrasted with brief clips from the streets
above. Matta-Clark thus creates a dialogue between new and old Paris,
the visible and hidden city, both light and sinister. Deep below L’Opera
and Les Halles, a neatly arranged wall composed of thousands of human
skulls and bone fragments dating from the days of the Revolution finds a
curious match with countless wine bottles, safely stored in the cool
temperatures. The film ends, perhaps appropriately, with a wine tasting.
Substrait (Underground Dailies) (1976), Matta-Clark’s underground
portrait of New York, reveals a view of the American city never seen by
most people.
Burial chambers underneath the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, tracks
running deep below Grand Central Station, and sewage structures with
underground rivers streaming through, combine to make up the urban
tissue beneath the surface—vividly compared in the explanatory dialogues
accompanying the film as "arteries and veins.”
Photographs and drawings accompany the films on view, documenting both
the metropolitan explorations and contemporaneous projects by the
artist.
Jacob’s Ladder, Matta-Clark’s ambitious project for Documenta 6 in
Kassel, Germany, in 1977, originally included plans to develop an aerial
dwelling site suspended some fifteen feet above ground, but ultimately
took on the shape of a long woven net attached to a thirty-story-tall
chimney, which brave visitors could ascend one thin batten at a time.
The title of the installation was chosen by Matta-Clark for its analogy
to the Old Testament story of Jacob’s dream, of a staircase connecting
Heaven and Earth. By implication, it is also a reference to brotherly
rivalry, as this vision occurred while he was fleeing from his brother
Esau, with whom he had been fighting for inheritance. As such, the
project contains perhaps another reference to the loss of artist’s twin
brother a year earlier.
A series of diagrammatic sketches entitled Sky Hook (studies for a
balloon building) (1978) are testaments to Matta-Clark’s idealistic
interest in architecture and urban renewal. Based on vigorous research
into the mechanics of ballooning, these drawings outline tent-like
towers attached to large inflatable shapes. Balancing somewhere between
actual proposals for flexible, economic housing networks and playful
fantasies, they map out alternative spaces in defiance of existing
social environments and even gravity. As such, they match one of the
inspirations behind the subterranean expeditions, where the search for
the "negative” spaces of the city became part of a broader interest in
"mapping…lost foundations: working back into society from beneath.”
Born in New York in 1943, Gordon Matta-Clark is widely considered one of
the most influential artists working in the 1970s. He was a key
contributor to the activity and growth of the New York art world in SoHo
from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1978.
Since 1998, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark has been represented by
David Zwirner, and Above and Below marks the fifth solo exhibition of
the artist’s work at the gallery in New York.
In 1985, the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work was
presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and traveled until
1989 to over a dozen institutions worldwide, including the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Basel; Le Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne,
France; Brooklyn Museum; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure was the first full-scale
retrospective
organized twenty years later by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, in 2007. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. From 2009
to 2010, Gordon Matta-Clark: Undoing Spaces toured South America to
venues including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museu de
Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; and Museo de
Arte de Lima.
Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections,
including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen,
Antwerp; San Francisco Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The
Gordon Matta-Clark Archive is held at the Canadian Centre for
Architecture in Montreal, and includes the artist’s personal
correspondence, notebooks, drawings, photographs, slides, films, as well
as other archival material documenting his life and work.
Above and Below is curated by Jessamyn Fiore, an independent curator and
writer. In 2007, she became Director of Thisisnotashop, a
not-for-profit gallery space in Dublin, which supported emerging
artists. She also co-founded The Writing Workshop in 2007, which
functioned as a collaborative forum for writers and artists. Fiore is
co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark with her mother Jane
Crawford, Matta-Clark’s widow. She received a Masters from The National
College ofArt and Design, Dublin, in 2010. In 2011, Fiore curated 112
Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) at David Zwirner in New York,
which led to the critically acclaimed, eponymous catalogue, published
by David Zwirner and Radius Books in 2012.
www.davidzwirner.com http://artnews.org/davidzwirner/?exi=37996&Gordon_Matta_Clark
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