The Physical Poetics of 'Anarchitecture'

Flash Art shares an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Gordon Matta Clark: Physical Poetics (UC Press, 2019), by poet and writer Frances Richard: "'The term anarchitecture was more or less invented by Gordon,' wrote sculptor Richard Nonas in 1992, regarding his friend and collaborator Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978)," she begins. Later, we learn about the term as a poetic device:

Anarchitecture sought not to theorize “mental, personal, nonstructural notions” but to work inside them. Ubiquitous and protean, “space” was understood by these sculptors and dancers as a conduit through which they could continue research into the dematerialization of the art object and activation of marked sites begun by Fluxus, Conceptualist and Earth artists. Such inquiries introduced an active body back into artmaking, without returning that body to the psychological and spiritual grandeur it had borne in action painting. Because space is shared by all who inhabit it, the group could approach phenomenological and semiotic questions indirectly. They could treat a word or photograph — or magazine page — as a place, as real (or unreal) as a building or landscape.

“The Anarchitecture group — if I look at it from twenty feet away — was a completely literary thing,” remembers Anderson. “The talking was really a working method and a way of identifying with each other.” It is significant in this regard that eight of the twelve Flash Art images incorporate language. Reproduced in handwriting as opposed to print (exceptions are the headnote and list of participants), these verbal elements establish, inside the magazine, a visual correlate to the playfully embodied speech at Anarchitecture meetings.

Read more from this exciting publication at Flash Art.