lost paws:

Gordon Matta-Clark at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Review by Anthony Vidler in ArtForumExcerpts: "Matta-Clark’s practice took many forms—photography, film, installation, action, and others he invented—so it is gratifying to see that, alongside the variety of media recording the cuttings, the exhibition also covers an impressive range of his other work, including vitrines displaying the index cards that were so much a part of his “systems” approach to research; the tresses of his hair, cut off, numbered, and organized to recombine into a wig; the bricks he made from discarded glass bottles in a kiln installed in the basement of the exhibition space at 112 Greene Street in New York; documentation pertaining to Food, the SoHo restaurant Matta-Clark cofounded in 1971; and Super-8 film of Tree Dance, the exceptionally moving performance Matta-Clark staged at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1971. The images in this latter piece are striking examples of his perfect eye, attuned equally to the nuances of architectural forms and bodies in movement, as well as to the poetics of decay, of detritus, and finally of space itself.

A number of significant revelations emerge from such a comprehensive collection of material, particularly after so many partial glimpses of Matta-Clark’s work in previous shows. Among the most noteworthy of the items on display, especially given the difficulty of reconstructing the spatial nature of the buildings before and after cutting, are several large photomontages, which provide an almost filmic vision of Matta-Clark’s process. Particularly striking are the photomontages of the “Core” and “Datum” cuts of A W-Hole House, 1973, itself a beautiful exemplar of the complex geometrical nature of Matta-Clark’s actions, as he sliced horizontally and vertically through the square studio with its pyramidal roof. In an incisive catalogue essay exploring Matta-Clark’s relation to his father (the quasi-Surrealist artist Roberto Matta), as well as to architectural history and the “origins” of architecture in particular, Princeton professor of architecture Spyros Papapetros posits a parallel between a consideration of the conceptual nature of the Egyptian pyramids in the second volume of Sigfried Giedion’s Eternal Present (1964) and Matta-Clark’s use of the pyramid as “a median plane to invert his previous architectural education.” Papapetros’s argument is especially persuasive because the influence of Giedion’s earlier book, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941)—the central “set book” of the 1960s that saw the Baroque as the progenitor of the Modern Movement, the dramatic spatial geometries of the former transformed by the collapsing of space-time in the latter—can be felt in the cuttings Conical Intersect, 1975, and Office Baroque, 1977. The large color Cibachrome photocollages documenting the creation of Office Baroque might well be playful elaborations of Giedion’s premise, taking it literally but reversing the historical movement by returning the modern to its Baroque roots.”