What we think of today when someone mentions the district of SOHO in New York is luxury: a place of expensive designer boutiques, making it the top shopping destination. What also characterizes the neighborhood is its unique buildings, having the world’s greatest concentration of historic cast-iron architecture. In 1974, however, that same district was a place that smelled of machine oils and neglect– abandoned, industrial buildings; people thought were too hollow to have anything to offer. Gordon Matta-Clark saw these streets as his canvas.
Matta-Clark was an American artist; a trained architect who never built a thing, and instead directly engaged with the environment, pioneering a radical approach to art making. One of his practices, called Building Cuts, involved him physically cutting through buildings as a conceptual process of ‘opening it up’ and, with that, displaying their insides. He strongly believed that matter does not arrange itself in our way. It drives for comfort, sprawls, and overflows away from its structure. Letting the light through, showing the guts, he would reveal that what looked like a solid and permanent structure was just wood and plaster: someone’s old decision about how space should work. He transformed abandoned buildings with an idea of unveiling the anatomy of the city and having it interact with its environment. His work, done in Paris, Conical Intersect, for example, was a tornado-shaped hole carved in the walls and floors of two 17th century townhouses in 1975, next to the Centre Pompidou construction site. The hole’s widest opening faces the street, offering passersby a view of the buildings’ internal skeletons: an invitation for mutual participation.
Through demolishing existing architectural spaces, Matta-Clark wanted to expose how cities trap and control people through enclosures. This idea shows up vividly in his project Fake Estates, during which he bought tiny, unusable parts of land such as alleyways or the ‘in-betweens’ at city auction for $25 each. He then paired them with maps and photographic collages. The project was less about the land itself and more about the absurdity of the system that produced it. The art was supposed to openly and radically critique the absurdity of ownership, claiming that a strip of pavement too narrow to stand on could still be legally owned by someone. He argued that property lines are merely arbitrary human decisions, motivated by the logic of capital.
A group emerged around Matta-Clark. Among them were Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Richard Nonas, and Carol Goodden, who collaborated on the ephemeral actions of merging anarchy and architecture; they called themselves the Anarchitecture group. Together, they rejected traditional architectural boundaries, creating conceptual works and photographs that challenged how capitalist systems controlled urban spaces, housing, and property. Those abandoned buildings weren’t chosen only because of availability. For the Anarchitecture group, their emptiness and lack of assigned meaning were significant in themselves. In a city where every building has a designated role, architecture is authoritative, dominant, and overstepping. An empty building without a ‘plot’ is lacking that authority and can become honest. The artist wanted to showcase that kind of honesty: cutting the uncertainty of the building open and confronting what was underneath all the confident structure. The abandoned buildings of 1970s New York were not failures. For Gordon, they were the only buildings telling the truth.
The Anarchitecture group was anti-ownership, anti-building authority– they rejected building permanence and strived to dissect art and disconnect it from the market. However, the art did not stay far from the market. Although Matta-Clark died at the young age of 35 and did not live to experience the transformation of human approach towards abandoned buildings, we now see that the institution consumed the anti-institutional. The abandoned factory is now a loft marketed on its “industrial chic character.” Landlords charge extra for the look of industrial abandonment, and interior designers chase the same effect in buildings that were never abandoned at all. One can imagine fresh walls sprayed with fake patina, or pipes installed that lead to nowhere. Decay has been aestheticized, commodified, and has become a trend. The homes that were once classified as hollow and neglected are being rented back to us.
Gentrification, in the context of Matta-Clark’s art, does not just displace such artists but erases the conditions that made the Anarchitecture gesture of revealing the honesty of buildings possible. Judging through the lens of Matta-Clark’s motives, I believe he would classify gentrification as a sort of building cut– but not as truthful. The operation hollows an honest neighborhood quietly, avoiding the connotations of brutal performative demolishing. It lets light in for new people, leaving the facade standing. In neighborhoods like SoHo itself, the cast iron buildings that Matta-Clark once cut open with his saw are now luxury lofts. The conditions that made his art possible– the cheap and easily available margins of the city– have been converted and monetized, leaving no hidden truth behind walls to cut open and reveal.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975. © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. © Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hi, I’m Julianna, and I’m a second year BEMACC student from Poland. I travel and ski whenever I get the chance. Writing is my way to interpret my thoughts and to belong. I am under no obligation to make sense to anyone, but I still hope that you enjoy reading my words as much as I enjoy writing them!!!
