An alumni of Cornell, Gordon Matta Clark’s background in architecture is interesting in that his statement more often than not was to remove architecture.
“Conical intersect” in Paris was probably the first time I ever saw his work and it remains one of my favourites. His interest in creation through destruction is a theme that he championed. The imagery of his work is pretty much all that remains of his large scale pieces as they were orchestrated with pre demolition builds. The photos of “Conical intersect” beside the nearly complete Pompidou Centre are rather poignant.
His notebooks are an excellent reveal of his thinking and thought process, not to mention his relentless questioning of the interpretations of the “International stool” Corbusier.
What is that I find so interesting? His vantage point - really quite unique. A builder of phoenixes in the ashes of “progress”. He took our eyes and minds into the everyday and the redundant and made us look and question, and that is a state of mind we should always have.
