“The real purpose of painting is to give pleasure.”
–Robert Ryman

When one’s thoughts turn to the topic of white paintings, artist Robert Ryman comes easily to mind. Ryman, born in 1930 in Nashville, was first a jazz musician until he moved to New York in 1952 and subsequently took a job as a vacation relief guard at the Museum of Modern Art. His exposure to the artwork there, including contemporary Americans Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, was instrumental in his decision give up music and turn to painting. He never had any traditional art training, although, as Suzanne P. Hudson recounts in Used Paint¹, he was directly influenced by MoMA’s “widespread institutional ethos of experiential learning whereby museum educators … promoted values of thinking and making ‘outside the lines.’” He took one adult course at MoMA in experimental painting, although he would later say he didn’t remember much of it. Other than some life drawing done in the class, he never went through the traditional stages of learning to paint or draw representationally. Instead, he was interested in discovering what could be done with different kinds of paints, substrates, and other materials.

Robert Ryman, Surface Veil (detail)

Although beginning in the mid-1950s he spent many years exclusively making paintings with every type of white paint, using a seemingly limitless variety of techniques on every possible surface, and he is known for work most commonly described reductively as “white squares,” he would say that he was not making white paintings. “I never thought of white as being a color. White could do things that other colors could not do. White has a tendency to make things visible. You can see more of the nuance.”²

Speaking of one of his earliest works, Untitled (Orange Painting), he said in 1992, “I’ve always thought that if I ever wanted to paint a white painting it would be in the order of the way this painting was done, because this is definitely an orange painting but there are many nuances and many oranges (and black and green). And if I were doing a white painting I would approach it the same way, and there would be whites and warm-whites and cold areas and then you would have a white painting. As it is, the way I use white it’s more as a neutral paint, in order to make other things in the painting visible, color for instance.”³

Robert Ryman, Twin (1965)
6′ 3 3/4″ x 6′ 3 7/8″ Oil on cotton. Collection New York MoMA.

The interesting thing about Ryman is how he became so well known in spite of (or because of?) his unapologetically unconventional approach to painting. He confounded the critics, who tried variously to categorize his work as minimalist, or anti-form, or process, or conceptualist, while admitting that none of these could be perfectly applied. He resists the idea that his work is abstract, saying “I don’t abstract from anything. [My work is] involved with real visual aspects of what you really are looking at, whether it’s wood, or you see the paint, and the metal, and how it’s put together and how it works with the wall and how it works with the light.”⁴ 

Robert Ryman, Untitled (1958)
10.125 inches square, enamel on linen. Collection SFMOMA.

He also resisted attempts to place him into a specific box or frame within the greater art world. “I’m not involved with any kind of art movement. I’m not a scholar, I’m not a historian. I just look at it as solving problems and working on the painting and the visual experience.”⁵ There is no attempt at illusion; the paintings are not “about” anything other than what’s right before your eyes. What you see is what you get – nothing more, nothing less.

I read parts of Used Paint a couple of years ago when I was doing research for a school project. It was a treat for me soon thereafter to be able to go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and see some of these paintings in person. They are just what you’d expect, but somehow in person they have a surprising presence. I’m drawn to Ryman’s work aesthetically, and I admire his ability to put forth these seemingly simple objects as paintings and get them hung in the most prestigious of museums. I have an impressive number of partially finished textile works lying around my own studio, suspended from completion because I love the raw edges and I don’t want to cut, bind, or hide them in some “professional” way. If I were Ryman, that would be the end of it – I’d just hand them over to the Guggenheim and up they’d go as is.

Robert Ryman, An all white painting measuring 9 1/2 ” x 10″ and signed twice on the left side in white umber
(See full view here) 

I first became aware of Ryman’s work from the wonderful PBS art:21 series. In this video from Season 4 (2007), Ryman demonstrates how his paintings consist not only of the support and the paint, but also the edges, the fasteners, and the wall itself. He tapes panels to the walls with blue painter’s tape, and then paints right over the tape and onto the walls beneath the panels. Then the tape, which has functioned as a resist, is removed. The process is repeated multiple times. This creates a variance in the surface and edge surrounding each panel. The quality of the light in the room is extremely important to the aesthetic experience, including how it changes throughout the day. Speaking about his intention, Ryman says, “It should be a soft, quiet experience that’s nice to look at.”

“In painting, something has to look easy even though it might not be easy.”
“The painting should just be about what it’s about, and not other things.”
“In all of my paintings, I discover things; sometimes I’m surprised at the results⁶

1Suzanne P. Hudson, Used Paint (October Books, 2009) 7.
The title of the book comes from an anecdote Ryman tells. In 1968, he was to have an exhibition at the Konrad Fischer gallery in Dusseldorf. In order to minimize customs fees, Fischer listed the shipment as “paper” instead of “art.” The customs official said that the duty on handmade paper would be expensive, so Fischer told him it was used, and the paintings were shipped with the designation “Used Paper.” Ryman says, “Since that time I have wondered about the possibility of paintings being defined as ‘Used Paint.’ Then there could be ‘Used Bronze,’ ‘Used Canvas,’ ‘Used Steel,’ ‘Used Lead … ‘”

²Robert Ryman in “Paradox,” segment from PBS series art:21, Season 4.

³Ryman, cited in interviews with Catherine Kinley on April 11, 1992, and Lynn Zelevansky on July 1 and 7, 1992. See Catherine Kinley, Lynn Zelevansky and Robert Ryman, “Catalogue Notes,” in Robert Storr, Robert Ryman (ex. cat., Tate Gallery, London/MoMA, New York, 1993), p. 48, quoted in “The How and the What,” Suzanne Hudson, Flash Art n.263 November-December 09

⁴Ryman, “Paradox”

⁵ibid.

⁶ibid.

Echoes of Tulips Summer, 36 x 36 inches, ©Nancy G. Cook

Nancy Cook is a North Carolina artist whose work I first became aware of a couple of years ago when I saw her piece in the SAQA 20th Anniversary Trunk Show. Titled Ankle Twister II (photo here), it was a tiny gem of a quilt that captured my attention in a big way. Nancy has been working with the quilt medium for 16 years, but she has really found a unique voice with her Seed Play series. She invites us to take a closer look at the exquisite details of seeds, pods, and fruits, whose subtler color is often overlooked in favor of the plant’s showier flower, but whose form is just as interesting if not more so. Nancy’s reverence for nature is evident in her lively composition, ethereal colors, and mesmerizing quilting lines.

Echoes of Tulips Summer, detail

The focal point of this quilt is the seed pod of the Tulip Poplar. Nancy says,

“[It] shatters as the birds feed upon it. It will also hold some of the seeds from one year to the next. So you can find buds, flowers, this year’s seed pods, and last year’s seed pods on the tree all at the same time. The little seed stitches on the spike of the pod are where seeds have already fallen off the pod.”

Nancy left her career in organizational development and psychology to become a full-time artist in 2001. With more time to concentrate on her work, she was able to focus on her love of the outdoors in combination with her art. She says,

“I find the interconnected web of life to be endlessly fascinating, and I like working with one small piece of it to unravel some of the wonders. Recently, I have been working on a series that features tree seeds as symbols of the gifts that come with life’s maturity. I learned that my work was autobiographical when I noticed that I was creating autumnal images at the same time that I was aware that I came to my art in the autumn of my life. Fortunately, it seems to be a Southern autumn that is prolonged.”

Kousa: A New Dogwood in Town, 36 x 36 inches, ©Nancy G. Cook

Nancy’s heightened awareness of issues concerning nature and trees is a frequent source of inspiration for her work. Kousa: A New Dogwood in Town was inspired by the passing of one species in decline while another takes its place. She says, “Our native dogwood is succumbing to a viral infection across the country. In its place, the Asian Kousa Dogwood is being grown as it is resistant to the infection.”

Mockingbird’s Larder, 36 x 36 inches, ©Nancy G. Cook

“Mockingbird’s Larder is a deciduous holly. The Mockingbird carefully guards a food tree like this throughout the winter until either the Cedar Waxwings or the Robins descend in large numbers and strip off the berries and move on.”

Mockingbird’s Larder, detail

There are several things about this piece that I find intriguing. First, I love the way the darker areas of the hand-dyed background fabric echo the character of the tree branches, bringing a strong unity to the work. Second, Nancy has added depth and dimension by using hand embroidery to create the finishing details. And finally, in an unexpected and lovely master stroke, she has engaged the viewer by leaving some of the berry shapes unpainted, indicated only by quilting lines.

Nancy’s career is really taking off this year. She will have no fewer than three solo exhibitions and a featured artist exhibit in botanical garden and art center galleries over the next 12 months. She has also been selected as a featured artist in  Art Quilt Portfolio: The Natural World by Martha Sielman, to be published in 2012.

You can learn more about Nancy and see more of her work on her web site, and keep up with her work and exhibitions on her blog.

Edge of Information: A Cityscape of Paper & Cloth, 48 x 36 inches, ©2009 Leslie Tucker Jenison

Last summer, when I was in Ohio for the taping of Quilting Arts TV, I had the pleasure of meeting several artists who were also there to tape various segments on their own work. One of these was Leslie Tucker Jenison, a lovely and talented artist from San Antonio, Texas. I didn’t realize it when I met her, but after I got home, it hit me that she was the creator of  Edge of Information: A Cityscape of Paper & Cloth, from SAQA‘s Creative Force exhibition, a quilt I loved so much I decided a detail of it needed a full page in the intro of the catalog.

Edge of Information: A Cityscape of Paper & Cloth (detail), ©Leslie Tucker Jenison

Intrigued by the idea behind this piece, I contacted Leslie to ask her about the work. She was very generous in sharing her process with me. The quilt is constructed of cotton/bamboo, cotton/silk, cotton broadcloth, and Lutradur. It also features various kinds of paper from books, magazines, newsprint, and shredded junk mail, all stabilized with matte medium to seal and stabilize against potential problems with acid content in the paper. She explains how her original idea was transformed during the process:

I was creating a quilt for a themed exhibition. I spent about a month using dye, soy-wax batik, screen-printing, and other surface design techniques to create many yards of cloth and paper for this quilt, thinking I was working toward an abstract winter landscape. The piece wasn’t coming together in a satisfying way, but still I pushed forward. One night, I had a dream about a very different quilt using all this cloth & paper. This had never happened to me before (or since, unfortunately!); this quilt would be a different sort of landscape: a city skyline. I dropped the other construction and began working on the piece that eventually became Edge of Information. The quilt came together very quickly once I got on track. Edge of Information: A Cityscape of Paper and Cloth is the first large piece that I created using both cloth and paper.”

Artists come to fiber art from many different backgrounds, but I think Leslie is unique in that she has been both an RN and a pilot. I asked her if either of these things provided an influence for her current work, and she said, “Without question!” Once I heard how these things relate to her work, it’s easy to see the inspiration. She says,

I love the juxtaposition of microscopic to the overt. I adore all things skeletal: I find bones to be very sculptural, with fascinating contours and negative spaces. To me, the inside of the human body is as beautiful and interesting as the outside.

I have spent many hours flying over the landscape, particularly in the midwest. Topographical details of the landscape, crop patterns, river courses, etc., have greatly influenced my quilting style.

Leslie says her best work comes from experimenting in the studio. She doesn’t plan extensively when making a piece, but she begins with an idea and allows the work to evolve while working out the details of how best to interpret and convey the subject.

Her recent large quilt, What Remains, a piece about the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, is another example of how she works to express the idea.

What Remains,  ©2010 Leslie Tucker Jenison

The quilt was created using print media about the earthquake, laminated to polyester sheer, along with cloth created to resemble industrial-looking building materials. The base is constructed of many layers of felt and cloth to create a dimensional effect. Leslie describes her thoughts about making the work:

Specifically, I was thinking about the strata of the rubble: all the everyday items layered in between building materials. I thought about how these images are shown to us so frequently that we almost become immune to the horror of the tragedy. Then, it becomes yesterday’s news. I did a great deal of writing on this piece both by hand and sewing machine, and it’s incorporated into the quilt. The quilt is quite raw and disturbing to look at, and that was my intent.

This quilt was part of the special exhibition Beneath The Surface in Houston at the International Quilt Festival.

Where I Come From, 8 x 10 inches, ©2010 Linda Sharp

Yesterday I received this marvelous jewel of an artwork in the mail. It’s my purchase from the SAQA Benefit Auction. I’d had my eye on it from the beginning, and now I’m so thrilled to have it. The photograph doesn’t do it justice; I wish you could see it in person. The spheres are brilliant little half-globes of felt, and the quilting is exquisite, bringing to mind ocean currents or shipping routes. The circular globe shape is dimensional, a raised area surrounded by a narrow strip of felt. Even the back is meticulously finished, with the title done in beautiful lettering, and some intriguingly deconstructed printing hinting at the narrative.

Where I Come From, reverse, ©2010 Linda Sharp

I wanted to know more about the story behind the quilt, so I contacted the artist, Linda Sharp, to ask her about it. Here’s what she said:

“Where I Come From” is a theme that has intrigued me for years.

Being an adoptive child made me wonder about my biological origins and what secrets may be encoded in my DNA waiting to surprise me.
I am reasonably certain now that I am not a lost princess, as childhood dreams dictated. But this is just as well, since it is probably too late for me to learn how to eat at a place setting with six forks and I suspect that even a tiara won’t really help a bad hair day.

As the daughter in an air force family, and the wife of an engineer specializing in rural telecommunications, I have lived in many parts of the world.
Landscapes spoke to me, friendships were made and sometimes wisped away, foods were remembered, but no one place held all the good things.
I could never really answer the question “Where do you Come From?”

The heavy metallic stitching on the quilt represents the complexity of where we belong – the currents of time and travel change us and our needs.
The button is a whimsical ‘belly button’ hinting at the secrets of my birth.
The felted spheres speak to me of many things, molecules, our cells, map markers and planets.
The target is focused on the Oldavai Gorge.

I suppose that the answer is “I have come from everywhere I have been.”

—-

I was especially drawn to this quilt because of the felting, which touched a spark of synchronicity for me. I’ve been interested in the idea of working with felt for several months, and I’ve been doing some research into how to do it, plus I bought some wool this past summer (a story in itself!). Linda has generously shared some of her knowledge with me – did you know that you can use Kool-Aid to dye wool? I certainly didn’t. But I’m going to try it, because really, what could be easier?

I highly recommend a visit to Linda’s web site, Rock, Paper, Stitches. Perusing her categories, you will find that not only does she make quilts and felted art, but it turns out she’s also an accomplished jeweler, teacher, and even a cartoonist! And be sure to look at the Workshops tab, where she shares some of her methods.

There are still some beautiful art quilts available in the auction. Up for bid through Sat., Oct. 2, are the pieces in the 2nd group on pages 2a and 2b. Starting Monday, Oct. 4, bidding starts for the last group, which you can see on pages 3a and 3b.

Last week, I had the great privilege to spend several days visiting my friend Joan Schulze. Joan is an internationally recognized artist known primarily for her quilts, but she also works extensively with paper, making collages and artists books, and she is an accomplished poet. Her work has just been featured in a 40-year retrospective called Poetic License: The Art of Joan Schulze, on view at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles through May 9.

Joan Schulze with The Angel Equation, ©1994, 56 x 57 inches.
Silk, paper, cotton, and transparent overlays.
Photo by Deidre Adams.

Joan’s long and illustrious career in the arts began with embroidery in the early 1970s and quickly expanded to quilts. She has always been an innovator and was an early pioneer in using techniques that art quilters take for granted today. Over the course of the last 40 years, she has made over 1800 quilts and collages, exhibiting a phenomenal dedication and never-ending passion to her work that serves as a true inspiration to artists working in any medium. Her artwork and her poetry enjoy a symbiotic relationship, as each is nurtured by the other. As she says, “Writing poetry is as necessary as stitching cloth.”¹

Joan’s work is known around the world, and in addition to exhibiting and teaching in many countries, she has developed strong ties with artists and teachers in China through her affiliation with the Beijing International Tapestry Exhibitions and Tsinghua University. As she does not have an official academic title, the Chinese bestowed upon her their own title: “Famous Activist of Art.” They’ve since expanded it, but I think this one is succinct and says it best.

My first introduction to Joan’s work came through a marvelously beautiful book which arrived at the offices of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine one day while I was working there as a graphic artist. Titled The Art of Joan Schulze, it was an eye-opening experience for me, containing very large and detailed photographs of her work, along with essays and anecdotes by other artists, and a selection of Joan’s poems. At that time, I was beginning to understand how quilts could be art, but this book transcended anything I had encountered before.

In 2008, I was fortunate to be able to meet Joan in person when she and I and Teresa Barkley shared a hotel suite in Traverse City, Michigan, while we were all there for the opening of the 12 Voices exhibition. Joan and I found we enjoyed a lot of the same things: good food and wine, going to art galleries, taking pictures at the abandoned Traverse City State Hospital (a.k.a. the Northern Michigan Asylum), exploring the nearby roads and towns, shopping at second-hand stores, and admiring stones on the beach — whether on the shores of Lake Michigan or the Pacific coast, as on this recent trip. Knocking about with Joan is an educational experience, as she has a unique perspective and looks at everything in a careful, considered way, seeing what others miss.

I was so excited to have this opportunity to visit her in her own world. We did so much in just a few short days, it’s hard to know where to begin. It was complete art immersion, beginning with Joan’s beautiful house and her extensive art collection, then visits to museums and Joan’s studio in San Francisco, and topped off by a visit to her retrospective at the gallery. On Wednesday, Joan gave an artist’s talk for members of the SAQA Northern California-Nevada region. She talked about the stories and inspiration for each quilt in the exhibition, as well as reading correlated selections from her own poetry.

I won’t attempt to describe the exhibition, but if you’d like to know more, you can read a descriptive and thoughtful review by artist Liz Hager on the Venetian Red blog. Joan also speaks about her life in the arts in this article from the San Jose Mercury News. I also highly recommend a visit to her web site for many luscious images and more information.

Poetic License: The Art of Joan Schulze is accompanied by another beautiful book (to call it a catalog would understate its presence) with photographs of quilts in the exhibition plus many more, and essays by Deborah Corsini, Sarah E. Tucker, and Peter Frank. It’s available on Joan’s web site.

¹The Art of Joan Schulze, 28.

Palimpsest

Amy Metier at William Havu Gallery through April 10, 2010

1040 Cherokee St.
Denver, Colorado

In her third solo exhibition at the William Havu Gallery, Metier fills the space with exuberant abstractions of objects from her studio, other artist’s studios and recent travels. These shapes are drawn with fluid, gestural lines, wiped away or partially painted over, and redrawn again, inviting the viewer to engage in the painting.¹

I was excited to see this show last week, because Amy is a professor at Metro, and she was the instructor for 3 out of the 5 painting classes I took there. She’s been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally since the mid-1980s, but is especially well known and loved in the Denver area. This is her third solo at Havu. I had seen some of her work in person, and more of it online and in Colorado Abstract, a book by local art critics Michael Paglia and Mary Voelz Chandler published last year. So I was interested to see the new work, some of which is done in new, more muted color palettes. I admire Amy’s fearless approach to painting, with free-spirited brushstrokes which give each piece a lively energy and a sense of rhythm. Placement of colors and shapes seems random, yet logical in the sense that balance is achieved in an organic way. Expressive linework animates the compositions and ties them together.

On Saturday, 60 x 60 inches, oil on canvas, ©2010 Amy Metier

Amy sometimes uses a photo as a starting point, but it’s difficult or impossible to tell what the subject was originally, leaving the viewer free to make a personal interpretation and connection with the work. As many abstract painters do, she maintains a balance between chaos and harmony, and the unexpected color combinations keep the work fresh and exciting.

In the Studio, 72 x 48 inches, oil on canvas, ©2010 Amy Metier

Metier is fully engaged in the push and pull between the representational and the way in which a shape informs abstraction. Her paintings, studies, and works on paper demonstrate an ease in resolving what she has called “that tension between wanting to create an image and not wanting to create an image.”²

The William Havu Gallery is a beautiful space, especially in the late afternoon with the warm golden glow of the sun illuminating the paintings.

Amy also does lovely monotypes and linocuts. I wasn’t able to get any good photos because of the reflections from the glass, but here’s an overall shot of selections from her Harrison Suite, linocut with chine collé.

You can see more of Amy Metier’s work here and here.

¹from William Havu Gallery’s literature

²Colorado Abstract (214)

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974

Completion through removal. Abstractions of surfaces. Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space. Creating spatial complexity, reading new openings against old surfaces. Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut. Breaking and entering. Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point of collapse.
— Gordon Matta-Clark, 1971

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks researching the work of Gordon Matta-Clark for a paper for my Art Theory & Criticism class this semester. The assignment was to choose an artist and/or specific work to tie in with some of the theories we had been discussing in our readings. Deconstruction theory* is very interesting to me, so I started with a Google search on that term and came up with Gordon Matta-Clark. As soon as I saw the images that came up, I remembered having seen a slide of his work in an earlier art history class. The slide we saw was from his work Bingo, in which he cut out sections from the side of an old condemned house. Some of these sections were saved, and this slide shows them placed in a pristine museum setting — a striking contrast of particular interest for me because I find abandoned structures so compelling.

Gordon Matta-Clark was quite an interesting guy. He was the son of two artists — Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta and American artist Anne Clark. Marcel Duchamp was his godfather. He was active during the early 70s and died an untimely death from cancer when he was only 35. His work is somewhat difficult to categorize, consisting of elements of sculpture, drawing, film, performance, social activism, and “semantic deconstruction,” a label applied to his fondness for word play in his documentation.

His most well-known works are probably those often referred to as the “building cuts.” The earliest works involving cutting of buildings were “urban guerilla acts” in which he illegally entered abandoned apartment buildings and cut out parts of what would have been a floor on one level and a ceiling for the level below. These cut-out fragments were displayed in a gallery setting as Bronx Floors.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floors, 1972-73

As he gained notoriety, Matta-Clark was able to gain legal access to various condemned structures in order to perform his interventions. Splitting (top) is probably his most iconic work, consisting of a house which he cut completely in half. He and his collaborators were able to remove part of the foundation on one side so that the affected half tilted back and transformed the opening into a dramatic wedge, widening from bottom to top.

Matta-Clark was interested in the social aspects of how abandonment and urban renewal would affect and displace communities. His ideas about consumerism and capitalism seemed to be taken almost directly from the Situationists: the concepts of psychogeography, dérive, and détournement. In explaining his “dualistic habit of centering and removal,” he said,

Here I am directing my attention to the central void, to the gap which, among other things, could be between the self and the American Capitalist system. What I am talking about is a very real, carefully sustained mass schizophrenia in which our individual perceptions are constantly being subverted by industrially controlled media, markets, and corporate interests. … This conspiracy goes on every day, everywhere, while the citizen commutes to and from his shoe-box home with its air of peace and calm, while he is being precisely maintained in a state of mass insanity.[i]

Matta-Clark was trained as an architect, having received a B.A. in architecture from Cornell University in 1968. But he spent a lot of time in the company of artists while in college, and he expressed some disaffection with the field of architecture, and especially with the type of modernist ideas he encountered there. After leaving Cornell, Matta-Clark moved to New York City, to an area now known as SoHo but which was then called the South Houston Industrial area. At that time, the area was in a state of decline, a prime example of urban decay, with numerous abandoned buildings and streets lacking lighting and maintenance. Since the 1950s, artists had been attracted to the area for the cheap rents, living illegally in buildings zoned for commercial, not residential use. In the late 1960s, the city’s urban planners and wealthy landowners wanted to transform the area into a modern corporate and financial center, an idea which was met with no small resistance by the inhabitants.

At this time, much of Matta-Clark’s work involved a spirit of community, calling attention to the plight of the poor and homeless and involving neighbors and other artists in the work’s creation. He had several ideas for making building materials from discarded bottles and other trash, with thoughts of developing some of these ideas into places for the homeless to live.[ii] He explained his motivation:

As a native New Yorker my sense of the city as home runs deep … [and] my attitudes are still keener as regards an awareness of prevailing conditions and their need for improvement. Among the conditions my training and personal inclination have taught me to deal with is neglect and abandonment. There are words which when applied to children or human beings of any age evoke a profound call for alarm and rectification, yet when existing in massive proportions throughout our urban environment evokes only bureaucratic or juridic ambivalence and in-action.[iii]

Matta-Clark’s ideas about the social content of his work grew clearer to him as he progressed in his career. In a 1976 interview with Donald Wall, after he had done several building-cut projects, he reiterated his commitment to fighting against what he saw as a flawed system:

By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am gesturing: first, to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer—a virtually captive audience.[iv]

In 1975, Matta-Clark began work on Conical Intersect, one of his more complex building interventions. In Paris at this time, the old section of the city known as Les Halles was being demolished to make way for modernization, including the building of the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou. Matta-Clark obtained permission to work on two 17th-century houses that were the last to be demolished to make way for the modernization project.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975

Having been to the Pompidou myself last summer, I found this especially interesting. The pictures are fascinating, but how amazingly cool it would have been to be able to experience this first-hand. These works could only exist, and for only a short time, because they would subsequently be destroyed. All that remains are photographs and film of the process.

Interior view of Conical Intersect

I can’t help feeling nostalgic when older buildings are demolished to make way for the new. I know that’s a kind of sentimental attitude, and we must have progress and all that, but I just like the character of old buildings better than new ones. If I never saw what was there before, of course I couldn’t give that too much thought, but Gordon Matta-Clark did want people to think about that, and that’s why I love his work so much.

_______________

*Deconstruction is a literary theory credited to Jacques Derrida, who is maddeningly difficult to read. I found a very understandable explanation of deconstruction in Literary Theory for the Perplexed by Mary Klages. (Wow – Amazon seriously wants $132 for this book? Good thing we have libraries!)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[i]Gordon Matta-Clark, Interview by Donald Wall, 1976, in “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006), 58.

[ii]Christian, Scheidemann, “Material and Process: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Object Legacy, in Gordon Matta Clark: You are the Measure. Exhibition catalog published by the Whitney Museum of American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 119.

[iii]Gordon Matta-Clark, notes from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, quoted in Judith Russi-Kirchner, “The Idea of Community in the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003), 148.

[iv]Matta-Clark, Wall interview, 57.