An Excerpt From Frances Richard's Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics

Places Journal has published an excerpt from poet, writer, and editor Frances Richard's new book, https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520299092/gordon-matta-clark (University of California Press, 2019). The artist's "swashbuckling image," writes Richard, "has tended to obscure the more conceptual elements of Matta-Clark’s practice." For example:

For Matta-Clark, the physical and the poetic were halves of a whole. He wrote constantly, and punning wordplay, surreal quasi-narrative provocations, and conversational exchange were integral to his understanding of sculpture, performance, and filmmaking alike. He was not, like his somewhat older contemporaries Donald Judd and Robert Smithson, a reviewer of other artists’ work, nor an essayist composing for publication. Neither was he a diarist, writing to fulfill inner needs. Much of his verbal output occupies, instead, a liminal zone between presentational and off-the-record or off-the-cuff. In place of polemic or confession, he gave interviews, drafted long-shot proposals, and kept aphoristic notes on index cards; he confected neologisms on the spot. He was probably dyslexic and his spelling was atrocious — yet these errors cannot be discounted wholesale, since his puns often turn on intentional misspellings and multilingual plays on words. There was method to his madness, and he returned continually to his flights of verbal fancy and invented terms, reworking phrases on the page and weaving a mesh of nuances based on use.

An equally important — and closely related — element of Matta-Clark’s career is his commitment to collaborative and politically inflected art-making. Like the vivid physicality of his site-specific cuts, the sociopolitical symbolism of his production has frequently been taken as a given in critical reception. “Matta-Clark’s work is a politics of things approaching their social exhaustion and the potential of their reclamation,” observes the art historian Pamela M. Lee — whose 2001 book Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark reignited interest in its subject after years of posthumous neglect. “It is a politics of the art object in relation to property; of the ‘right to the city’ alienated by capital and the state, of the retrieval of lost spaces; of communities reimagined in the wake of their disappearance; a politics of garbage and things thrown away.

Read on at Places. Can't wait for this book!