René_Magritte_The_Empire_Of_Lights_1954

V.S.

Gordon Matta Clark_Splitting_1974

Entrambe le case sono illuminate, timidamente in Magritte che preferisce la penombra e il sottinteso.

L'atto voluto, imponente di Matta Clark, nonostante la violenza non rischiara totalmente, ma rappresenta una piccola apertura su una parte.

Sono piccoli momenti di lucidità, guardarsi prima del sonno in un rituale giornaliero, oppure fissare, mantenere la riflessione di un attimo trasmettendola inalterata come a ricordare quell'istante.

'Vederci Chiaro': affondare nelle basi, aprire l'ultima matrioska. Non è una scelta frequente e quando accade non è un'operazione semplice, spesso non riesce. Ho una gran simpatia per chi prova, scompone, destabilizza e poi... lo racconta!

]]> http://mobilome.wordpress.com/?p=200 Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:01:00 +0000 ivantozzi http://mobilome.fr.wordpress.com/2008/03/13/echaffauder-des-etages-2/


photos ivan tozzi

note précédente : échafauder des étages [1]

L'échafaudage est le temps de la construction, du renouveau. C'est le temps mis en suspension, en attente, un entre deux, d'ossatures. Mis à nu il n'est autre qu'un corps agrippé à un autre. Il est un plus, un appendice au changement : comme des allumettes à mes yeux pour ne plus dormir.

Histoire de trompe l'œil pour ne pas fermer les yeux. Entre un avant et un après. C'est la mise en forme d'un processus.

le chien andalou

Comment penser-formaliser le faire ? Ce qui est en train, ce qui n'est pas fini.
Penser les choses comme tel ! Figurer l'esquisse d'un devenir comme étant le résultat : tout le problème du projet ! Le projet est ce qui va advenir. Mais n'est il pas en soi un ensemble de processus d'étapes fini ? Ne serait- il pas une construction de l'étude, de l'esquisse ?

chantier pour le construction de Beaubourg - gordon matta clark

Lorsque l'on met un morceaux de sucre dans l'eau, à quel moment fond-il ? C'est ce temps là que j'aimerai revêtir ou in-vêtir. Habiter un temps où la position de l'instant est juste ! Où le prétexte d'une fin permet d'éclairer chaque instant comme voulu. De rendre sensible le mouvement, de le ralentir à ce qu'il est, un nouveau différent du premier mais présent à chaque fois.

dessin solaire - serge toussignant

Prendre une pause. Faire de cette pause la réussite du projet. Et ainsi travailler sur les silences ...

[à suivre]

It's not so common to be walking and have The Velvet Underground as your personal soundtrack, coming from a falafel store, from some pizza place, from some radio of a worker who's tired of digging holes for you to drive smoothly and feel like you're flying. I felt as if I was trapped in a Wes Anderson movie, and I was walking in slow motion, being watched by someone who was listening to Sunday Morning inside his head.

Having Lou Reed speaking to you is the best sign that you can ever get. Even when you're not in some NYC bar in the 60's, even when you fell in love with Basquiat and hated Andy Warhol like a jealous wife, even when you weren't there to see the street art of Gordon Matta-Clark and the beatniks, hippies, communists, and cursed rock & roll poets who left their traces from coast to coast.

So when some days ago, he spoke to me, I knew it meant something. And I pictured Gwyneth Paltrow, with her fur coat, thinking about how she has been out walking, thinking about the things she forgot to do. And I pictured Franny Glass in her Upper West Side apartment, reading "The way of a Pilgrim" and repeating things in her mind as if they were mantras. And I pictured myself, walking through Ibn Gvirol in slow motion, thinking of all the streets I had crossed not so long ago.

Opening: Friday November 30th, 7pm-9pm

Exhibition Hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 2pm-7pm

The first ever exhibition in Ireland of New York conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark takes place 1^st-19^th December at thisisnotashop.

Jane Crawford, artist widow and director of the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate, will give a talk about the life and work of Gordon Matta-Clark on Tuesday December 4^th at 10am at NCAD, room Go4-Go5 on the ground floor of the design block.

Now internationally recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 1970’s, Gordon Matta-Clark was a central figure in the birth of the artistic community in Soho, NYC, which included such luminaries as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Mary Heilmann, and Robert Rauschenberg.

His first Irish exhibition will focus on the restaurant opened by Matta-Clark in Soho, NYC, in 1971 called Food. Food was at once a good/cheap place to eat, an employer for any struggling artist, a meeting place for the burgeoning artistic community, a performance space, and a work of art. Consisting of documentary photographs and film, the exhibition will explore Food in the context of Matta-Clark’s artistic work and the role it played in the art community of 1970’s New York.

Major recent exhibitions of Matta-Clark’s work include a retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum in NYC in February and is now at LA MOCA in Los Angeles, CA, and is heading to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art early next year. In 2006 there was an award winning exhibition of his work at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain, and he was a central featured artist at the San Paolo Biennial in Brazil.

Matta-Clark’s work took art out of the traditional museum context and into the streets where he deconstructed disused spaces to highlight the social problems and possibilities of the decaying urban landscape in which his community lived in worked. As a sculptor takes a chisel to marble, Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to abandoned buildings cutting through walls and floors, exposing layers of the past to light and air, taking the viewer out of the safety of the museum/gallery and directly into the art work. He evolved obsolete architecture into stunning works of art that challenge us to question our notions of security and safety both socially and psychologically.

Gordon Matta-Clark left behind a body of work that is now celebrated world wide and has inspired subsequent generations of artists and architects because of its courage, passion, and genius.

Original documentary photographs and limited edition reprints will be offered for sale.

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York on June 22, 1943, to artists Roberto Matta and Anna Clark. Teeny Duchamp, Marcel's wife, was Matta-Clark's godmother. Matta-Clark's childhood was spent in New York, Paris, and Chile. He studied architecture at Cornell University in 1963-68.

In 1969, Matta-Clark moved back to New York. Over the following two years, he explored the metamorphic possibilities of cooking, beginning by frying Polaroid photographs in oil with gold leaf. In the early 1970s, he helped organize 112 Greene Street, an exhibition space showing new art. He also collaborated on Food, a combined restaurant and performance piece; made Garbage Wall, a prototype shelter for the homeless; and was active in building SoHo as an artists' community. He addressed popular culture in the 1973 Photoglyphs, hand-colored black-and-white photographs depicting New York's burgeoning graffiti.

During the 1970s, Matta-Clark made the works for which he is best known: his "anarchitecture." These were temporary works created by sawing and carving sections out of buildings, most of which were scheduled to be destroyed. He documented these projects in photography and film. Although he made interventions into a former iron foundry in Genoa, Italy, in 1973, his first large-scale project has been defined as Splitting (1974). To create this work, Matta-Clark sawed two parallel slices through a nondescript wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, and removed the material between the two cuts. In addition, he cut out the corners of the house's roof, which were subsequently shown at John Gibson Gallery in New York. He made similar gestures in some of his photographs, cutting the actual negatives rather than manipulating individual prints.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_105A.html

Perhaps a good example of the backstory to Anderson’s backstory of postmodernism would be the sculpture, or archi-sculpture, of Felix Schramm, who currently has a show up at the San Francisco MoMA. It’s impossible to look at Schramm’s installation and not think of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and, later, Rachel Whiteread, artists for whom explorations of spatiality were always hitched to an “extra-formal content,” to a polemical engagement with the forces of urban renewal (that is, displacement of the poor) and gentrification (the reproduction of the rich) which are the complement to market-liberalization and the hyper-liquidity of capital in the 70s, 80s and 90s, leaving in its wake extra-urban containers for the poor and a bumper-crop of condos and kitsch emporia for nostalgic hipsters (a.k.a. The East Village/Williamsburg/ Silverlake/The Mission District).

And yet, despite the formal homologies, there is no institutional critique in Schramm, no tension between his wrecked planes and the mesh of museographic prose to which they accommodate themselves perfectly. His is a false negativity. Negativity is applied like a lacquer to the surface of an essentially constructive drive. That is, what appears to be the work of breaking and cutting, what appears as, say, an embryonic architectural concept foundering upon the sterile space of the museum (having, perhaps crashed through its roof and into the galleries which eventually healed around it)—all of this is the simulacrum of disaster: the walls of the gallery, and the painted, jointed planes of drywall and plywood are assembled in one continuous, constructive process. It is a perfect homologue for speculative capital’s “real subsumption” of the essentially negative flows of an oppositional, militant art. It is beautiful: the essentially aestheticized picture of disaster capitalism where the quotient of pleasure to be had represents the profits extractable fro tragedy and atrocity. This is, of course, the capital that so any want or need to think of as having let 9-11 happen, the capital that did let Katrina happen, and that is letting the deathtolls mount in Iraq and Afghanistan because, spectacular YouTube democracy notwithstanding, it plays right into its hands. In this, perhaps, the falseness of Schramm’s work is truthful. Whither negativity?

And so, Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, on modernism’s last gambit:

At the center of contemporary antinomies is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end. Hegel was the first to realize that the end of art is implicit in its concept. That his prophecy was not fulfilled is based, paradoxically, on his historical optimism. He betrayed utopia by construing the existing as if it were the utopia of the absolute idea. Hegel’s theory that the world spirit has sublated art as a form is contradicted by another theory of art to be found in his work, which subordinates art to an antagonistic existence that prevails against all affirmative philosophy. (32, trans. Hullot-Kentor)

This is the story that Jameson clarifies in “’End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” Instead of the reign of a stable political order, in which the world spirit found its home philosophy, what we got was a philosophically-charged modernism in opposition to the horrors of modernization. But of course, this art was premised on the existence of an outside to modernity, whether the leading edge of a revolutionary future, or the residues of a pre-capitalist past of aristocrats and rural peasantry. None of that exists anymore, except in a simulated, sublated form, if you believe Jameson, but it did continue to linger on through WWII. What is left then, for late modernism, modernism that has missed its chance, is this dictum of Adorno, perhaps the central premise of all of Jameson’s work on SF:

Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatively. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. In the image of collapse all the stigmata of the repulsive and loathsome in modern art gather. Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled: This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia— that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise—converges with the possibility of total catastrophe. (32-33)

I hope that I never fail to feel the frisson of truth in reading that last sentence, truer now than ever. But where, where do we find such a dialectical image today? In Gordon Matta-Clark, there is always a utopian aftertaste, the back-propagation of the beautiful in the rearing up of the sublime, a negative aperçu. The conical cuts of Office Baroque, for instance, offer a kind of topological solution to the Gordian knot of a totally administered life in the bland sodium lighting of the spectacle. With Matta-Clark, you are always looking through to something, however inadequate one’s own proprioception is providing a set of useful bearings. Those shafts of light in the earlier cuts were able to manage a diagonal solution to the false antinomy of irony/sincerity.

If, to quote DeKooning, in those works “content is a glimpse,” at least there is content. Not so in Schramm. Nor in the similarly emptied, formalized work of Franz Ackermann. The cutting of the Gordian knot is, in fact, another way of binding it.

Instead, opposition has turned back on itself, been abstracted, walled off, become form. Perhaps, to look at this work generously, this walling off functions in order to preserve it cryogenically for resuscitation in the advent of political movement. Ungenerously, this is nothing less than its murder. In the most powerful work in the Schramm show, a kind of sculptural chimera, half piano, half interior design, lies on the floor, preserving in its hollow a record player on which, punctured an inch from its true center, a record plays in varying ellipses, cutting across the grooves of the music. For me, it is difficult in looking at this not to think of Guy Debord’s The Naked City, where the slicing of a map of Paris allows for its reassembly via variously suggestive arrows. I think of this because of resonant puns in this work. For Debord, The Naked City was “an illustration of the hypothesis of psychogeographic turntables.” These plaques tournantes describe “the spontaneous turns of direction taken by a subject moving through these surroundings in disregard of the useful connections that ordinarily govern his conduct.” In his détournement of the term for a railway turntable, it’s difficult not to hear, once it’s translated into the English, the rallying cry of early hiphop and its basic instrument, the turntable which (once it’s doubled) makes musical consumption coterminous with musical production.

But in Schramm, all of this is present only as revenance and echo (and here it’s difficult not to think of K-Punk’s stimulating thinking about hauntology): a fragment of analog equipment from another age that can sing only of its depoliticized, desocialized impotence, vinyl fetishes be damned.

from Architecture NJ, July/August/Sept 1979, 20-25.

an excerpt

Wall: There’s a strong image forming in my mind. It has to do with doll houses. With the peeling away of barriers. Removal of sides. . .

Matta-Clark: Now we are getting very personal. Actually, the first birthday present I can remember insisting on and getting, is a doll house.
          I wanted to be a voyeur ever since I was four years old. That’s when I got the doll house. The thing about the doll house is it’s not so much being a voyeur as being in control.
            Someone said they thought the piece up in Niagara Falls is like a rape; the most anti-feminist thing that anyone could do, the building, all those parts covered up, and, well, closed, (and) to go in there and strip the building bare of its walls . . .

Wall: Is there anything sexual in all this?

Matta-Clark: Yeah. The thing that is most sexual about voyeurism is the thing that is most sexual about sex, to some degree; (there) is as much anticipation as there is gratification.

Click here for interview
published in Architecture NJ, July/August/Sept 1979, 20-25.
special issue for Mind Child Architecture