Gordon Matta-Clark

Heart of a Dog

Laurie Anderson

Archie, Gatto

Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings.

Clockshower

Gordon Matta-Clark

In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface.

Open House

Gordon Matta-Clark

In May 1972, Matta-Clark installed an industrial waste container between 98 and 112 Greene Street in New York?s SoHo district. He collected discarded doors and pieces of timber and divided the interior into three openings. This piece records an opening-day site performance by the artist, Tina Girouard, Keith Sonnier, and other friends.

Fresh Kill

Gordon Matta-Clark

This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece was shown in Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Camera: Burt Spielvogel, Rudy Burkhardt. Producer: Holly Solomon, Burt Spielvogel.

Fire Child

Gordon Matta-Clark

In 1971 Matta-Clark produced works for the exhibition Brooklyn Bridge Event. This film records his process of making a sculpture - a small wall made of rubbish, waste paper and tin cans collected from the area. —EAI

Chinatown Voyeur

Gordon Matta-Clark

This space and texture work, created specifically for video, is a tour of the skyline and domestic interiors of New York's Chinatown.

Paris Underground

Gordon Matta-Clark

In this film Matta-Clark explores underground Paris. The artist shows the complexity of underground spaces with scenes of architectural ruins, car parks, tunnels, ossuaries, cellars, crypts and basements in the Opera district.

City Slivers

Gordon Matta-Clark

For City Slivers, which was made with a camera borrowed from Robert Rauschenberg, Matta-Clark affixed vertical matte strips in front of an anamorphic camera lens, thereby allowing only slivers of light to penetrate the film. He then rewound the film, repositioned the mattes, and reshot the same camera load. Using only in-camera editing, the light appears to slice through the film frame in a manner analogous to Matta-Clark’s architectural “cuttings.”

Sauna View

Gordon Matta-Clark

Matta-Clark made a video of his friends having a sauna; he later cut a section of the sauna to reveal the structure of the wall.

Bingo

Gordon Matta-Clark

Bingo documents the ten-day progression of Matta-Clark’s incision into a Niagara Fall’s residence before its demolition. Using a system derived from techniques developed by the British architect and theorist Colin Rowe, Matta-Clark first divided the exterior wall of the house into nine equal grid-like sections. He then removed eight segments from the structure piece by piece, leaving the middle section of the grid intact. Bingo was filmed and edited primarily by Matta-Clark.

Tree Dance

Gordon Matta-Clark

For the exhibition Twenty-Six by Twenty Six at the Vassar College of Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, Matta-Clark created a performance inspired by spring fertility rituals. He performed in a structure made of ladders, ropes and other materials, which he built at the top of a large tree.

Day's End

Gordon Matta-Clark

In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof. Camera: Betsy Susler.

Office Baroque

Gordon Matta-Clark

Matta-Clark made a cut in a five-story commercial building located in front of the Steen, a tourist spot in Antwerp. (On Matta-Clark's death shortly after, an attempt was made to save the work as a future museum of contemporary art, but the building was demolished.)

Substrait

Gordon Matta-Clark

In this film, Matta-Clark explored and documented the underground spaces of New York City. The artist chose a range of sites (New York Central railroad tracks, Grand Central Station, 13th Street, Croton Aqueduct in Highgate, etc.) to show the variety and complexity of the underground spaces and tunnels in the metropolitan area.

Conical Intersect

Marc Petitjean

Gordon Matta-Clark

“I met Gordon Matta-Clark at the 1975 Paris Biennale. He was looking for a place to make a piece. I led him to a building across the street from my place on rue Beaubourg that I had been taking photos of for the past year and which was about to be demolished. In front of my eyes Conical Intersect became the last unexpected and dazzling resident of 29 rue Beaubourg.” —Marc Petitjean

Splitting

Gordon Matta-Clark

For his 'Splitting' project, Matta-Clark found a house in Englewood, NJ (322 Humphrey Street to be precise) set for demolition, and bisected it neatly down the middle. Half-documentation, half-exploration: Splitting shows the laborious process and heady result- a house split completely in two.