Gordon Matta-Clark
Or, what anarchitecture offers immersive design
Welcome back. This is the fifth in a series of twelve short essays exploring some of the background thinking that went into making From Bitter Ground, an immersive work bridging books, digital literature and immersion, that launches in April this year. If you’re new, then the archive so far is up on Substack. If you’re an old hand, then here we go again.
But before we start properly, here are some details:
Gordon Matta-Clark was an American architect and artist. The son of noted Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, he studied architecture at Cornell University, and spent a year in Paris at the Sorbonne, studying French literature. His body of work includes performance and recycling pieces, spatial and textural works, and his "building cuts" (of which more later). He died young - at 35 years old from pancreatic cancer in 1978 - but he left behind a body of work that is genuinely groundbreaking in its ambition, scale and scope.
Matta-Clark was concerned with space, and the evocation of something that sits inside those spaces, and demands to be found a way out. That escape might otherwise be through the way a building or drawing is rendered, but Matta-Clark is notable for cutting buildings. Using industrial tools, or hand-held saws, or a combination of each, he (and a team of assistants) made incursions into the physical fabric of a structure, in ways that defied both expectation and our usual understanding of structural design. This philosophy of practice - named as ‘Anarchitecture’ by Matta-Clark, is concerned with the nature of architecture as it might exist after modernism - in the wake of the formalism that modernism embodies, these works literally deconstruct the fabric of buildings and propose a manifesto by practice that foregrounds human interaction with architectural space. That they are always, necessarily, transitory doubles down on their relationship to human interaction. These are reworkings of spaces designed for humans to dwell or work within, made at once inaccessible and strange.
They’re absofuckinglutely amazing, and I’m haunted by them. Constantly.
I first saw a Matta-Clark in my twenties, which might have been ‘Splitting’ (image above), and although it’s taken me nearly thirty years to get around to addressing what his work means to me, and what it makes me think, and feel, it’s been a fairly constant companion. There’s a lot of writing about his work and the ideas he developed, and if you want a book recommendation, then reply and I’ll walk you through my Matta-Clark shelf.
For now though, and to begin, two quotes to dwell on:
Both Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier shared a fascination with the way buildings act on human consciousness – the interplay, perhaps, between the elements Barthes identified within architecture of function and dream – and also in the attitudes that might give rise to new building types.1
And invoking Matta-Clark’s employment of the cut, as described here:
…he told Lisa Béar, his ‘normal sense of gravity was subverted by the experience. In fact when you got to the top floor and looked down through an elliptical section through the floor that was cut out, you would look down through the fragments of a normal apartment space, but I had never seen anything like it. It looked like … almost as though it were a pool. That is, it has a reflective quality to it and a surface – but the surface was just the accumulation of images of the spaces below it.
It’s this ‘fragmenting’, altering the substrate of the world to show us something that patently isn’t and cannot be there, that’s at the heart of his practice. And the interplay between space and thought leans, for me at least, into what it it we’re making when we attempt an immersive work. Daniel Albright writes about art as having pseudomorphic2 potential, in that art that attempts to duplicate the affect of another medium is performing something specific to the qualities possessed by and of art itself. Art reaches beyond its own surface, and in doing so, reifies something approaching the sublime.
The thing that Matta-Clark’s work does to me personally though, is to evoke something so utterly alien that it’s staggering to be witness to. The cuts he makes in structures that should not have those incisions made in them defies the rules of representational physics. He sees a building in a way that’s not governed by the same rules that you and I employ, and that’s genuinely interesting.
What has that got to do with immersion though, and From Bitter Ground specifically?
I’m going to answer that in reverse order. I want to do something new with each piece of work. New in that it should be something I’ve not attempted before and therefore brings with it a sizeable element of risk. Risk, and reward, because in addition to that being the flipside of risk, it’s also the point of trying something new. Even if it doesn’t completely work, you’ll learn something.
Here, what I think Matt-Clark’s work is pointing me to, is a way to make use of a profoundly uncanny affect in the register of the narrative.
Very minor spoilers ahead
From Bitter Ground is based - location-wise - around a house. It’s a house that, of course, doesn’t exist (you can experience this work anywhere in the world3 and my budget didn’t stretch to building a house for each and every one of you). The house does exist within the work though, and the exact nature of that existence is what the story, and the immersive techniques employed, are trying to render. What Matta-Clark offers me is a way to make that existence uncanny, to evoke the presence of what ought to be absent (see - these essays do connect). Seeing the world, seeing the house you’re asked to create, at least partly through the lens of anarchitecture, might, I thought, be a way to lean into that experience of the strange and unfamiliar. Anarchitectural princinples are concerned with a critique of architectural practice, with provoking a reexamination of inhabited spaces, of the assumptions that culture makes about them. From Bitter Ground makes no claim to be an anarchitectural work, but it is a response to the ideas Matta-Clark pioneered, and the ways in which he transformed buildings into something far from normal.
spoilers end
You don’t have to read the paragraph above, but the essay might end a bit abruptly if you don’t.
Unspoilery thoughts though. The very special thing that immersive media - and especially this derivation of it - do, is to find ways to conjure the impossible. Punchdrunk blur the line between reality and dreaming, and do so in a series of otherly charged spaces. Abandoned industrial sites, derelict buildings, tunnels underneath London Underground Stations, disused Postal Sorting Offices, all are changed by the presence of an immersive work at scale. Blast Theory reimagine urban landscapes, rendering car parks, road networks and counter-cultural spaces become ‘othered’ as technology layers experience over them. Duncan Speakman’s recent body of work - It Must Have Been Dark By Then and Only Expansion - will the Anthropocene into being for their participants, creating and layering audio landscapes over your native surroundings that bring into sharp focus the irreparable damage inflicted upon our planet.
These are all, I propose, anarchitectural endeavours. They want us to reimagine the spaces around us, and find new meanings in things we previously took for granted. They want to shock, or surprise, or scare. They have a purpose. They are going to change us.
Okay, there we go. Next time, genre and science. With some fiction.
In Panaesthetics. Yale University Press. 2014
That has a semi-reliable phone signal