"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "Zacharias, Erica Ashley"@en . "2011-10-24T18:29:10Z"@en . "2011"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) is best known for his experimental \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbuilding cuts,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in which he reconfigured whole architectural spaces slated for destruction in North and South America, and in Europe. An extensive scholarship theorizes Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice as a critique of his architectural education and a recuperation of the social spaces outside its purview. Today, audiences view Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts through the two-dimensional media of film and photography, further complicating the original works\u00E2\u0080\u0099 play with temporality and performance. Recent scholarship has seen photography as central to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s performance-based and sculptural practice. This thesis addresses a gap in scholarship between Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photography and his ephemeral works. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s use of photography as document relates to the Land Art practice of exhibiting outdoor works inside the gallery. His photographs also engage in the photoconceptual practice of questioning that very documentary status. I trace three modalities for the photographic within Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works: image (referent), object (medium), and apparatus (technology). I suggest that the photographic image is historically situated by the latter two categories as an ontologically specific space, at once material and abstract, technological and theoretical.\n\tMy research draws on theoretical discourses underpinning Modernist architecture. The role of photography is belied in Modernist architectural discourse, a mainstay of Cornell\u00E2\u0080\u0099s architecture program under the leadership of historian Colin Rowe, from which Matta-Clark received a BArch in 1968. I find an unstated connection between photography and phenomenal transparency, a term defined in Rowe and Robert Slutzky\u00E2\u0080\u0099s influential essay, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal,\u00E2\u0080\u009D where it is used to describe the abstraction of space in the work of Le Corbusier. I set up a theoretical framework for the conceptual role of photography in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice by being attentive to the relationship between photography and architecture through the photographic slice, the visualized analog to the sculptural cut. I argue that in order to criticize the supposed transparency of both photography and architecture apparent in contemporary art practices and Modernist architectural discourse respectively, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work investigated the two media in tandem."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/38192?expand=metadata"@en . " GORDON MATTA-CLARK\u00E2\u0080\u0099S PHOTOGRAPHIC SPACES by Erica Ashley Zacharias B.A., Brown University, 2007 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2011 \u00C2\u00A9 Erica Ashley Zacharias, 2011 ii Abstract Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) is best known for his experimental \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbuilding cuts,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in which he reconfigured whole architectural spaces slated for destruction in North and South America, and in Europe. An extensive scholarship theorizes Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice as a critique of his architectural education and a recuperation of the social spaces outside its purview. Today, audiences view Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts through the two-dimensional media of film and photography, further complicating the original works\u00E2\u0080\u0099 play with temporality and performance. Recent scholarship has seen photography as central to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s performance-based and sculptural practice. This thesis addresses a gap in scholarship between Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photography and his ephemeral works. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s use of photography as document relates to the Land Art practice of exhibiting outdoor works inside the gallery. His photographs also engage in the photoconceptual practice of questioning that very documentary status. I trace three modalities for the photographic within Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works: image (referent), object (medium), and apparatus (technology). I suggest that the photographic image is historically situated by the latter two categories as an ontologically specific space, at once material and abstract, technological and theoretical. My research draws on theoretical discourses underpinning Modernist architecture. The role of photography is belied in Modernist architectural discourse, a mainstay of Cornell\u00E2\u0080\u0099s architecture program under the leadership of historian Colin Rowe, from which Matta-Clark received a BArch in 1968. I find an unstated connection between photography and phenomenal transparency, a term defined in Rowe and Robert Slutzky\u00E2\u0080\u0099s influential essay, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal,\u00E2\u0080\u009D where it is used to describe the abstraction of space in the work of Le Corbusier. I set up a theoretical framework for the conceptual role of photography in Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice by being attentive to the relationship between photography and architecture iii through the photographic slice, the visualized analog to the sculptural cut. I argue that in order to criticize the supposed transparency of both photography and architecture apparent in contemporary art practices and Modernist architectural discourse respectively, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work investigated the two media in tandem. iv Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... v Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 The Work and Its Influences ....................................................................................................... 1 Reception .................................................................................................................................... 5 Lefebvre and Space ................................................................................................................... 10 Gordon Matta-Clark .................................................................................................................. 14 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Photographic Practice ....................................................................................... 25 Photography as Process............................................................................................................. 25 The Photographic Image ........................................................................................................... 30 The Photographic Object .......................................................................................................... 31 The Photographic Apparatus..................................................................................................... 32 Phenomenal Transparency ........................................................................................................ 35 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Photographic Cuts ............................................................................................. 42 Conical Intersect ......................................................................................................................... 49 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 55 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 57 Archives .................................................................................................................................... 57 Published Sources ..................................................................................................................... 57 v Acknowledgments I give many thanks to my supervisor Dr. Catherine M. Soussloff, who first introduced me to Gordon Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work, encouraged me to visit the Gordon Matta-Clark Archives, and supported my thesis from its inception as a seminar paper in her class. I also give many thanks to my first reader Dr. John O\u00E2\u0080\u0099Brian, whose class, \u00E2\u0080\u009CPhotography, Modernity, Violence,\u00E2\u0080\u009D helped shaped my theoretical understanding of the photographic. I thank the staff of the study centre at the Centre for Canadian Architecture, in Montreal. I also thank Dr. Maureen Ryan for her support, Dr. Rob Stone for his useful questions, and Professor Sherry McKay from the Architecture Department at UBC for her help and suggestions. vi Dedication To M & D, my sister & brother, Kristin & Katrina 1 Introduction The Work and Its Influences My thesis engages with the practice of one artist, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), who occupied a central position within New York\u00E2\u0080\u0099s contemporary art scene in the 1970s, producing conceptual, performative, and site-specific sculptural works. Best known for his large-scale \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbuilding cuts,\u00E2\u0080\u009D which radically altered architectural sites, Matta-Clark investigated space using a number of strategies and media. His earliest documented works, created in Ithaca, New York, provide examples of the experimental and at times dangerous negotiations of the built environment and quotidian spaces that mark his entire practice: in 1969, Matta-Clark wove a virtually-unusable rope bridge, which was stretched across a treacherous ravine near the Cornell campus (Rope Bridge), and made a local house uninhabitable by filling the space with a large inflatable plastic sculpture (Deflation). These works can be juxtaposed against the education that Matta-Clark received from Cornell\u00E2\u0080\u0099s architectural department, under the new leadership of Modernist historian and theorist Colin Rowe. At the time, the program was becoming increasingly theoretical, influenced by functionalist architectural discourse of the early 20 th century as it was re-framed by Rowe and his colleagues. Matta-Clark earned a BArch from Cornell in 1968, but would ultimately find the architectural profession unreceptive to his alternative notions of ambiguous and non-functional space. 1 1 Matta-Clark discusses how his notions of space differ from those of professional architecture on page fourteen of a rough draft of an interview between Donald Wall and Gordon Matta-Clark which resides in: Gordon Matta-Clark Archive, Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (hereafter referred to as GM-C Archive), PHCON2002:0016:002.077. Matta-Clark states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CAll places have ambiguity. Its not a clear cut either-or situation. Space is more than the \u00E2\u0080\u009Caesthetic\u00E2\u0080\u009D manipulation of shapes. It is this ambiguity that needs liberation, clarification, amplification, augmentation, call it what you wish.\u00E2\u0080\u009D This interview was later published as \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Building Dissections,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Moure, Works and Collected Writings, 53-71. 2 An extensive scholarship, including works by Thomas Crow, Pamela Lee, and Dan Graham, theorizes Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice as a critique of his architectural education and a recuperation of the social spaces outside its purview. 2 In his own writing, Matta-Clark positioned himself against the discourse of functionalist architecture and its figurehead, Le Corbusier, of whom Rowe was an avid supporter. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s stated interest in social space is corroborated by his spatial inquiries, including real estate purchases of unusable plots of land (Fake Estates 1973) and performances of quotidian activities, such as cooking and cleaning, or shaving and showering, in overtly public places (Garbage Wall 1970 and Clockshower 1974). In the work Fresh Air Cart, 1972, Matta-Clark engaged passersby with an overtly environmental message, offering assisted breathes through a homemade breathing machine. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s physical investment into his own community further evidences the seriousness of his social practice: in 1977 Matta-Clark received a grant for a project that aimed to teach teenagers from impoverished New York neighbourhoods basic construction skills and, thereby, the ability to transform their own environment. During his career, Matta-Clark received professional support from many members of the art community, including post-minimalists Robert Smithson and Dan Graham, founder of the Italian Arte Povera movement Germano Celant, as well as a young group of artists living in New York. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s immediate artistic and social circle included dancers and choreographers Tina Girourd, Trish Brown, Suzanne Harris, and Carol Gooden, performance artist Laurie Anderson, sculptors Jene Highstein and Richard Nonas, and artists Jeffrey Lew and Ted Greenwald. The community was instrumental in transforming the SoHo district from an industrial ghetto into an artistic hub of live-work studios, small galleries and co-operative spaces; 2 The following works by the three scholars deal with this subject extensively: Crow, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Diserens, Gordon Matta-Clark, 7-132; Lee, Object to be destroyed; Walker, Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism. 3 Matta-Clark was an active member of the artist-centered gallery at 112 Greene Street and designed and renovated the Holly Solomon Gallery. He was also a co-founder of the restaurant Food, which both employed and provided a meeting place for artists in SoHo. While maintaining a strong foundation in New York, Matta-Clark actively participated in the avant-garde European art world. His father, Robert Matta-Eucharen, the Chilean Surrealist painter (and, early in his career, a practicing draughtsman) best known as Matta, spent much of his life in Europe, providing Matta-Clark with a network and professional connections abroad. Just less than half of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s large-scale interventions into architecture were executed in Europe, with the majority taking place in the Northeastern United States, and one earlier intervention occurring in Santiago, Chile. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s large-scale building cuts were executed both legally and illegally, with and without institutional support. In his first building cuts, executed in 1972, Matta-Clark subtracted sections of the walls and floors of condemned houses in impoverished New York boroughs, making small alterations in the building material. However, the majority of his cuts altered entire architectural structures, both out of public sight and in full view. The first whole building intervention occurred in 1973 in Genoa, where Matta-Clark was gifted a building by an engineer; he created a series of cuts within the walls and roof, collectively known as A W-Hole House. In Splitting, executed in 1975, Matta-Clark altered the structure and foundation of a New Jersey suburban house donated by Horace Solomon, one of his New York dealers. Day\u00E2\u0080\u0099s End was executed in an abandoned warehouse along the Hudson River in New York in 1975, and was intended as an exhibition space before being reclaimed by the port authorities. In Bingo and Conical Intersect, created for the 1974 Art Park and the 1975 Paris Biennale respectively, the building fa\u00C3\u00A7ades\u00E2\u0080\u0099 registered Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spectacular spatial interventions. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s last two major building cuts, often cited as his most complex ones, were organized with the help of established art institutions: Office Baroque through the International Cultural Centre, Antwerp, 4 in 1977, and Circus through the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1978. The works produced large exhibition catalogues, including interviews with the artist. None of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts are extant. Concurrently with the sculptural and social practice, Matta-Clark documented his activity and works, in particular the short-lived building cuts, through photography and film. His use of photography as document relates to contemporary Land Art and performance practices: Matta- Clark exhibited photographic, filmic and sculptural elements of his works in galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His practice generated three artist books, sixteen films and videos, and thousands of photographs, many taken by friends, colleagues, and viewers, as well as by the artist himself. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s engagement with the documentary media was often experimental. While he presented narrative black-and-white shots as stand-alone images, Matta-Clark also collaged multiple prints of a single architectural intervention in disorienting, rather than evidentiary, photomontages. He worked with new printing techniques, producing archival quality colour-saturated Cibachrome prints, as well as barely decipherable prints on cardboard boxes (Untitled, 1972, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, Photographic Portraits). Matta-Clark also collaged the Cibachrome negatives themselves, which were subsequently printed as large art works, in which the masking tape joins and added paint strokes became highlighted. For Matta- Clark, the photographic process was both a tool for spatial investigation and the subject of material investigation. Recent scholarship theorizes photography as central to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s performance-based and sculptural works. My thesis builds on this foundation, while addressing the often referenced, but seldom-breached gap in scholarship between the documentary medium and the more overtly physical works. 3 I set up a theoretical framework for the conceptual role of photography in 3 Many scholars note the Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s similar treatment of two and three-dimensional media: 5 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice by being attentive to the relationship between photography and architecture through the photographic slice, the visualized analog to the sculptural cut. Scholars note a number of possible influences for Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts. For example, during the 1969 Earth Art exhibition, guest curated by Willoughby Sharp at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell, Matta-Clark assisted with Dennis Oppenheim\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Beebe Lake City Ice Cut, a work with formal similarities to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s later interventions into the built environment. Also, colleagues identify his first cut as a horizontal wedge spontaneously cut out of a wall in the restaurant Food during a renovation. Without discrediting these very direct influences on Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s working method, my thesis considers how Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s material investigation of photography conceptually influenced his simultaneous investigation of architectural spaces. I argue that, in order to criticize the supposed transparency of both photography and architecture, apparent in contemporary art practices and Modernist architectural discourse respectively, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work investigated the two media in tandem. Reception For the purposes of this introduction, I will briefly outline the reception of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work through exhibitions and scholarship, particularly as it relates to the themes of photography and architecture. 4 In the years following Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s untimely death, his work was included in numerous group exhibitions of conceptual art in Europe and North America. In 1985, Mary Jane Diserens, Preface to Gordon Matta-Clark, 6; Fer, \u00E2\u0080\u009CCelluloid Circus,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 137; Jacob, Introduction to Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, 8; Walker, \u00E2\u0080\u009CDrawing on Architecutre,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 122. 4 For a more thorough outline of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s projects and exhibitions, as well as publications on Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work, see the chronology sections in the exhibition catalogue for the 2007 retrospective, Gordon Matta-Clark: \u00E2\u0080\u009CYou are the Measure,\u00E2\u0080\u009D at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, edited by Elizabeth Sussman, which provide the most comprehensive overviews to date. 6 Jacob spearheaded Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s first major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The exhibition catalogue for the retrospective, produced only seven years after Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s death, emphasizes his personal biography, family lineage and artistic community. Art critic Robert Pincus-Witten, a contemporary of Matta-Clark, produced a critical essay for the catalogue, in which he betrays a skeptical stance towards art produced in the 1970s, commenting on the different ideological tenor between that decade and the one in which he was writing. Pincus-Witten associates conceptualism with a seemingly idealistic commitment to the de- materialization of the art object (at the time back in full force). Any mention of photography is, therefore, dismissive, and fails to take into account conceptual art\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice of questing the photograph\u00E2\u0080\u0099s status. Although Mary Jane Jacob discusses the multi-media aspect of Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s career in her foreword to the catalogue, including photographer in a list of adjectives describing the artist, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographs themselves are not a topic of any major discussion. Since the mid 1990s, the number of traveling one-artist exhibitions of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work has grown exponentially in Europe, the United States and Canada. As scholars and critics gain distance from the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s inception, the documentary media becomes increasingly important and, along with the sculptural works, takes on a richer theoretical dimension. \u00E2\u0080\u009CReorganizing structure by drawing through it\u00E2\u0080\u009D: Zeichnung bei Gordon Matta-Clark, a large exhibit executed in 1997 at the Generali Foundation, Vienna, sets a precedent for considering two-dimensional media, in this case his numerous graphic drawings, in tandem with the sculptural practice. Pamela Lee\u00E2\u0080\u0099s association between the Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s cut drawings and building cuts, discussed in her catalogue essay, \u00E2\u0080\u009CDrawing in Between,\u00E2\u0080\u009D is particularly important for my own thinking of the photographic slice. Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, conceived at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow in 2003, sets another precedent for my thesis: the exhibition presented mainly photographic material from the artist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice, foregoing the sculptural 7 remnants of the large-scale works. In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Lisa Le Feuvre states that neither Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s events nor his photographic works necessary depends upon the other, thereby acknowledging the independent lives of the photographs. 5 Transmission: The Art of Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark, a 2006 exhibition from the San Diego Museum of Art, deals with the issue of architecture central to the artistic practices of both father and son. A fellow student of Rowe, Anthony Vidler\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essay in Transmission provides insight into the influence of Cornell\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Modernist architectural program as a theoretical foundation with physical manifestation in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work.6 In the his 2009 monograph on the artist, Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and the Attack on Modernism, Walker considers Gordon Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s body of work as it relates to Modernist theory and postmodern dissent in the fields of art and architecture. His reading diverges from earlier accounts of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s social agenda, which often theorize Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work as a direct political attack on functionalist architecture.7 Walker\u00E2\u0080\u0099s account is most similar to Vidler\u00E2\u0080\u0099s nuanced understanding of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work, as borrowing from rather than merely rejecting Modernist architectural discourse. Walker\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion on Modernism includes the theoretical works of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and the Cornell Urban Design Studio under the direction of Colin Rowe. Using the theorists Henri Bergson and William James, among others, Walker argues that Matta-Clark does not reject Modernist formalism, but rather expands its assumed binaries. 5 Le Feuvre, \u00E2\u0080\u009CForeword: Thinking about the Space Between,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 9. 6 Vidler, \u00E2\u0080\u009CArchitecture-To-Be,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 68-69. 7 An example of this now-conventional reading of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts will be discussed in the body of my thesis, in particular through a critical re-reading of: Graham, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta- Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Rock My Religion, 194-205. 8 In the first monograph on the artist, Object to Destroy, 2000, Pamela M. Lee also deals with the ambiguous role of Modernity in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice. She considers Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work against contemporary minimalist, site-specific and professional urban planning practices. She identifies fundamental themes in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice, including public versus private space, monumental versus domestic space, capitalism and private property. Lee also challenges criticism that posits Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work as mere nihilism, particularly apparent in the response of both the Left and the Right to Conical Intersect in Paris. Instead, Lee theorizes Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s agenda as a political critique of the destruction that his work seemingly entails. However, by relying on the writings of George Bataille and Walter Benjmain Lee shows how Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s ephemeral work complicates the idea of site-specificity and community and the limitations of these two concepts in art, while conveying the fundamentally Modern community of loss. She states that: \u00E2\u0080\u009CFor Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s art fully embraces the contradictions of both its production and reception, untethered as it is to fixed notions about the space of art in contemporary life.\u00E2\u0080\u009D8 Perhaps most importantly for my own research, Lee deals with the issue of temporality in Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work and as a subsequent facet of art historical writing, locating a productive irony in both the creation of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cworkless\u00E2\u0080\u009D art and in writing about it.9 I find a relation between Lee\u00E2\u0080\u0099s historiographical concerns and the scholarly reception of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographs, in which the play of temporality is further augmented. Corrine Diserens edited an important anthology, Gordon Matta-Clark, in 2003, which includes an essay on photography by Christian Kravagna. 10 Kravagna addresses the issue of representation in conceptual art practices. He is the first to categorize different types of 8 Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, xx. 9 Lee, Object to Destroy, 233-234. 10 Kravagna, \u00E2\u0080\u009CIt\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Nothing Worth Documenting If It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Not Difficult to Get,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 133-146. 9 photographs in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice, each with a theoretical resonance. The categories include: the snapshot image, often depicting work-in-progress; the photo-conceptual narrative, made up a series of images, that is seemingly documentary, but in fact points to the analytical influence of photoconceptualism; the photomontage, which gives a sense of the disorientation that the original interventions produce. Kravagna identifies the last category as the most useful for Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s critical project. He also asserts that film or video integrates the three aspects embodied by Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic types and, therefore, provides the most effective documentary representation. 11 Elisabeth Sussman coordinated the artist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s most recent major retrospective, Gordon Matta-Clark: \u00E2\u0080\u009CYou Are the Measure,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in 2007 for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The role of media, both photographic and filmic, is central to a number of essays in the exhibition catalogue. In an article specifically addressing Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photoworks, Briony Fer addresses the ambivalence that the photographs incite, as alternatively documentary, conceptual and aesthetic. However, Fer does not attempt to separate these photographic types, instead identifying the importance of, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe mixture of rawness and intricacy in the material world that this body of the photographic work contains\u00E2\u0080\u0094arguably a world no less material (or any more inward looking) than a building cut through. 12 Fer considers how Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s collage techniques reveal themselves within the artwork and highlights the conceptual resonances of his material experimentation, in particular the importance of process for looking, making and moving. She suggest that: \u00E2\u0080\u009CPerhaps the space in front of the Cibachromes and photomontages, the space we, as viewers, move in, can also be thought of as a kind of open seam or join that is 11 Ibid, 146. 12 Fer, \u00E2\u0080\u009CCelluloid Circus,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 137. 10 unhinged in the encounter with the image.\u00E2\u0080\u009D13 Here I find a direct connection between the cut of the photograph and Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts. As evidenced by both Kravagna and Fer\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussions of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experimental photomontages, mentioned above, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic experimentation is equated with his larger-scale building interventions by a number of scholars. In his 2004 article, \u00E2\u0080\u009CDrawing in Architecture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D Walker also alludes to the gap between the photographic media and more sculptural works, asserting that the role of the photograph is complicated within Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photomontages in a way that relates to the function of the building cuts \u00E2\u0080\u0093 both the cut and the photomontage challenge the concept of an original or complete experience. Walker states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe results of these experiments in representation can not only be read back over, and clarify, the kind of kinesthetic experience available within the buildings; they can arguably extend and complicate it.\u00E2\u0080\u009D14 My thesis both unpacks and complicates the pairing between photographic and building cut, as the above scholars mention it. Lefebvre and Space The concept of space, like that of photography, is theoretically unwieldy. And, in a manner similar to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic investigation, postmodern theory conceives of space as a socially produced medium. Henri Lefebvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s seminal text, The Production of Space, first published in French in 1974, marks the radical leftist spatial discourse of the 1970s and 1980s. The work provides a touchstone for counter-culture interests that contest the political status quo, as constructed by centralized government control and capitalist interests, which depend upon professional architecture for legitimating. In part for this reason, much scholarship 13 Ibid, 142. 14 Walker, \u00E2\u0080\u009CDrawing on Architecture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 122. 11 on Matta-Clark, including the monographs by Lee and Walker mentioned above, relies on Lefebvre as a theoretical parallel to the artistic practice. Although Lefebvre does not figure heavily within the body of my thesis, his theories on space provide an important foundation for the theoretical criticism on which I draw, and, therefore, deserve some discussion here: Lefebvre is unique among spatial theorists for his insistence on the unity of socially produced space, and its inextricably overlaid and multifaceted nature. His categorization of separate spatial types\u00E2\u0080\u0094 inseparable in practice\u00E2\u0080\u0094make the theory a remarkably useful one and especially relevant to my understanding of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s conceptual use of photography. Lefebvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s fusion of spatial types relates to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s necessarily layered photographic investigation; the photographic has multiple modalities, which when considered together critically inflect his practice. In Lefebvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory of spatial unity, spatial practice denotes empirical space created through material relationships, such as the technologies and infrastructure of the built environment; representations of space denote the systems by which empirical space is conceptualized, including the abstract Euclidean space of architectural manipulation, as well as the space of the ubiquitous photographic image. Representations of space, such as building plans and photographs have a dialectical influence on subsequent material action; they alter the way a viewer perceives and interacts with the world itself. This symbolically loaded world of lived experience, at once material and mental, makes up the last space of Lefebvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s trinity, known as representational space. It is at once the most difficult space to conceptualize and the space of the very transactions through which we navigate our daily lives. In his essay, \u00E2\u0080\u009CDrawing on Architecture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D discussed above, Walker provides a particularly sophisticated use of Lefebvre, contrasting Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s literal fragmentation of space with Lefebvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theorization of the fragmentary nature of Euclidean space in the capitalist city. According to Walker, the building cut literalizes the fragmentation of Euclidean space in the three-dimensional urban environment, and, as a result, diminishes its importance by shows 12 spatially what exceeds this particular representation of space. 15 Walker also discusses the work Reality Properties: Fake Estates, in which Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s juxtaposes documentary photographs, legal deeds and town-planning maps, and, as a result, diminishes the authority of all three systems and highlight the contingency upon which all are based. 16 According to Walker, Matta- Clark subverts both photographic and Euclidean representations of space in Fake Estates, in order to show their incommensurability with each other and with actual spatial practice. Walker\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s conflation of different spatial types provides an important precedent for my own discussion of the artist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s conceptual or formal use of photography. In a manner that relates to my own understanding of Lefebvre, Anthony Vidler uses the Lefebvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s tripartite space as a foundation in the introduction to his book Warped Space. For Vidler, representational space is both material (the Real) and in-the-process-of-becoming Symbolic and, therefore, marks the space of artistic intervention\u00E2\u0080\u0094an intervention into the material world with symbolic repercussion. Using Conical Intersect as its main case study, my thesis suggests a resonance between Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic spaces\u00E2\u0080\u0094the spaces eked out through his photographic investigation and building cuts\u00E2\u0080\u0094and this simultaneously material and mental representational space. First, I outline three modalities for photography in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice more broadly\u00E2\u0080\u0094the photographic image, object and apparatus\u00E2\u0080\u0094through which I define a specific photographic space with historical and ontological resonance apparent in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works; my thesis proposes that Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s effective spatial critique takes into account the interpenetrating nature of the material (in this case by way of medium or object) and the mental (in this case by way of image) through process (in this case aided by the photographic apparatus). I then locate the unstated presence of this photographic space in Modernist 15 Ibid, 120. 16 Ibid, 114. 13 architectural discourse, specifically in the work of Le Corbusier and in an influential essay by Rowe, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Hence, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s investigation into photographic space extends into a broader critique of the ways in which the space is understood, conceptualized, and utilized for vested interests. Ultimately, I locate Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s critique of this photographic space in Conical Intersect and its photographic extensions. 14 Gordon Matta-Clark The limits of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice are difficult to define. To mark its definite end in 1978 with Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s early death simplifies the issue of temporality at play within the works and their current assemblages. To state matter-of-factly, as I have done, that there are no extant building cuts undermines the related photography, film and video by which the interventions critique the conception of site. To define Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s media, material and otherwise, as architecture, performance, sculpture, or photography, bypasses the thematic complexity between media that makes the practice so fascinating. And to say all of this without mentioning the ongoing life of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s memory and influence risks excluding the interconnectedness of community and art that fueled Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice during his own lifetime. Therefore, I do not try to define either the practice or its limits per se (although it may seem that this is exactly what I am doing). Instead, my hope is that what appears at first to be an outer limit, a specific medium, and a single aspect, reveals itself to be an internal vein, a conceptual modality, and but a single thread of another twining. 17 I am concerned with photography in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice\u00E2\u0080\u0094a simple enough statement for what is, in fact, a theoretically fraught and amorphous medium. An attempt at comprehensive overview would be necessarily simplistic. Nevertheless, my thesis outlines multiple roles for photography within Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice in order to expose the underlying importance of the photographic process and the photographic as process. I hope to reveal, within this unwieldy 17 My first paragraph is in dialogue with Le Feuvre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s foreword to the exhibition catalogue for Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, in particular with the last sentence of the text: \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe journey through Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice does not seek to find an answer to the question >what is the work?< but aims instead to extend that interrogation. Perhaps it is only in these spaces-in- between that articulation of artwork can operate.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Le Feuvre, \u00E2\u0080\u009CForeward: Thinking About the Space Between,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 11). 15 terrain, the presence of a photographic space 18 that occurs in tandem with the more overtly physical and sculptural aspects of the works and that functions as an architectural critique. By relating the photographic modalities of his practice to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s well-theorized social agenda, I also argue for the ideological necessity of his parallel investigation into photographs and buildings. My understanding of the photographic applies broadly across the practice. However, in part for the sake of clarity, this discussion centers on a single artwork, Conical Intersect, executed for the 1975 Paris Biennale. This fortuitous work succinctly illustrates the importance of the photographic as it emerges during a culminating point in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s admittedly short career. For two weeks in the fall of 1975, Matta-Clark and assistants chiseled, hammered, sawed and cut a large, spiraling hole out of two seventeenth-century buildings in the Les Halles-Plateau Beaubourg district. As with all of his building interventions, the exact narrative of those two weeks can be only approximately pieced together through eyewitness accounts, photographs, and film (or video in some later projects). Single shot photographs show the progression of the building cuts, as seen from within the building\u00E2\u0080\u0099s interior and from the street below. Interior shots juxtapose the disorienting and dissected walls, floors and ceilings with relatively intact views of the Marais framed by the large central hole cut through building\u00E2\u0080\u0099s south fa\u00C3\u00A7ade. The same oculus, when photographed from outside the building produces the opposite effect: the view of the interior is comparatively dark and the kaleidoscopic effect of the cuts is reduced to a series of seemingly two-dimensional circular voids, resulting in a compressed sense of depth. The film 18 I borrow the term \u00E2\u0080\u009Cphotographic space\u00E2\u0080\u009D from Beatriz Colomina, who uses it to describe aspects of Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s architectural practice. See Colomina, Le Corbusier and Photography. 16 record of Conical Intersect, 19 titled by the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s alternate name, Etant d\u00E2\u0080\u0099Art Pour Loctaire, combines both viewpoints and provides an outline for the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s chronology. The soundless colour film shows the progression of the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s construction, most notably marked by the expanding aperture cut through the southern building\u00E2\u0080\u0099s exposed fa\u00C3\u00A7ade: a gloved hand with hammer blasts through the exterior wall; Matta-Clark and an assistant dance the can-can at the edge of a semi-circular void; the semi-circular shape is systematically expanded into a four-foot wide hole / oculus / aperture / window. Numerous sequences situate the work within its urban context: cars and pedestrians travel the main route below; passersby stop to watch the progress and take pictures; Matta-Clark talks to people on the street; one continuous shot taken from a moving vehicle duplicates the view as seen from the heavily trafficked Rue Beaubourg; a number of close-up pans juxtapose the work and its neighbour, the George Pompidou Centre with its holey, lattice-like structure. During the last few minutes of the film, a front-loader methodically dismantles the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s support, the twin seventeenth century buildings, eventually destroying both the dense and empty spaces of the work. From these documentary sources, we can deduce that for a short time the building cuts of Conical Intersect traversed the entire width and multiple floors of the residential buildings, directing the attention of passersby toward the neighbouring George Pompidou Centre, a monument to modern art and culture, at the time under construction. The apparent tension between architectural destruction (first through the cut and then by front-loader) and construction (of the neighbouring center) was heightened by the artwork\u00E2\u0080\u0099s location on the edges of the recently demolished Les Halles area. This historic district had been a ruin in the Parisian cityscape for four years, and the vacant expanse, known as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cle trou des Halles,\u00E2\u0080\u009D acted as an 19 Matta-Clark et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098ETANT D\u00E2\u0080\u0099ART POUR LOCATAIRE,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 CONICAL INTER-SECT,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Program Seven. New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, [2001?]. Videocassette (VHS), 37 min, 20 sec. 17 ironic counter argument to the promise of urban renewal under de Gaulle\u00E2\u0080\u0099s government.20 A theatrical act of urban recycling, Conical Intersect augmented the area\u00E2\u0080\u0099s incidental critique against Modernism and city planning. 21 The success of the work can be attributed, at least in part, to the lucky combination of contemporary spatial practices, the historical resonance of site, and formal intervention. Indeed, Matta-Clark described the work as, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u00A6A FORM THAT HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH ANY \u00E2\u0080\u0098ONE\u00E2\u0080\u0099 THING.\u00E2\u0080\u009D22 According to Bruce Jenkins\u00E2\u0080\u0099 recent account of Conical Intersect, Matta-Clark frequently downplayed the purely formal aspects of the work. 23 However, as evidenced by subsequent scholarship, the conical shape of the cuts has a strong resonance with the geometry of optics, perspective and image-making technology. Matta-Clark himself described the shape as a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cspyglass,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and both Lee and Graham mention the periscopic and telescopic qualities of Conical Intersect. 24 Jenkins provides the most extensive reading on the formal influences of filmic projection to date. The following two examples, although often mentioned in accounts of the work, had not been the subject of an extended critique prior to Jenkins\u00E2\u0080\u0099 account. 20 Lee, \u00E2\u0080\u009COn the Holes of History,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 77. 21 This reading has become the standard one for Conical Intersect, first appearing in Jacob et al., Gordon Matta-Clark, 87. Dan Graham provides a similar anti-architectural reading of the work in Graham, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Rock My Religion, 194-205. 22 This hand written statement is in the GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:001.070. 23 Jenkins, \u00E2\u0080\u0098Conical Intersect\u00E2\u0080\u0099, 14. 24 Incidentally, Graham and Lee provide contrasting descriptions of the structure. According to Graham the building cuts act as a periscope when viewed from the street, while Lee describes this same view as telescopic. However, both scholars use the formal structure to discuss the works metaphorical dialogue between the past and present: As Graham says, \u00E2\u0080\u009CWith the aid of this \u00E2\u0080\u0098periscope,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 viewers could look not only into the interior of the Matta-Clark sculpture/building, but through the conical borings to other buildings that embody past and present era of Paris.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Graham, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 202). Similarly, Lee states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CConical Intersect literally telescoped the past through the present.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Lee, \u00E2\u0080\u009COn the Holes of History,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 75). My thesis shifts its attention to the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cliteral telescoping\u00E2\u0080\u009D or seeing-technology itself and the implication of a photographic technology as formal model for an artwork made on architecture. 18 Before acquiring a site for the work, and after his initial proposal to cut through the exhibition space itself was rejected, Matta-Clark proposed to execute a variation on the son et lumi\u00C3\u00A8re, a post-world war II French spectacle in which light and sound are projected onto building exteriors at historic sites. This imagined intervention, according to the artist, would resonate with its urban site as, \u00E2\u0080\u009CSomething both in keeping with the French monumental tradition and a stab at dramatizing without actors.\u00E2\u0080\u009D25 However, the shape of the final work, a diagonal tunnel carved through the width of a building (in this case two buildings), is similar to an unrealized New York project conceptualized the previous year, 26 which suggests a broader interest in the purely formal aspect. Matta-Clark viewed the second possible influence, Anthony McCall\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experimental film, Line Describing a Cone (1973), around a year before his Parisian cut. McCall\u00E2\u0080\u0099s film begins with a small circle of light caused by the throw of the projector. The projector\u00E2\u0080\u0099s cast of light widens, eventually creating a three-dimensional cone of light within the viewing space. Gerry Hovagimyan, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s main assistant for the work reports that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon and I talked about it a lot, and that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s what he was trying to do at Beaubourg.\u00E2\u0080\u009D27 There is an obvious formal relation between the inward spiraling vortex of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s cut and McCall\u00E2\u0080\u0099s film, in which the viewer is turned towards the projector as opposed to the image being projected; the play of projection is important in both works. Regardless of the exact source of inspiration, the cuts facilitated a (literally) pointed critique of (or at) Modernist architecture, embodied by the hyper-functionalist Pompidou Centre. 25 Letter from Gordon Matta-Clark to Nina Felsin, dated June 30, in the GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:003.090. 26 In a letter to Dorris Friedman, dated January 25, 1975, Matta-Clark inquires about a possible projection in New York, which has formal resonances with Conical Intersect: \u00E2\u0080\u009CI would need use of the structure from one to month to cut a diagonal tunnel-like void the width of the building\u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u009D In GM-C Archives, PHCON2002:0016:003.020. 27 Gerry Hovagimyan, interviewed by Joan Simon, in Jacob et al., Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, 88. 19 According to Pamela Lee, the Centre, designed by the Italian and British architectural team of Piano and Rogers, \u00E2\u0080\u009Carose in the neighbourhood like an irrepressible, scandalous machine, the monstrous child of a machine-age aesthetic of which it was the logical, if extreme, heir.\u00E2\u0080\u009D28 For Dan Graham, Conical Intersect played directly on this Modernist ideology. He stated that: \u00E2\u0080\u009CTo destroy and not to construct (or reconstruct) a building amounts to an inversion of functionalist doctrine.\u00E2\u0080\u009D29 Both scholars identify Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s intervention as an attack on architecture, and for Lee the form of Conical Intersect embodies a metaphoric intersection of discourses, where the inscription of art onto architecture literalizes the non-commensurability between these two cultural practices. The symbiosis between art and architecture is, of course, exactly what the Centre was meant to embody, what Donald Wall describes as the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cintradisciplinary\u00E2\u0080\u009D ideological discourse of the avant-garde art community in the early 20 th century discourse. 30 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s relationship to architecture, both as a theoretical discourse and profession, is a complex one. Indeed, the relationship is becoming increasingly nuanced in scholarship. Before taking up an artistic practice, Matta-Clark received a rigorous architectural education from Cornell University at the time the program was undergoing a theoretical shift under the new Head of the Urban Design Studio, architectural historian Colin Rowe. Rowe espoused Modernist principles and theory, based on the practices and writing of members of the Bauhaus School and on the Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier. 31 In writing and interviews, Matta-Clark often positions himself against the architectural profession, the architectural discourse of functionalist architecture, and, in particular, Le Corbusier, the outspoken proponent and figurehead of 28 Lee, \u00E2\u0080\u009COn the Holes of History,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 81. 29 Graham, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 198. 30 Wall et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CBuilding Dissections,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 54. 31 Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present, 66-71. 20 machine-age Modernism. However, as architectural historian, Anthony Vidler, asserts, Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s modes of spatial manipulation and representation, as well as the language he uses to describe his own interventions, borrows a great deal from this Modernist discourse, especially as it was re-framed in the 1960s by Rowe. 32 Indeed, Matta-Clark qualified his anti-architectural position by distinguishing between the ideals of the early avant-garde and their subsequent (mis)usage in political discourse, architectural practice, and the business of city planning: The state of [American?] architecture reflects the iconography of the Western Corporate Axis. It is first the abuse of Bauhaus and early Purist ideals that I take issues with. Then I must clarify how Monolithic Idealist problem-solving has not only failed to solve the problems but created a dehumanized condition at both a domestic and institutional level. So what I am reacting to is the deformation of values (ethics) in the disguise of Modernity, Renewal, Urban Planning, call it what you will. 33 Paradoxically, the conception of space as a dynamic medium with social consequences entered into Modernist discourse, by and large, through architectural practice at the turn of the last century, along with the concomitant foregrounding of formalism and the related field of geometry. 34 In avant-garde discourse of the early twentieth century the universality of form was given a particularly social inflection and espoused by figures as politically diverse as Le Corbusier and El Lissitzky. Modernist discourse grounded functionalist architecture within the 32 Vidler asserts that, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u00A6in making information about a building visible, and in describing the procedure as a \u00E2\u0080\u0098formal\u00E2\u0080\u0099 concern is an extension of Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s modern-mannerist analysis into the real.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vidler, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098Architecture-To-Be\u00E2\u0080\u0099,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 70). 33 Ibid, p. 65. 34 Of course, the discourses of space have a long and complex trajectory. (For a useful overview of spatial history see Burgin, Indifferent Spaces, Place and Memory in Visual Culture). However, this discourse comes to the fore as matter of debate for art historians, architects, painters, etc. at the beginning of the 20 th century. Furthermore, early 20 th century discourse prompts an understanding of space as material product dependent on human intervention. According to Vidler, \u00E2\u0080\u009CBy 1914 this understanding of the space of humanist play had become widely accepted.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vidler, Warped Space, 4). 21 tenet of social equality by utilizing the concept of transparency, which provided a material or physical metaphor for honest governance and a re-organized social structure. As it was seemingly manifested in new building technology and design practices, transparency also bridged the modernist ideals of scientific progress and social utopianism. According to cultural and architectural critics, however, architectural discourse was severed from its political and social avant-garde roots by the second half of the twentieth century. 35 At this time, the ever ephemeral and slippery concept of space moved to the foreground as medium and site of investigation in postmodern art practices, including post-minimalism, Land art, and performance art. Although the discourses of architecture and art still shared the concept of space as a central concern, the issue was often approached from opposing positions, with many contemporary postmodern artists critiquing the architectural container itself. In a 1978 interview with Judith Russi Kirshner, Matta-Clark remarked: \u00E2\u0080\u009CI\u00E2\u0080\u0099m really into the whole group of people who are trying in an artistic way to create and expand the \u00E2\u0080\u0098mythology\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of space.\u00E2\u0080\u009D36 This expanded \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmythology\u00E2\u0080\u009D can be contrasted with finite Euclidean space, the mathematical abstraction of space that dictates the parceling of property and sectioning of architectural space. Before it was applied more generally and abstractly across urban and geographical place, Euclidean geometry was conceived of through the finite space of the architectural plan. 37 In order to counter the formal spatial regime lauded in his architectural 35 For example, Vidler notes that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhile in the work and theory of the first avant-gardes such interchanges were frequent\u00E2\u0080\u0094between architecture properly speak, art, installation, and drama\u00E2\u0080\u0094 they were by and large undertaken within a general theory of spatial construction as a universal flux, a medium, so to speak, that subsumed and informed all media. Today, however, with the boundary lines between the arts quite strictly drawn, and with no one overarching theory of space, the transgression of art and architectures takes on a definite critical role.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vidler, Warped Space, 10-11). 36 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 335. 37 Burgin, Indifferent Spaces, 41. 22 education, now deprived of a social counterpart, Matta-Clark utilized and critiqued the ancient conception of Euclidean space, manifest in recognizable architectural forms and a Modern architectural discourse invested in formalism. Matta-Clark literally expanded spatial mythology by piercing, cutting and opening the seemingly finite limits of walls, floors and ceilings of the original Euclidean space\u00E2\u0080\u0094the building.38 However, the exact nature of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009Cexpanded space,\u00E2\u0080\u009D that which is outside the precincts of functionalist and formalist architectural discourse is multivalent and difficult to define. In the interview mentioned above, Matta-Clark admitted: \u00E2\u0080\u009CI don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know what the word \u00E2\u0080\u009Cspace\u00E2\u0080\u009D means either. I keep using it. But I\u00E2\u0080\u0099m not quite sure what it means.\u00E2\u0080\u009D39 In the same interview, in an attempt to convey the breadth of spatial inquiries in contemporary practices, Matta-Clark contrasts those concerned purely with perception and light itself, an important element in many Land art practices, to those concerned with the space of the body, central to performance art. 40 Interestingly, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own work spans the length of this spectrum. His building cuts utilize light in order to disrupt the body within domestic space, and according to eye-witnesses, the cuts put into conflict both visual and haptic orientation. Indeed, at the expense of both eye and body, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work pointed towards a simultaneously material and symbolic space, perhaps embodied within architectural material, but often outside of the architectural purview. 38 I discuss the phenomenon in the introduction to this thesis, in particular as the phenomenon is theorized by Walker in \u00E2\u0080\u009CDrawing on Architecture.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 39 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 335. 40 Matta-Clark defines one extreme as art that deals with the speed of light, and on the other end, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthere is Vito Acconci,; he deals in an entirely different spatial context, which is a type of space we all, all of us, have stored in memory: spaces that are detailed and precise, fragments generally, at all levels of reminiscence, an infinite number of associations emerge. Memory seems to create a unique kind of space setting up an about-to-be-disintegrated level.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Wall et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Building Dissections,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 66). I associate the latter space with the corporeal and the phenomenological. 23 Scholars relate much of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s interest in the urban environment to his own biography, corroborating the artist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own reflections on his childhood spent in New York, in which, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe city evolved\u00E2\u0080\u00A6into a completely architectured International Style steel and glass megalopolis.\u00E2\u0080\u009D41 Among a likeminded group of artists living and working in (as well as transforming) the SoHo loft district of New York, Matta-Clark spearheaded the group Anarchitecture that sought out \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmetaphoric gaps\u00E2\u0080\u009D within the urban environment. For the artistic collective, made up of dancers, sculptors, photographers and conceptual artists, including Tina Girourd, Suzanne Harris, Laurie Anderson, Bernard Kirschenbaum, Jene Highstein, Richard Landry, and Richard Nonas, this theoretically coherent fabric of the city became a medium for deconstruction. In opposition to the sanitized space of the purely visual, and the gallery setting that supported it, this group was interested in the idiosyncratic inflection of the everyday, the particular, and the corporeal. Having briefly discussed Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s personal and artistic investment in the urban fabric, I can now return to Conical Intersect and its site on the edge of the Halles area, a historic site in the Parisian cityscape. In her account of Conical Intersect, Lee relates Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s architectural intervention to Jean Baudrillard\u00E2\u0080\u0099s critique of the new Pompidou Centre in his essay, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Beaubourg Effect.\u00E2\u0080\u009D For Baudrillard, according to Lee, the literal use of transparency within the Centre\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building design belies an implosive vacuum at the core of culture: centralized and administrative government control over the fine arts. Lee notes that transparency stands for both intelligence and sight in architectural discourse, and relates Baudrillard\u00E2\u0080\u0099s metaphoric vacuum to the dark and obscure holes of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Parisian work.42 Lee locates the critical potential for the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s opacity in its resonance with \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe untimeliness of the past in the space of the modern 41 Matta-Clark, \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark, Antwerp, September 1977,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 250. 42 Lee, \u00E2\u0080\u009COn the Holes of History,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 83-84. 24 city. 43 For Lee, Conical Intersect embodies a Modern phenomenon of loss; she connects the illusion of permanence, at play in the concept of community central to both site-specific work and urban planning practices, to the illusion of transparency. I suggest that the sense of loss that Lee locates in Conical Intersect is augmented by the role of the camera in capturing the work. Photography is often theorized as the very index of loss, an opaque reminder of an unknowable past, and, therefore, undoes both illusions identified by Lee and critiqued by Matta-Clark. My thesis, therefore, extends Lee\u00E2\u0080\u0099s argument by relating Modernist architectural discourse, and the ideal of transparency, to the apparent transparency and actual obscurity of photography, as it is formally investigated in this one work and in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice more broadly. In this thesis, I suggest that the apparatus of the camera brings both the seemingly elemental medium of light and the material and haptic space of the body into the realm of the social and the symbolic. I do this, in part, by considering how photography is dialectically involved in the creation of architecture and embedded within the Modernist understanding of transparency. First, however, I consider how Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own photographic practice and the burgeoning importance of photography in a contemporary art context inflects the discursive clash between the old teammates of art and architecture. Due to his architectural education and his family background, Matta-Clark occupies a unique position between the fields of contemporary sculpture and professional architecture. I suggest that, rather than merely widening the gap, Matta-Clark investigates this in-between place, where photography provides a mediating link and, therefore, a modality for the critique of both spatial discourses. 43 Lee, Object to Destroy, 209. Lee\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of Conical Intersect in Object to Destroy follows her argument from \u00E2\u0080\u009COn the Holes of History.\u00E2\u0080\u009D However, I prefer the wording of this section of the argument in the latter book. 25 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Photographic Practice Photography as Process Photography has a particular significance for this historical moment in contemporary site- specific and performance art: the photographic document was becoming increasingly necessary as evidentiary support. For Land art, photography provided the solution to a spatial problem\u00E2\u0080\u0094 the inaccessibility of work outside of the gallery setting\u00E2\u0080\u0094and, for performance art, photography solved a temporal problem\u00E2\u0080\u0094the ephemeral nature of the work. Both spatial and temporal complexities are apparent in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s large and short-lived building cuts. And, by 1975, with Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s career taking off in the United States and in Europe, photography was becoming an increasingly important element of his gallery practice, not only as a stand-in for the inaccessible works, but as art works in themselves. 44 Photoglyphs, a series of photographs of New York subway graffiti, traveled to galleries throughout Europe both with and without Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s consent; galleries representing Matta-Clark attempted to track down all sold photographs to assign certificates of authenticity and experimental Cibachrome colour prints became popular among buyers. 45 Yet, as his photographs, in particular the photomontages became increasingly 44 This general statement about the importance of photography in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice is founded on my own research at the GM-C Archive. Based on the available correspondence and consignment sheets, I estimate that the minimum price for a single 40\u00E2\u0080\u009D x 40\u00E2\u0080\u009D photograph increased from $250 to $500 between 1974 and 1976, with photography-related correspondence increasingly steadily during this time. In a letter dated 30/11/75 written to Galerie Alfred Schemal regarding its upcoming show of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographs, Horace Solomon describes the both documentary and conceptual role of photography: \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe total number of photos and process works is 30, most in color. Gordon has created new work that he refers to as process work that illustrates both with written text and small black and white photos, the final realization of the complete finished work which is then photographed in color. He has done this for three of his best works, Conical Intersect, Splitting and Pier 52. We feel it best illustrates what the artist is doing and how he does it.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (PHCON2002:0016:004.077). 45 This statement is founded on my own research at the GM-C Archives. Examples of informative correspondence include: A letter from dealer, Salvatore Ala, dated 24/5/76, reports a general interest among Parisian buyers in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s colour work. 26 complex and salable, Matta-Clark remained concerned that the photographic work might dull the reception of the physical cuts. 46 In Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s original proposal for Conical Intersect he suggested cutting through the exhibition space itself, presumably an attempt to bypass any mediation between the viewer and the work. This proposal was denied and instead Matta-Clark was allotted space for hanging photographic documentation. He was unsatisfied with this now-conventional solution and numerous exchanges with Biennale officials suggest that, in or out of the gallery space, Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s primary goal for this Parisian work to make a physical cut. In a letter to Biennale delegate, Georges Boudaille, Matta-Clark asserts that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CAs I have discussed with Walter Hopps, my intention to convert an abandoned structure slated for demolition into a work could be in any location and need have no particular character.\u00E2\u0080\u009D47 Matta-Clark later articulates this concern in his interview with Donald Wall: All too often there is a price to pay due to exhibition conditions; my kind of work pays more than most just because the installation materials end up making a confusing reference to what was not there. But for me, what was outside the display became more and more the essential experience. 48 (PHCON2002:0016:004.013). Also, in a letter to an art enthusiast, dated June 23, 1976, Matta- Clark echoes the concerns often stated by his galleries by making clear the importance of limited editions: \u00E2\u0080\u009CSince the documentation of my work was all taken by me and is the only existing remains of my efforts I must take special steps to insure that too many copies of my slides or negatives don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t get distributed without due protection and remuneration.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (PHCON2002:0016:004). 46 Matta-Clark states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe whole question of gallery space and the exhibition convention is a profound dilemma for me. I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t like the way most art needs to be looked at in galleries any more than the way empty halls make people look or high-rise city plazas create lifeless environments. And even though my works has always stressed an involvement with spaces outside the studio-gallery context, I have put objects and documentation on display in gallery spaces.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Wall et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CBuilding Dissections,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 59). 47 Letter to Georges Boudaille from Matta-Clark, dated July 30, 1975, in the GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:003.112. 48 Wall et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CBuilding Dissections,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 59. 27 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s ambivalence towards the photographic medium reflects the fluctuating status of the photograph in 1960s and early 1970s American contemporary art circles, a phenomenon that occurred alongside the medium\u00E2\u0080\u0099s increased accessibility and usage in art practice. Conceptual and performances artists often negatively criticized the photographic document in order to accent the de-materialized aspect of artwork or the ephemeral nature of performance. 49 However, the relationship between contemporary art and photography would also tend towards nuance. During this time conceptual artists, such as Edward Ruscha, Dan Graham, and friend and mentor Robert Smithson, were actively revaluing the status of the de-skilled snapshot photograph and the mediated experience of photography would become a site of much scholarly reflection. In an influential essay on postmodern practices, Douglas Crimp asserts that the photograph does more than simply document the markedly absent referent. Instead, the photograph acts as a ghostly double that provides an excessive kind of presence. The sense of excess, according to Crimp, is an aspect of performance art and many other postmodern works. 50 The photograph and performance have a parallel function as a mode of hyper-presentation and consequently a marker of loss. The photograph, as theorized by Crimp, has a conceptual resonance with Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s extra-ordinarily contingent and spectacular body of dramatically short-lived works. Furthermore, the contingent nature of photography makes it an appropriate media for the critique against a-historical Modernist discourse and the metaphorically static realm of architecture. However, the critical potential for the photographic image is complicated 49 One example of a considered approach to this problem appears in the following article: Balme, \u00E2\u0080\u009CAporias of Ekphrasis: The Performance Archive\u00E2\u0080\u0094Archiving the Performance.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 50 Crimp, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 92-94. 28 by Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic experimentation. Within his practice, the photograph acts as both tool for, and subject of, critique. In a letter describing his work, Matta-Clark states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe photographic materials are interpolated from the spacial situation becoming independent though referential works, while film or video is at present documentary (sic).\u00E2\u0080\u009D51 Here the photographic unit is allotted unique potential for artistic manipulation in contrast to the technologies of the moving-image, with which photography has both material and conceptual ties. According to Kravagna, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photography deconstructs the experience offered by film or video: the photographs complicate and extend the effect of the cuts. 52 Walker and Fer, have assigned similarly theoretical roles to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic experimentation and in particular his photomontages, which inflect interpretations of both the original three-dimensional interventions and subsequent documentary material. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic experimentation complicates the play of temporality by calling into question the legitimacy of the originally indexed moment in new spatial configurations, and also, any possibility for an authentic experience of the three-dimensional reconfigured space. Although Matta-Clark was at times reluctant to rely too heavily on photography, he was clearly aware of the conceptual development of his photographic practice, reporting that: 51 This letter was written to Ms. Lauren Ewing, Art Department, Williams Collage, William Town, Mass, regarding a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cvisiting-exhibiting artist program\u00E2\u0080\u009D and dated January 17, 1975. In GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:003.014. 52 I discuss Kravagna\u00E2\u0080\u0099s categorization of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographs in the introduction to this thesis. (Kravagna, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Nothing Worth Documenting If It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Not Difficult to Get\u00E2\u0080\u0099.\u00E2\u0080\u009D) Here Kravagna divides Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographs into three types\u00E2\u0080\u0094narrative, photo-conceptual narrative and photomontage\u00E2\u0080\u0094and points to the varied use of photography in the Conceptual, site-specific and performance art that contextualizes Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice. These three categories fall under my first two categories of image and object, which will be explicated later in this essay. 29 ...I think it\u00E2\u0080\u0099s possible to see the merit of very personally interpretive groups of photographic images which attempt to interpret, like in this case, a spatial situation\u00E2\u0080\u00A6It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s gone from just the snapshot to a process documentation to a kind of personalized process documentation to a sort of voyeuristic interpretation and then finally into some sort of thing where the whole looking at the piece being made and having been finished becomes a narrative which is subject to all kind of variations. 53 The photomontages in particular mark a transition from photography\u00E2\u0080\u0099s role in process work and a new importance for the photographic process. The photomontages outdo the documentary potential of the single photograph by showing multiple spaces in a single instant, therefore, approximating both the spatial confusion of the cuts, and the peripatetic experience of the viewer within the intervention. 54 As Matta-Clark accurately described the effect of his photomontages, \u00E2\u0080\u009CIt is an approximation of this kind of ambulatory \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgetting to know\u00E2\u0080\u009D what the space is about.\u00E2\u0080\u009D55 Scholars note that connection between montage and building cut is augmented Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s similar treatment of photographs and buildings\u00E2\u0080\u0094he cut up both media. My thinking draws on this theoretical foundation. I propose that the precise nature of the interrelationship between photographs and building is best understood within the context of the photographic as process, as it is revealed across the scope of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works. 53 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 332. 54 In his article, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark: Drawing on Architecture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D Walker notes that montage, a technique of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s collage work, is already a part of an architectural experience. He also states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe suggestion that the photo-collages offer a polyvalence of visual of visual experiences, as well as opening onto the familiarity of everyday spaces, highlights a similarity between them and the operation of the building dissection themselves.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Walker, \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta- Clark: Drawing on Architecture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 123-124). I will extend this connection later in the essay by aligning the photographic act itself, as opposed to the subsequent work of the photomontages, and the process of cutting in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work. I will also further investigating the dialectical relationship between photography and architecture by considering the photographic unit itself, within filmic montage. 55 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 332. 30 An overview of the multiple conceptual levels at which photography functions within Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice reveals an interest in the photographic process that far surpasses its merely instrumental or technological usage. When considered comprehensively, the process of photography, the process through which a photograph is made and concurrently made to have meaning, becomes a subject itself. In order to make this case, I have defined what I understand to be Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s three main modes of investigation into the photographic process: the photographic image, the photographic object, and the photographic apparatus. I propose that each aspect of the photographic plays a separate and necessary role within the practice, while simultaneously coming into conflict with the other aspects. As a result of this tension, the photographic process, that which holds all three modes together is revealed, reversed, critiqued, and brought to the fore as a particular kind of space for artistic intervention. The Photographic Image The photographic image points to photography\u00E2\u0080\u0099s representational aspect, utilized as both \u00E2\u0080\u009Csnapshot\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cprocess documentation.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The indexicality of the image grants the medium its documentary status utilized by de-materialized conceptual and performance art practices. Indeed, photographic images of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works continue to circulate through books, exhibition catalogues and the Internet and are arguably the most accessible mode of engagement with his practice. Even within the seemingly instrumental usage of photography, however, we can locate an internal tension. While some photographs document Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s artistic actions, such as the extraction of large sections of abandoned buildings, other photographs are the outcome of the artistic action of selection, such as the photographs of found spaces exhibited in Anarchitecture\u00E2\u0080\u0099s group show or those of purchased city lots included in Fake Estates. This second type, in which the act of photographing becomes the process of spatial inquiry, represents a relatively new 31 strategy in conceptual art, in which the photograph stands for art object, and I will later relate this parallel action between photographing and conceptual probing to Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s more overt spatial inquires. 56 I understand this internal tension within seemingly documentary photographs as a fluctuation between the photographic image and the second mode of investigation, the photographic object. As document, the image within / which constitutes the photograph is essential, while the photographic object remains secondary to the multi-dimensional work and world. However, as the photographs are sold, bought and exhibited as artworks in themselves, their materiality\u00E2\u0080\u0094colour, size, printing quality, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u0094becomes increasingly important. The Photographic Object Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s investigation of the photographic object is evident in works for which photography acts as medium for subsequent artistic action. His attitude toward the photographic medium was admittedly irreverent\u00E2\u0080\u0094a position that challenges the sanctity of the photographic image. Matta-Clark stated that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CI like very much the idea of breaking\u00E2\u0080\u0094the same way I cut up buildings. I like the idea that the sacred photo framing process is equally \u00E2\u0080\u009Cviolatable.\u00E2\u0080\u009D57 Friends and fellow artists took many of the documentary photos, and much of the photographic \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwork\u00E2\u0080\u009D\u00E2\u0080\u0094cooking, cutting, pasting, taping, bundling, installing, and re-printing\u00E2\u0080\u0094mitigates the role of the traditionally authoritarian photographer\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009Ceye.\u00E2\u0080\u009D58 Perhaps the most drastic investigation of the photograph as medium occurred in 1969 at the John Gibson Gallery in New 56 For example, in a interview with Bruce Nauman, Willoughby Sharp states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cto present a photograph as a work in 1966 was pretty advanced. there weren\u00E2\u0080\u0099t very many sculptors, i can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t think of any, who were presenting photographs as the work at that time. (sic)\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Beijeren et al., Made by Sculptors/Door Beeldhouwers Gemaakt, 14). 57 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 332. 58 Weinberg, Foreword to \u00E2\u0080\u009CYou Are the Measure\u00E2\u0080\u009D, 7. 32 York, where Matta-Clark cooked photographs of Christmas trees on an old stove in a pan of grease. The remains of these photographs were later gold-leafed, boxed and sent out as belated Christmas presents. Yves Alain-Bois relates this work to the 1939 work of Surrealist Raoul Ubac, in which the photographic emulsion and negative were placed over a hot plate and the image liquefied. 59 In a manner that is similar to this earlier work, which presents a failure to develop an image, I suggest that Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s chemical alteration of the print through cooking and gold-leafing can be read as a development in reverse, the material investigation probes and undoes the process of its creation, a move that unsettles the photograph\u00E2\u0080\u0099s epistemological function as transparent document, by both pointing to and altering its constructed nature. The Photographic Apparatus As a historically constituted medium the photographic image can be ontologically linked to the third mode of investigation, the photographic apparatus, and has been in recent theory. 60 Theorist Roland Barthes famously located the unique potential of the photograph to its indexical nature, as produced by the camera: \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.\u00E2\u0080\u009D61 My understanding of the photographic apparatus, relates to the technology of the 35-mm format analog camera that Matta-Clark employed to document his work, but exceeds the physical limits of the camera-object itself. I understand the apparatus\u00E2\u0080\u0099s basic constituents as thus: a particular orientation, within a finite amount of time, in which a 59 Bois et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CA User\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Guide to Entropy,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 54. 60 The ontology of photography, of course, is an important matter of debate in postmodern discourses. For an overview of this debate and the role of photography\u00E2\u0080\u0099s technological origins within its theoretical functioning, see Batchen\u00E2\u0080\u0099s first chapter, \u00E2\u0080\u009CIdentity,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, 2-21. 61 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4. 33 quantity of light is exposed through an aperture into a dark container of space. We find a direct connection between this formal photographic model and Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Untitled piece of 1971, executed in the Museo N\u00C3\u00A1cional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile. In this little-researched piece, Matta-Clark created a lens system using a series of building cuts and mirrors, by which images of the sky framed by the museum\u00E2\u0080\u0099s glass dome were projected down and through the building and onto screens and mirrors placed on the walls of the basement urinals. As Walker has aptly observed, the Santiago work acts as a camera obscura while simultaneously complicating the camera\u00E2\u0080\u0099s traditional functioning by gathering the residue of gallery spaces at various stages of the lens system within the final projected image; the clarity of the moving image is, therefore, compromised and the process of projection is inflected and revealed. 62 I suggest that Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (mis)use of the camera obscura, a pre-cursor to the photographic apparatus, points to the photographic itself. The photographic apparatus, a formal model shared with the camera obscura, seemingly acts as a formal summation of the photographic process or photography as process. However, unlike the camera obscura, metaphorically associated with the 18 th century ideals of transparency, the photographic apparatus materially solidifies the image as photographic object through chemical transformation. Therefore, while the presence of the photographic apparatus in his practice connects photographic technology to a history of optics and the geometry of perspective, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concurrent investigation of both the photographic image and object 62 Stephen Walker ends the first chapter of his recent book, Gordon Matta-Clark, Art, Architecture and Attack on Modernism, with a discussion of this piece. Walker argues, the viewer\u00E2\u0080\u0099s body, situated within the public space of the basement urinal undermines the autonomy and authority of the interior mind\u00E2\u0080\u0099s eye, once metaphorically connected to this proto- photographic technology. Walker uses this example to illustrate how Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work upsets Cartesian space and the binary of mind and body and how Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work obscures, so to speak, as well as illuminate. From Walker\u00E2\u0080\u0099s complex and elegant argument, I have gleaned a single aspect by which to trace the practice: the critical potential of photographic image making and its technology. (22-27). 34 distinguishes photographic technology from other types of seeing-technology as a conceptual model underlying his practice. I suggest that Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s investigation of these three aspects of photographic process relates to a specific photographic space. In contrast to the implied deep space of perspective, formally connoted by the photographic apparatus, photographic space is that of framed, fixed material inscription that mediates between perspectival vision and two- dimensional abstraction. 35 Phenomenal Transparency Borrowing Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s terminology, I suggest that his building cuts alter and make visible the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cunvisible;\u00E2\u0080\u009D63 the cuts reveal the simultaneously mental and material construction of the built environment. 64 Matta-Clark investigates the object of architectural space in order to undo its construction as such. His architectural education, in particular, an influential essay by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal,\u00E2\u0080\u009D provide clues to the specific nature of these \u00E2\u0080\u009Cunvisible\u00E2\u0080\u009D representational spaces. Vidler, a student of Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s around the same time as Matta-Clark, reads Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s large interventions as an extension of Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spatial theories, which find a condensed form in Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essay on transparency.65 I also find a connection between Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spatial theories and Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spatial investigations. However, I understand Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s material use of Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theoretical space as performing a critique of Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory: Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s building cuts literalize the implied, dynamic space that Rowe locates in Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice. I propose that through the process of literalization the cuts reveal and, ultimately, unravel the clandestine presence of the photographic within Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concept of phenomenal transparency. This revelation of photographic space complicates the 63 Presumably in reference to his practice, Matta-Clark wrote on a note card, \u00E2\u0080\u009COPENING UP VIEW TO THE UNVISIBLE,\u00E2\u0080\u009D which I relate to a nuanced understanding of the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cinvisible.\u00E2\u0080\u009D In GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:001.025.4. 64 As Vidler states, transparency makes this environment itself an object for investigation, a single fabric: \u00E2\u0080\u009CA transparency that, extending the universal panopticism of Benthamite ideology, will finally render buildings subjects: subject to space, absorbed and dissolved in it, penetrated from all sides by light and air, undercut by greenery, roofs planted as gardens in the sky.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vidler, Warped Space, 62). 65 Vidler discusses Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s lectures during the early 1960s as relating to his later article \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal.\u00E2\u0080\u009D He relates Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of transparent and opaque spaces to the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cslipping and sliding according to the tricks of Gestalt perception and the consistent cutting up of closed structures characteristic of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s later work consisting of facades cut upon forensically as it were, to display their true phenomenal being.\u00E2\u0080\u009D I will connect Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concepts to the effects of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s cuts more generally, and relate these effects to the photographic. (Vidler, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098Architecture-To-Be,\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D 68-69). 36 concept of transparency, as an embodiment of scientific objectivity and social equality within Modernist architectural discourse, utilized in Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spatial theories. In his essay on transparency, Rowe attempts to unpack the ubiquitous Modernist term. Rowe distinguishes between two types of transparency: literal transparency, a property of an isolated material; and phenomenal transparency, a relational property between interpenetrating material or objects. Phenomenal transparency is, therefore, distinguished as a property belonging to the object of space or, more accurately, to a flux in space-time where different locations can be perceived simultaneously. Rowe reads the less sophisticated literal transparency into the glass curtain walls of Walter Gropius\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Bauhaus building at Dessau, and champions the phenomenal transparency of Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Villa Stein at Garches, in which the relationship between glass windows and concrete walls suggests the interpenetration of a conceptual grid into the actual physical structure of the building. 66 Here the imaginary space of phenomenal transparency is embodied within seemingly transparent glass windows, which now function as opaquely as the building\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concrete walls. Rowe states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThere is a continuous dialectic between fact and implication.\u00E2\u0080\u009D67 However, he does not investigate the tension within this overlapping space. Instead, Rowe sublimates this compressed space-time within the imaginary and the visual. Importantly, Rowe references Bauhaus artist L\u00C3\u00A1szl\u00C3\u00B3 Moholy-Nagy as a proponent of phenomenal transparency. Rowe quotes from Moholy-Nagy\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work Vision in Motion, in order to illustrate Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own spatial theory: \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe transparent qualities of superimpositions often suggest transparency of context as well, revealing unnoticed structural qualities in the object.\u00E2\u0080\u009D68 66 Rowe et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 168. 67 Rowe et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 170. 68 Moholy- Nagy, Vision in Motion, (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947), qtd. in Rowe, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 161. 37 However, Rowe reads Moholy-Nagy\u00E2\u0080\u0099s paintings themselves as examples of the less sophisticated, literal transparency. Rowe also fails to reference Moholy-Nagy\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic practice, and in particular his experimental aerial shots, in which the new media is used a tool of spatial investigation, aptly illustrating Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory. And although Rowe quotes Moholy-Nagy from his 1946 book, he bypasses the central theme of Vision in Motion, in which both photography and architecture are used to theorize space. 69 With this erasure in mind, we reinsert the history / ontology / concept of photography into Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s definition of phenomenal transparency. Indeed, I am suggesting that Matta-Clark reinserted the photographic into three- dimensional space. As many critics and architects note, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cour experience of architecture is reliant to an extraordinary degree on the mediation of the photographic image, used and reproduced in a vast array of contexts.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 70Architectural magazines began incorporating illustrative photography into page layouts by the turn of the last century and, in part due to this fact, architectural photography became an increasingly specialized practice in the preceding decades. 71 Furthermore, the mediation of the architectural space through the representational space of photography began to feed back into subsequent design practices. The early 20 th century represents the first occurrence of this dialectical relationship between the two media; at which time a growing awareness of the photogenic possibilities for building design is apparent. 72 69 Caiger-Smith, \u00E2\u0080\u009CSite Work,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 8 70 Caiger-Smith, Preface for Site Work. 5. 71 Elwall, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Specialist Eye,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 63. 72 Caiger-Smith, Preface for Site Work, 5. This argument has been made as early as 1946, in an article published in Architectural Review, written by Michael Rothenstein, quoted in Robert Elwall\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Specialist Eye.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Rothenstein argued that the new trend of dramatic black and white photographs, were influencing architects 38 Scholars note two general trends for photography of early Modernist architecture. New Photography, associated with the Bauhaus, shares the school\u00E2\u0080\u0099s interest in abstraction and form, and in particular the use of pattern, grid and light: for Bauhaus members Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, and Werner Mantz, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cphotography, in particular, looks upward and outward away from the confusion and debris of streets and battlefields.\u00E2\u0080\u009D73 In contrast, a number of experimental and documentary photographers used Modernist architecture as background for the burgeoning underground life begotten by the city itself. By the 1930s, in both the US and in Europe, the 1920s experimental abstract style of the New Photographers became standard format in avant- garde architectural magazines. 74 As Robert Elwall has articulated, post-war photography responded to the machine aesthetic of architecture with its interest in abstraction through dramatic angles, pattern and reflection. 75 The camera represents an auxiliary machine within the Machine Age: With the translation of Bauhaus canon to International Style, photography and architecture enjoyed a new fusion. Their coalescence was pure. The camera had little problem recording architecture as abstraction, simply because much International Style architecture was itself abstract. 76 to design buildings without consideration of colour or the even the nuanced of grey-scale. (Elwall, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Specialist Eye,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 66). Also, Elwall has suggested, by 1979, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u00A6photographs had become the indispensable currency of architectural exchange, and underlined important developments since the turn of the century in the way photographs were perceived and used, and in the relationship between photographer and architect, architect and the public.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Elwall, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Specialist Eye,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 63). 73 Jeffrey, \u00E2\u0080\u009CMorality, Darkness and Light: The Metropolis in Pictures,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 59. 74 Caiger-Smith, \u00E2\u0080\u009CSite Work,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 8. 75 Elwall, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Specialist Eye.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 63. 76 Akiko Busch, The Photography of Architecture: Twelve Views, New York (1987): 7-8, qtd. in Caiger-Smith, \u00E2\u0080\u009CSite Work,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 7-8. 39 In a manner similar to Bauhaus photography, photographs of Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work eliminate context and tend towards the formal and abstract. However, the architect disparaged the role of photography within design practice. Beatriz Colomina complicates this stated position by exposing the architect\u00E2\u0080\u0099s direct engagement with photographs and advertising media, specifically during his time as a member of the magazine L\u00E2\u0080\u0099Esprit Nouveau. According to Colomina, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[Le Corbusier] came to understand the press, the printed media, not only as a medium for the cultural diffusion of something previously existing, but also as a context of production with its own autonomy.\u00E2\u0080\u009D77 For example, Le Corbusier frequently airbrushed photographs of his built designs in magazine and book publication, at times erasing structural elements and environmental context. The supposed transparency of photography was sacrificed for the sake of Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s abstract representational space. In contrast to Moholy-Nagy\u00E2\u0080\u0099s overt photographic investigations, Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s manipulation of photography occurs at the expense of the medium\u00E2\u0080\u0099s integrity, and the conceptual architectural object takes precedent over built environment through the altered photographic image. 78 Colomina theorizes the dialectic engagement between Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s autonomous photographic space and his design practice: she has convincingly attributed the shape and function of Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s now-iconic bands of horizontal glazing to the flat and isolated view of the photographic landscape. In this way, Le Corbusier sublimates the photographic object within the spatial practice of architecture. Indeed, the photographic capture of space through architecture relates to Le Corbusier writing on transparency, specifically his concept of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cineffable space,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in which we also find a theoretical precedent for Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s formal readings. In 77 Colomina, Le Corbusier and Photography, 11. 78 Le Corbusier demonstrates an extreme lack of concern with place or site, which Matta-Clark and the artistic collective Anarchitecture would heavily critique. As Colomina asserts, \u00E2\u0080\u009CBy eliminating the site, he makes architecture into an object relatively independent of place.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Ibid, 12. 40 the following quote from New World of Space, Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s description of this amorphous space directly relates to Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s later iterations of phenomenal transparency: \u00E2\u0080\u009CIn complete and successful work there are hidden masses of implications, a veritable world which reveals itself to those it may concern.\u00E2\u0080\u009D79 The inception of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cineffable space\u00E2\u0080\u009D is often attributed to Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s first trip to the Acropolis, in which he famously sketched, not only the object of the Parthenon, but the successive vistas on his journey up to it. Vidler understands \u00E2\u0080\u009Cineffable space\u00E2\u0080\u009D as the explosion of that particular panoramic scene, as it would become incorporated into his designs: \u00E2\u0080\u009C[ineffable space] dissolves walls and opens the inside to the outside, an outside now simply framed in order to testify its visual existence. 80 Colomina also draws on this incident: she asserts that Le Corbusier conceptualized space through photography, as opposed to architectural plan, using the filmic sketches of his ascent as testimony. 81 I find a direct connection between Colomina\u00E2\u0080\u0099s photographic space and Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009Cineffable\u00E2\u0080\u009D space, as a surface that eclipses three-dimensional volumetric space.82 The frame, rather than the perspectival illusion, of the view determines photography\u00E2\u0080\u0099s epistemological function, as a space both detached from the world and superimposed onto it. Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s horizontal windows undermine the epistemology of perspective and the progression of depth in space. 83 Here the photographic object re-situates an older classical model for transparency, still 79 Le Corbusier, New World of Space (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948), qtd. in Footnote 10 Vidler, Warped Space, 54. 80 Ibid, 55. 81 Colomina, Le Corbusier and Photography, 15. 82 As Vidler asserts, \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhat in Vers une architecture had been a vast \u00E2\u0080\u0098cubic volume\u00E2\u0080\u0099 is now transformed into an instrument of the modernist sublime.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vidler, Warped Space, 54). 83 In her debate over the flattening of space in Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s design, Colomina discusses an ongoing debate between Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier over the merits of vertical and 41 at work within photographic image, but threatening to unravel. In Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work, the perspectival image marks the beginning, not the end of an artistic action. Paradoxically, his use of photographic space makes the material immaterial within the three-dimensional world. The photograph is seamlessly superimposed onto the built environment. In direct contrast to Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s sublimation of photographic space, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s investigation into photographic space reveals its materiality. His work undoes photographic seams within the Modernist conception of the built environment. horizontal windows. Perret understand vertical windows as providing a complete view of space, from foreground to background, and therefore, embodying humanist perspective. (Colomina, Le Corbusier and Photography, 18). 42 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Photographic Cuts At the beginning of Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s influential essay he provides a three-part definition for the adjective \u00E2\u0080\u0098transparent.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concept of phenomenal transparency relates to the last definition, acknowledged as a rare one, that of: \u00E2\u0080\u009CAdmitting the passage of light through interstices.\u00E2\u0080\u009D84 Here I find a direct connection between Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s phenomenal transparency and the photographic apparatus, which exposes a momentary slice of light. This definition also aptly describes Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spatial practice and the effect of his building cuts, in which light passes through new openings in the built structure, creating patterns of light and dark and complexities out of interstitial spaces. In response to the illumination of this interstitial space, spectators reported a confusion of figure/ground and a distortion of depth. 85 An unrealized proposal for Conical Intersect suggests a similar spatial affect. We can infer from correspondence between the artist and Biennale officials that Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s first intention was to cut into the Biennale\u00E2\u0080\u0099s exhibition space at the Mus\u00C3\u00A9e d\u00E2\u0080\u0099art moderne de la Ville de Paris. In a letter to Nina Felsin, the American contact for the Paris Biennale, written in June of 1974, months before the event, Matta-Clark describes an early permutation for the piece: SINCE MY WORK OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS HAS DEALT WITH CUTS MADE THROUGH BUILDING SURFACES, FOR PARIS I PLAN TO \u00E2\u0080\u0098INSCRIBE\u00E2\u0080\u0099 THROUGH THE WALLS AND FLOORS OR CEILING (IF POSSIBLE) OF THE PROVIDED EXHIBITION SPACE A SERIES OF ONE INCH WIDE LINES LEAVING LONG SLIVERS OF LIBERATED SPACE. THE CONFIGURATION OF THESE OPENING LINES WILL BE DETERMINED BY FORMAL IDEAS THAT ARE BETTER EXPERIENCED THAN ANY ATTEMPT I COULD MAKE TO WRITE ABOUT THEM. AN OVER SIMPLIFIED REITERATION OF MY PLAN; IS TO INSTAL BY 84 Rowe et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 160. 85 For examples see: Lee, Object to Destroy, 158-159. 43 EXTRATION (sic); A DRAWING THROUGH PART OF THE EXHIBITION SPACE IN PARIS. 86 I suggest that the \u00E2\u0080\u009Clong sliver\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s proposal relates to the cut qua cut. In an interview regarding the 1974 work, Splitting, Matta-Clark describes the conceptual nature of the cut, asserting that, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u00A6a cut is very analytical. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s the probe! The essential probe.\u00E2\u0080\u009D87 This form of intervention, the subtractive cut, is also referenced the overall shape of Splitting. Here a vertical cross-section, created by two long cuts inscribed one-inch apart through the middle of a suburban New Jersey house, reads as a single large cut. In an interview, Donald Wall asked, \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhat have you found enjoyable in your work, after, for instance, the act of cutting is all finished? In the Humphrey house [Splitting]?\u00E2\u0080\u009D To which Matta-Clark replied, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe way the light passed through.\u00E2\u0080\u009D88 Here Matta-Clark points to the second type of cut in his work: the slice of light created by the physical cuts. A series of photographs from Splitting, in which sections of the house are photographed in cross-section, provides a succinct example of the photographic nature of this second type of cut. The building cuts, especially as they are physically captured by camera, mimic the photographic act of framing. In one example, the dark cut through the floor of the house is surrounded by a halo of light, while the light socket hanging from the ceiling above is empty: it is as if the cut exposes the image. The photographic act of framing creates an empty vignette peopled only by a few household appliances\u00E2\u0080\u0094the stove is turned coyly at 45 degrees in the adjoining room\u00E2\u0080\u0094and the space becomes a recognizable object. 86 In GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:002.064. 87 Bear et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 167. 88 On page thirteen of a rough draft of the interview between Donald Wall and Gordon Matta- Clark, at the GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:002.077. 44 Light is an important element of every large-scale building intervention, through which previously hidden views, aspects and spaces of a building are revealed. 89 In an interview with Judith Kirshner, Matta-Clark states that, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccertainly light is a very real issue and in any case\u00E2\u0080\u0094 let\u00E2\u0080\u0099s say I were to do ten pieces in the future\u00E2\u0080\u0094I\u00E2\u0080\u0099m sure, that of those ten, some big percentage would be involved with light.\u00E2\u0080\u009D90 The role of light is crucial, not only for the effect, but also in the design of Day\u00E2\u0080\u0099s End, which was executed the summer before Conical Intersect. Here we find a precedent to the circular holes of Conical Intersect in the ocular shape cut out of the side of a steel-trussed warehouse on edge of Hudson River, New York. This window / eye / aperture / hole tracked the passage of light throughout the day, and Matta-Clark marked the phenomenon by cutting a long canal into (or out of) the bottom of the warehouse in the pattern of the summer sun\u00E2\u0080\u0099s daily progression. Interestingly, Matta-Clark stated that he was notconcerned with light as an elemental, but rather as an integral part of contingent situation. He describes his work in an interview with Liza Bear as, \u00E2\u0080\u00A6very distinct from the California school which takes a neutral exhibition space and merely introduces a certain amount of light\u00E2\u0080\u0094the whole kind of post- Larry Bell school\u00E2\u0080\u00A6And the distinction between what I\u00E2\u0080\u0099m doing and this is not just the phenomenology, the isolated effect. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s a whole series of things that are very complex. And I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t feel totally in control of the situation. I just try to get in there and alter it. 91 89 Note that scholars read the shape of the many of the cuts by the shape or design of the building: this is perhaps the most obvious with Splitting, in which the slice mimics an architectural cross-section, and Bingo, in which the fa\u00C3\u00A7ade itself is extracted, but it is also true for the rectangular shapes of Bronx Floors that mimic the shapes of walls and doorframes. While I agree with this general consensus on the nature of the cuts, I also suggest that the effect of the cuts is photographic. 90 Kirshner, \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 22. 91 Bear et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark: Dilemmas,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 265. 45 Indeed, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work deals with light in an urban or suburban context, in which it already has an ideological resonance with transparency. And I suggest that the importance of the built environment, the both mental and material medium through which light works, distinguishes his work from most other Land artists and allows architectural discourse to so effectively inflect the work. Light remains an essential aspect, but an aspect tied to social context. With the preceding works in mind, I propose that the photograph apparatus is mimicked in the action of the building cuts, where the process of letting light into a building references the act of exposure. The act of photographic exposure both reveals and makes material: in Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s physical iteration, therefore, the compressed space of phenomenal transparency relates not only to the photographic apparatus, but to photographic space in which representational image and material object become inseparable. While the overall shapes of his building cuts are highly geometric and formal\u00E2\u0080\u0094the planar cut of Splitting, the cone of Conical Intersect, the spheres of Circus, Caribbean Orange\u00E2\u0080\u0094these abstract forms are painstakingly inscribed through drywall, studs, wood, and steel. The act of cutting exposes the materiality of walls and floors, and the large geometric shapes are complicated by the interstitial spaces within the walls and floors that the cuts reveal. For Matta-Clark, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cit was kind of the thin edge of what was being seen that interested me as much, if not more than, the views that were being created.\u00E2\u0080\u009D92 Indeed, in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work the volumetric space of a room is flattened by the accumulation of floors and walls, which become internal frames running through the viewing space. These frayed edges become the metaphoric seams of the conceptual photographic image-object, as well as the material edges of (de)construction. 92 Bear et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 167. 46 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s cuts physically manifest the presence of photography in Rowe\u00E2\u0080\u0099s conception of phenomenal transparency, which becomes opposed to the literal transparency that the photograph itself often connotes as documentation within Land Art and performance practices, as well as the ideological use of transparency in Modernist architectural discourse. For Le Corbusier, the transcendent space of transparency, like the objectivity of geometry itself, provided a solution to the social problems of the city itself, particularly modern phobias. The flattening, isolation and objectification of space was seen as \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca liberating leap into infinity for modernist \u00E2\u0080\u0098man.\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D93 However, for many cultural critics transparency provided architects and urban planners a solution to the wrong problems. According to Vidler: \u00E2\u0080\u009Cinfinite space became the instrument of suppression for everything [Le Corbusier and his supporters] hated about the city, if not the agent of repression of their own highly developed phobias: claustrophobia in the face of the old city, of course, but also, and linked to this\u00E2\u0080\u00A6the fear of touching.\u00E2\u0080\u009D94 Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s transparent space, therefore, directly contrasts the haptic, everyday space that performance artists in the 1970s would investigate as way of critique. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s background augments Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s status as a foil for Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own work. 95 Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father had worked for two years as a draftsman in Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s studio, who was seen as socially conservative in the eyes of Matta\u00E2\u0080\u0099s surrealist peers: Matta\u00E2\u0080\u0099s architectural dreamscapes are often read as a direct critique of Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s living machines.96 And, as stated earlier, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own architectural education was heavily inundated with Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice and theory: as an avid proponent of Le Corbusier, Rowe promoted a 93 Vidler, Warped Space, 10. 94 Vidler, Warped Space, 58. 95 For the most thorough discussion of the relationship between Le Corbusier and Matta-Clark to date, see Attlee, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTowards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 96 Vidler, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098Architecture-To-Be\u00E2\u0080\u0099.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 47 conservative Utopianism, seemingly read by Matta-Clark as dogma. In response to Wall\u00E2\u0080\u0099s question, \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhat images come to mind about Cornell?\u00E2\u0080\u009D Matta-Clark responded: Catholicism. As a matter of fact, Colin Row, or one of those people, I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know exactly who, made a clear statement which has always stuck. Which is, when you enter a design academy what you are doing is the same thing as entering the priesthood. You are going there for vocational training, as a novice. You learn to perform according to rubric, with all the trappings, including cowtowing in front of the cardinals and bishops, receiving the same sacraments upon leading the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgood\u00E2\u0080\u009D life, and excommunication for heretical behavior. Its very clear to me that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s what happens in a design school. You get the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cword.\u00E2\u0080\u009D97 Even in his own time, Le Corbusier stood for bureaucratic, top-down control, which Matta-Clark understood, ironically, as French tradition and located in the centralized institution of the Pompidou Centre. Of particular relevance to Paris of the 1970s, Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Plan Voisin of 1925, ideologically founded on the concept of transparency 98 had called for a full-scale clearing of the historic centre of Paris. The plan implicitly celebrated the 19 th century wholesale renovation of Paris by Haussmann, an historical event that was utilized in the negative critiques against the mass destruction of the Les Halles area that echo through Conical Intersect. 99 As accounts by Lee and Graham state, Conical Intersect represents a backwards glance through this historic past and technological projection into the future. I augment this reading by suggesting that, through artistic intervention, the architectural site becomes the material and symbolic form of the photographic apparatus, photographic space and by extension the photographic process. 97 On page nine of a rough draft of the interview between Donald Wall and Gordon Matta-Clark, in GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:001.077. 98 Furthermore, the ideology of transparency soon became a, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccommonplace that rendered it absurdly easy to construct the notion of a city to end all cities, from Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s project for Une Ville Contemporaine of 1923, to his Voisin Plan of 1925, culminating in the Ville Verte and Ville Radieuse of 1933-35.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vidler, Warped Space, 62). 99 This phenomenon is discussed by Lee in \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Holes of History.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 48 The photographic process, in return, acts on and critiques the site of architecture, with its particular social resonance in the history of bureaucratic Modernist discourse. 49 Conical Intersect In Conical Intersect, the son et lumi\u00C3\u00A8re, that which would be projected onto the exterior of a building, is instead generated from within the building by virtue of the cut. Here we see the influence of McCall\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experimental film: the direction of the viewer\u00E2\u0080\u0099s gaze, in this case the gaze of the passerby, is reversed, looking backwards into the projection, into the light source itself. The cuts internalize the projection. By referencing motion-picture projection, and reversing the viewing position, the intervention suggests a reversal of the standard order. The large-scale external projection becomes the internal projection by which an image is first captured. The formal shape of Conical Intersect mimics the action of the camera: the two-foot hole chiseled out of the attic of the southern building literalizes the aperture of the camera, and the conical shape mimics the shape of light refracting through a lens. From the position of the Pompidou Centre, the intervention takes the shape of a spyglass or telescope, but from the position of the viewer, the buildings take on the shape of a camera lens, of a rudimentary pinhole camera. In a letter to Yvon Lambert, from February of 1976, Matta-Clark describes this Parisian work as his, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccherished cyclopian \u00E2\u0080\u0098Hole\u00E2\u0080\u0099 (not a hole as much as a coup d\u00E2\u0080\u0099oeil)\u00E2\u0080\u009D100 The phrase a coup d\u00E2\u0080\u0099oeil translates as a \u00E2\u0080\u0098glance\u00E2\u0080\u0099 or a \u00E2\u0080\u0098wink.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Can we also hear a click? By inscribing the photographic apparatus onto the Euclidean structure of architecture, the formal models of both spatial technologies are complicated and revealed as subjects for critique. The photographic apparatus, as it relates to the refraction of light through a lens typically positions the viewer behind the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccone of vision.\u00E2\u0080\u009D As Victor Burgin attests, this formal geometry is a prevalent metaphor in 1970s post-structuralist writing, used to describe subject-object interrelations, and indeed, tends to rely on the eighteenth-century concept of transparency associated with the photographic camera\u00E2\u0080\u0099s pre-cursor, the camera obscura, as well as the ideal of 100 In GM-C Archive, PHCON2002:0016:003.034. 50 egalitarianism utilized in avant-garde Modernist discourse. According to Burgin, the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccone of vision\u00E2\u0080\u009D threatens to re-inscribes a particularly Western worldview associated with the perspectival geometry and the centered position of the viewer. 101 However, in Conical Intersect the photographic apparatus or \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccone of vision\u00E2\u0080\u009D is complicated by the photographic space inscribed in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Parisian work through the building cuts. We can contrast the diagrammatic shape of Conical Intersect with the actual view seen by the local Parisians who passed by the work during its short life on Rue Beaubourg. According to Jean-Hubert Martin, Biennale curator, many passersby who witnessed the progress of the work in this busy section of Paris saw the piece as a giant (and often artless) hole. In order to see the work in its complexity required a privileged position inside the building, where, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe light coming down through it changed the piece throughout the day.\u00E2\u0080\u009D102 This tension is aptly illustrated in a Cibachrome photomontage juxtaposing the opposing views. Two colour negatives taken from the inside the building accent the view framed by the central aperture: the cityscape includes a block of row buildings and parked cars along Rue Beaubourg, which cuts diagonally through the scene, an orthogonal line accenting perspectival space. By contrast, the space imaged through the central aperture as seen in the smaller and more obscured black & white shots directed onto the work\u00E2\u0080\u0099s south fa\u00C3\u00A7ade is compressed. The conical shape is flattened into a series of receding and progressively darker holes, with a small glimpse of light past the end of the cut in the north attic. Theoretically, we see through the twin 17 th -century buildings onto the Pompidou Centre. However, as evidenced by photographs and eyewitnesses accounts, passersby could, at best, catch glimpses of the new Centre through the actual conical cut. In reality, the intersecting curved edges of walls, floors, and ceilings, as well as the additional semi-circular 101 Burgin, Indifferent Spaces, 42, 46. 102 Jean-Hubert Martin interviewed by Joan Simon, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, 89. 51 incisions, obscured the geometrical form. A passerby would most likely have attempted to see through the conical void, as though through a fractured mechanical gaze. The role of the photographic in Conical Intersect is further complicated in a series of black and white photomontages that combine interior shots looking out of the southern fa\u00C3\u00A7ade\u00E2\u0080\u0099s hole, in which both the photographic image and the photographic apparatus are fragmented. 103 The photomontages maintain the representational aspect of the photograph, while obscuring the images\u00E2\u0080\u0099 legibility through juxtaposition and re-orientation of the photographic object. The metaphoric gaps between photographic frames are literally revealed, as the overlap of spaces around the central motif hints at the multiplicities of space lost within this single-shot monocular perspective and confuses any sense of the original conical shape of the building cuts. .104 As Matta-Clark said in 1978, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cit\u00E2\u0080\u0099s very easy to trick a camera, to outdo a camera. With the eye\u00E2\u0080\u0099s peripheral field of vision, any slight movement of the head would give us more information than the camera ever had.\u00E2\u0080\u009D105The photographic image can only approximate that peripheral field, which inflects the status of the photographic apparatus, metaphorically embodied by the central hole. In one photomontage, the aperture is sliced and sutured, the perspective onto the surrounding buildings doubled\u00E2\u0080\u0094the resulting space threatens to double over. In another photomontage, the space between the two centre photographs widens, and with it, the cut through the aperture widens. In a third work, the white background of the photomontage 103 Jenkins also suggests a general connection between the effect of photocollages and the motif of the aperture in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works: \u00E2\u0080\u009C Rather than paring down the range of photographic effects to a purely denotative or informational function, he was opening up the medium in ways that closely paralleled the apertures characteristic of the altered sites of his projects.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Jenkins, Conical Intersect, 71). 104 This phenomenon is discussed in many articles, including Walker. \u00E2\u0080\u009CGordon Matta-Clark: Drawing on Architecture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 124. 105 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 332-333. 52 annihilates the architectural view. Here the aperture has expanded and become an elliptical frame. As a result the pictorial surface inside it becomes a void. When read together, the group of three photomontages suggests a logical trajectory: the central aperture opens and closes, exposing the view to light and subsequently erasing the cityscape itself. The photographic apparatus functions at the expense of the photographic image, and its ability to document. Furthermore, the central hole takes on the function of the vanishing point, which marks the unstated place of absence within perspectival visuality. 106 Within early 20 th century avant-garde discourse, the geometry of perspective itself became an object of analysis, and vanishing point of perspective, the counterpart to the invisible viewing position, became the space of investigation. 107 The function of the vanishing point is, therefore, equated with that of transparency, and finds its counterparts in the aperture and the window frame. Paradoxically, transparency does not necessarily offer the opening up onto a scene, also but the closure or limit of one. And here the large central aperture, in which the view threatens to collapse into the white background, points to the relationship between Modernist abstraction and photography, while re-inscribing the photograph\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theoretical lack. What kind of space can we find outside of this central void, beyond the mechanical gaze? I return to the first of this series of photomontages, in which the repetition of small, mullioned windows around the central space again suggests a multitude of viewpoints. The windows themselves are opaque, while the interstitial spaces exposed by light become textured and materially dense. Right-angled rooms are here darkened cavities, retaining hints of the building\u00E2\u0080\u0099s former life\u00E2\u0080\u0094a wall post, a small cabinet, an open door, etc. Unlike the straight edges of the 106 Burgin asserts that the vanishing traditionally point marks an unstated absence and connects the inside of the picture with the outside, with that which lies beyond. (Burgin, Indifferent Spaces, 55). 107 Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique, and Representation, 18. 53 material photographs, the internal edges depicted within the images are roughly hewn: walls and floors are no longer borders around empty space, but systemic veins and capillaries running through the body of architecture. In contrast to the living machines of Modernism, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s walls become organic membranes through his spatial and photographic interventions. The mechanical eye has broken down, revealing instead a sense of corporeality that references the embodied experience of social spaces, the space between representations. The fragmented photographic images both highlight and surpass the role of the camera and the gestalt of architecture within its focused gaze. Matta-Clark distinguishes his most complicated interventions from other site-specific practices by describing his own interventions as those that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdefy that category of a sort of snapshot scenic work.\u00E2\u0080\u009D108 Here Matta-Clark uses the metaphor and form of the pictorial photograph to stand in for the disembodied sight of one-point perspective, in which the viewing subject remains exterior to the object, in this case the art work. While his analysis of contemporary Land art is undoubtedly too reductive, it points us towards the multi-layered engagement between artwork and the place of critique in Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own practice\u00E2\u0080\u0094an engagement that often takes place through the photograph. Photography acts as a means as well as an end of artistic action. Matta-Clark uses the conceptual model of photography as a place or starting point for investigation, either literally with his photomontages, or formally and metaphorically with the cut of light. Matta-Clark thereby uses the technology of photography against itself by reversing the process of creation, inflecting and, altering the material image. In opposition to a Modernist sublimation of the photograph, Matta-Clark reveals the image-object 108 Kirshner et al., \u00E2\u0080\u009CInterview with Gordon Matta-Clark,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 319. 54 as a new model of transparency. And, in doing so, this catchall Modernist phrase becomes situated within the everyday; the literal contingency of photographic transparency is revealed, as are the historical and social resonances of the photographic process. Conclusion Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s practice relates to various contemporary art trends in the 1970s, including Land art, conceptual art, and performance art, without belonging to a specific movement. During this decade, the fluctuating status of photography became an important issue for postmodern art practices. In my thesis, I traced three modalities for the photographic within Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s works: image (referent), object (medium), and apparatus (technology). For Matta-Clark, the photographic image provided a necessary tool to gain publicity, exhibit in gallery spaces, and network within the art world, while remaining an aspect of his experimental photoworks. Matta- Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s investigation of the photographic object is also apparent within his photographic experimentation: he collaged both prints and slide negatives, and used a variety of printing technologies, creating highly aesthetic colour-saturated cibachrome prints of sutured negatives and printing barely perceptible images onto cardboard boxes. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s interest in the photographic apparatus is evident in an untitled work of 1971, in which he created a functional camera obscura within multiple floors of a museum in Santiago, and, I suggest, by the formal shape of Conical Intersect, which mimics the lens of a camera. The photographic process is both a tool for the investigation of space and investigative subject. Furthermore, my thesis suggests that the photographic process informs the overtly political issues of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s spatial practice. In his own writing, Matta-Clark positioned himself against the discourse of functionalist architecture and its figurehead, Le Corbusier. However, as Anthony Vidler asserts, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s modes of spatial manipulation borrow from Modernist architectural discourse, especially as it was re-framed in the 1960s by Rowe. I found an unstated connection between photography and phenomenal transparency, a term defined in Rowe and Robert Slutzky\u00E2\u0080\u0099s influential essay, \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransparency: Literal and Phenomenal\u00E2\u0080\u009D where it is used to describe the abstraction of space in 56 the work of Le Corbusier. Beatriz Colomina provided an important case study for my thesis; she suggests that the flattened view of the photographic landscape became incorporated into Le Corbusier\u00E2\u0080\u0099s design as his now-iconic bands of horizontal glazing. By considering Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s realized sculptural works alongside his theoretical experimentation and architectural education, I will argued that the photographic is both crucial to and inextricably linked with his larger critical and social agenda. I showed how his cuts reference photographic space, as it appears in the writings of Rowe and the work of Le Corbusier. As such, his cut critiques the documentary status that photography often connoted in contemporary art practices, as well as the ideological use of transparency in Modernist architectural discourse. My thesis has suggested one way in which we can re-frame Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s unique contribution to the fields of contemporary sculpture and professional architecture, where he continues to be an influential figure. Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s reconfigured spaces have influenced, and continue to influence architectural practices, most notably those of Frank Gehry. Furthermore, Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work has become increasingly influential to younger artists, inciting several examples of direct homage. Today the reception of Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work remains strong, with a new publication forthcoming in January 2012. For this reason, it is important to re-evaluate his critical agenda, especially as it can be applied to the current extensions of his practice. By reinserting a historically specific understanding of the photographic into Matta-Clark\u00E2\u0080\u0099s physical investigations of both buildings and photographs, his forms take on insistently social dimensions, demonstrating the importance of critical means in the search for political ends. 57 Bibliography Archives Gordon Matta-Clark Archive, Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Published Sources Allen, Stan. Practice: Architecture, Technique, and Representation. London: Routledge, 2009. 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"Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"@en . "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"@en . "Graduate"@en . "Gordon Matta-Clark's photographic spaces"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/38192"@en .