Fresh Kill (1972)

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. This film stages the destruction of a red van by bulldozers near a refuse station in the middle of nature. Unlike many of Matta-Clark’s films, which simply document a performance, this one is truly staged for the camera, with editing and picture effects, which rhythm the destruction while playing on the contrast with the surrounding natural environment. From the start, the truck charges straight into the bulldozer. The sequence is repeated from different angles and is shot like a bullfight – the bulldozer continues the destruction by charging the red truck, after having executed several movements before attacking. The game continues with a second bulldozer entering the scene. They bash the vehicle to pieces, which wind up on a skip. The shots alternate with images of seagulls flying over the dump, until the final shot, when the birds’ flight passes over the dump in the light of a magnificent sunset. Gordon Matta-Clark works on materials within processes of deconstruction. By romantically staging the sacrifice of this truck, the artist creates a link between primitive and ritualised practices of sacrifice and the modern world in which he lives. The son of Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta and Anne Clark and the godson of Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Robert Matta-Echaurren (1943–78) studied architecture at Cornell from 1962 to 1968, including a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied French literature. In 1971, he changed his name to Gordon Matta-Clark, adopting his mother’s last name. Frustrated with the limitations of his chosen profession, Matta-Clark used his training in architecture instead as a base for his artistic explorations of space. He was an extremely prolific artist in a career barely spanning a decade that combined minimalist, conceptual, and performance practices. Best remembered for site-specific projects known as “building cuts,” these architectural interventions consisting of direct cuts into actual buildings scheduled for demolition now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, drawings, collages, and film and video documentations. Dating from 1971 to 1977, the eighteen films and videos included in this program—all transferred to DVD—document many of Matta-Clark’s well known performances and architectural interventions in New York, Poughkeepsie and Niagara Falls (NY), Englewood (NJ), Paris, Antwerp, and Berlin. Not only documents, these moving-image works also reveal Matta-Clark’s aesthetic attitudes and philosophical and political inquiries, all the while playing with the texture and space of the cinematic image. Working in New York City in the 1970s, “Matta-Clark was among those at the center of the avant-garde,” giving primary importance to the individual and to considerations of everyday life, an emphasis, which was in complete opposition to the focus on formalism during his education at Cornell. “War, political and racial assassinations and street riots, conflict between generations, all contributed to the feeling that a new order was evolving. Matta-Clark sensed both the dissolution of the old and the invigoration of seeking the new. . . . He proceeded like an inspired alchemist—experimenting, remaking what art can be, and turning unexpected things, acts, and sites into poetic and memorable aesthetic experiences.”2 Matta-Clark’s radical explorations into space and structure, which he referred to as Anarchitecture, called “for an anarchistic approach to architecture, marked physically by a breaking of convention through a process of ‘undoing’ or ‘destructuring,’ rather than creating a structure—and philosophically by a revolutionary approach that sought to reveal and later alleviate societal problems through art.”3 While the buildings that he cut into have long been demolished and even the neighborhoods that he worked in—Soho and the meatpacking district, for instance—are completely different places today, Matta-Clark’s dynamic engagement with the urban environment not only garnered high regard from his contemporaries but has influenced many artists since, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tobias Putrih, Hans Schabus, Olafur Eliasson, and Marjetica Potrc, whose practices are similarly collaborative, socially minded, and performative, and involve architecture in a variety of ways.