New York. Architecture, photography and audiovisual.

Son of the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta and the also New York painter Anne Clark, he grew up in this artistic environment with his twin brother Sebastian in Manhattan, where the family decided to move from Europe fleeing World War II.

Between 1962 and 1968, Gordon Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell University, being interrupted in 1963 to move to the Sorbonne University in Paris to study French literature for a year.

Matta-Clark wanted to extrapolate art to everyday life and social problems. Between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, the social situation of New York was marked by the consequences of the economic crisis derived from the new urban plan of 1961, which sought to transform the city into a financial center at the level world. Cuts in social budgets were applied and this fact had a very negative impact on the working classes, which in many cases were forced to leave their homes. Real estate speculation was favored and one of the neighborhoods most affected by this crisis was the Bronx. His rejection of this circumstance and his particular way of working, so different from the artistic, urban and architectural currents that prevailed in that decade, led him to be known for his peculiar interventions in the abandoned buildings of the city, the "cuttings" . These interventions consisted of making large cuts and extractions in the walls and slabs with polygonal and conical geometric shapes. Using saws and chainsaws, Matta-Clark allowed natural light to re-make its way through the perforations inside the rooms of these forgotten buildings. In this way, it managed to give relevance for the last time to buildings in disuse or about to be demolished. These interventions consisted of making cuts and extractions on the partitions of the buildings, presenting shapes that responded to certain geometric patterns.

In this context, the general feeling of unease in society due to the Vietnam War and the demonstrations organized by student groups against the government's calls to fight the war, had as a response from many artists the carrying out experimental artistic activities, which were not intended to produce pieces to be sold in art galleries for an elitist market, but rather sought to influence the working classes, through everyday life, nature, the city and the city. architecture. These experimental activities were carried out around the district known today as SoHo, which at that time was still a decaying industrial area of Manhattan, but due to the new urban plan its demolition was already planned. His concern to give new meaning to all those buildings that, while preserving their structure in perfect condition, had been rejected by the new development plans of the city, led him to search for vacant buildings. Matta-Clark was one of the main precursors of this trend, which was joined by many artists who also defended a conception of art detached from the better positioned social classes.

Often this group of artists would meet and discuss the need to bridge the gap between art and society. Gordon Matta-Clark questioned the role that architecture was taking. He rejected the underlying economic interest of the urban plans of the city, which is why his interventions are understood as a criticism of the model of conversion of cities based on destroying to rebuild.

His work does not have a linear evolution, in a process of rotation or transformation into a circle, he takes up and interjects his ideas and concepts. Convinced that the city, its architecture and its urbanism were both a metaphor and a reality of the human condition, he sought to approach them in an interactive and vitalist way, so that both construction and deconstruction had a configurative character. The city was unstable and polymorphous and continually oscillated between entropy and order, as a result of the anarchic action of numerous and varied influences, so perhaps he liked to use the term Anarchitecture to mean many of the concepts that underlie his work.

This concern leads him to create very metaphorical incisions (“cutting”) in space or in any existing system, be it political or physical. The actions that generate cuts in their buildings are a physical act that implies transgression, breaking limits, but they are also mental projections that link different areas of the building, turning it into an experience.

His interest in the use of the film camera stems from the consideration that it is the most precise means to capture space and the closest to transmit the experience. Although a part of his films are based on his performances and actions in buildings, he always conceives them as works in themselves.

To underline his ideas, he operated precisely on the residues that the physical and social entropy of the citizenry was leaving as testimony. Abandoned houses in old slums, right on the frontiers of order, where the discourse of the powerful loses its shame. In passing, he demonstrated how politics and criticism are inseparable from art even in a redefined modernity. Redefinition that implied valuing the architecture of the city and urbanism as shared and flexible aesthetic experiences, but in no case directed.

Gordon Matta-Clark's artistic trajectory stands out for being of a style and characteristics totally opposite to those that prevailed at that time in New York, which were based on minimalist artistic styles and pop art, aimed at a market with great purchasing power. In this context, Matta-Clark's artistic work is included within conceptual art since he rejected the idea of considering the object itself a work of art. For him, the importance falls on what is to be transmitted, the actions and processes necessary to carry out the work.

This way of working in buildings makes Matta-Clark's work often linked by some critics with deconstructivism, as is the case of the writer Maud Lavin, who argues that Matta-Clark's work is characterized by cuts with impersonal and clean geometric shapes typical of the minimalist style. However, Matta-Clark's interventions must be considered totally opposed to this current, since what he wanted was to give visibility to social and urban problems. Given the danger of collapse that the cuts produced in the structures of the buildings, all the properties in which Gordon Matta-Clark worked were demolished shortly after his intervention. That is why none of the buildings in which it intervened is currently preserved. However, Gordon Matta-Clark's work is documented through an extensive compilation of videos and photographs that he commissioned himself, aware of this fact.