matta-clark retrospective
April 2nd, 2008 • research
Spent the day in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art - kept finding myself back in the Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective, and his sculptural building cuts - shapes and slices carved out of abandoned buildings.
More than anything else, it reminds me of Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 sculpture House, a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house, but there’s something else, something oddly alien or distant about the seemingly familiar materials Matta-Clark excavated.
The collection is presented primarily through Matta-Clark’s photographs, and selected installations of removed building segments. The problem there, though, is that I wanted to be able to enter the actual spaces and take control of the sight-lines myself; perhaps the denial (or specific shaping) of sight is part of the point of the work, but I’m not sure you can get an idea of what you’re missing until you’ve seen it disappear from view.
Granted, we’re dealing with art-works, or buildings, that don’t exist any more, but the way in which they’re invoked here has the quality of shifting the focus away from the voids to the shapes removed from those spaces - and I’m not sure if that was an intention of the curation or not.
Still, most definitely worth a visit if you’re in the city, and that probably only means you, Dan. (The Alexander Calder mobiles are also great - and the best lit thing in the building.)
