Books about Matta clark from Amazon.com

Although highly regarded during his short life—and honored by artists and architects today—the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space.

Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction—suggest about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the 1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making—that the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do these projects address the very writing of history, a history that imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of progress?



In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs..
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After studying architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark developed more interest in buildings about to be destroyed than in the ones about to be built, as most architects would. He first forced his way into abandoned apartment buildings in the Bronx , and using a chain saw, would act as an architecture pirate, cutting pieces of walls and floors, only to leave behind the remains of what once was architecture. From pieces of walls his work shifted, in 1974, to the scale of a whole suburban house. "Splitting", probably his most popular work, was made by cutting a vertical line through the entire width of the house, and transforming the cut into a yawn, after lowering the foundations on both sides of the house. Erasing the boundaries between architecture, sculpture, and even drawing (his cuts have often been refered to as drawings in space); his building-cuts can also be understood as a social critique of the standardized suburban architecture that flourished during the postwar decades. The book opens with Thomas Crow's survey text on the artist (24,000 words). Divided into 4 chapters plus an epilogue, this richly illustrated essay provides insight into the career of the artist, from his childhood spent between New York and Paris, to his premature death in 1978 at the age of 35. These essays span the multi-faceted practice of Gordon Matta-Clark, with a particular emphasis on his building-cuts, the group of works he is most renowned for and that compose the most important part of his career. This book also includes a "Documents" section, composed of original interviews, articles, and documents compiled by editor Corinne Diserens. Several interviews, some of them never published before, allow the reader to understand more fully, and through Matta-Clark's own voice, the more pragmatic, technical, and physical dimensions related to the creation of his building-cuts. Some articles and essays of reference, most of them published in the 1970s and today out of print, are also republished and offer a unique critical background and context to his work..
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Gordon Matta-Clark, scion and rebel, died at 35 in 1978 and has since become a cult figure of late-twentieth-century art. Born in New York and trained in architecture at Cornell, he went on to question the field's conventions in vivid projects that excised holes into existing buildings or assembled deeds to New York City alleys and curbs. As the son of the Chilean-born Surrealist painter Roberto Matta and Anne Clark, and godson of Marcel Duchamp, with whom he played a regular game of chess in the Village, Matta-Clark had grown up inside the art world, also working an as assistant to mavericks like Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson. His work and words, while sophisticated enough to make him an "artist's artist," and colossal and outgoing enough to draw public attention and affection, were always also grounded in social or political convictions. He addressed not only space and real estate (in other words, housing), but the ultimate in necessity and nourishment, food. His "Pig Roast" under the Brooklyn Bridge offered passersby 500 pork sandwiches, and Food, the artist-staffed restaurant that he opened with dancer Caroline Goodden in SoHo, became a headquarters for that nascent neighborhood in the early 70s. He consistently broke the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, photography and film, performance and installation, and above all the permanent and the transitory. Once in a while he also broke the law. This book, published in celebration of the gradual opening of Matta-Clark's archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, collects previously unavailable writings, including notecards and notebooks, along with interviews and more than 100 illustrations..
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"Transmission" is a comprehensive examination of the relationship between the work of renowned surrealist Roberto Matta (1912-2002) and his son, conceptual artist, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978). The book explores how Matta-Clark's exposure to artistic circles of his father's generation influenced the direction that his art would take, and how that played a role in the evolution of 1970s conceptual art. Essays draw parallels between the way each artist absorbed artistic and cultural trends to conceive new significant models for art. Sculpture, paintings, and works on paper by Matta, and sculpture, photographs, and works on paper by Matta-Clark are illustrated..
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In the summer of 1973, artist Gordon Matta-Clark discovered that the city of New York occasionally auctioned improbably tiny and frequently inaccessible parcels of land created by zoning eccentricities. Fascinated by these spaces, he bought 15 of them (14 in Queens, and 1 in Staten Island) for between $25 and $75 each, photographed them, and collated the photographs with the appropriate deeds and maps. He called the project Fake Estates. Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estates" further documents and advances this seminal work, and accompanies Cabinet magazine's exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns in New York. Included here are responses to Matta-Clark's original artwork by 20 contemporary artists including Francis Als, Jimbo Blachly, Mark Dion, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dan Price, and Mierle Ukeles. Odd Lots also provides the definitive Fake Estates history, thus adding new dimension to the scholarship on this important artist*all within the spirit of collaboration and experimentation that marked Matta-Clark's short, but influential career..
Price: $14.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This is, quite possibly, one of the world's best designed art books. Featured within its pages are works from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection--one of the world's most significant (and yes, controversial) collections of contemporary art. But this book doesn't merely present some 400 works by 40 artists, it also seeks, through its design, to provide an individual stage--or section--for each artist in order to highlight the artist's philosophy, or to play off of his or her signature works of art. For example, Raymond Pettibon's comic-like drawings unfold to a newspaper-sized spread, while Gordon Matta-Clark's opening page has a split in it that corresponds perfectly to the cut-out in the house of his now-iconic piece, Splitting. The photograph of the house is revealed in full when the page is turned. A list of each artist's works in the collection is provided at the start of their section, which is coded with a specific color for that artist, and often features changes in paper type that correspond to a specific body of work (Larry Clark's gritty black and white Tulsa images are printed on uncoated paper, while Rachel Khedoori's Pink Room color images are made even more vibrant by high-gloss paper.) With splendid color reproductions, color-coded pages, and luxurious gatefolds, this book is not just a book about art--it is art. Anyone who has a love of art, of design, or of books will treasure this volume, which also gives detailed specs on every piece of art, and a short bio on each artist. The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection reads as a book of 40 individual monographs . . . turning each page is a treat..
Price: $116.26 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Images of the deconstruction of abandoned buildings and industrial structures are closely associated with "anarchitect" Gordon Matta-Clark. Here, however, are the film works through which Matta-Clark furthered his lifelong excavation of urban dwellings. In this book, San Francisco Cinematheque presents a retrospective of the moving-image works through which Matta-Clark explored his aesthetic assumptions and philosophical inquiry. Featuring rarely published images and a quartet of imaginative essays, City Slivers and Fresh Kills establishes Matta-Clark's films as perhaps his most surprising, and certainly most viscerally arresting body of work, characterized by the same creative provocation, rough aesthetic beauty, and intellectual insight that idefined his signature architectural cuttings and slicings..
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