Description
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect. Yale University Press for Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2017. 8vo in publishers hardcover, with jacket. 170 pages, richly illustrated. Text in English. Fine clean copy
First edition
“Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing.”
Monograph of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, “whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York. There he employed the term ‘anarchitecture,” combining ‘anarchy’ and ‘architecture,” to describe the site-specific works he initially realized in the South Bronx. The borough’s many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark’s raw material. His series Cuts dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of the ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with Conical Intersect, a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of 17th-century row houses slated for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou’s construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark’s practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetic”
