Aggression and denial

For Matta-Clark, art and living was transformed in the loft space through the transformation of the space itself. Further more, the wider devaluation of buildings and urban areas, abandoned and left empty as ghostly reminders of chance development, was addressed by making the lofts inhabitable. a renovated loft space had become comparable to any other middle- to high-end New York City apartment in terms of price, if not character. The artists, the pioneering settlers, eventually became a practical intermediate link in the overall revaluation of these city assets.

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Matta-Clark concedes, “I must admit despite all the political barrage that I’ve had, I still believe that invested time and energy means it [the loft space] belongs to you in some very important ways. And I think it’s important that something belongs to you, that your time belongs to you… energy, imagination. I must admit that I’m not all that much of a total collectivist socialist. There’s a kind of morality that that is based on which I don’t think in fact works. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m too American. I don’t buy the dogma” (2006a: 332).

For Matta-Clark, the situation was a deep regret, yet, at the same time, it offered a possibility of pursuing a life outside the conventions of society. He explained:

I think that the loft situation, at least the early loft situation in which artists were constantly confronted with their own housing needs, was an atmosphere in which many were compelled to transform their real and illusory environment as well as the nature of their works. Living in New York creates such a need for adaptation that raw, uninhabitable spaces constantly had to be transformed into studios or exhibition areas. I imagine that this is one of the ways that I became used to approaching space on an aggressive level. (249)

That transformation of raw, uninhabitable spaces made Matta-Clark aggressive, or forced a mobilisation of aggression, points in two directions. Firstly, the presence of aggression might be explained by the circumstance that the robust loft structures resisted modification unless treated with aggressive force, which is to say that mobilising a certain level of aggression to produce the required strength was necessary.59 _{On the other hand, the abandoned building structures might have provoked} the already socially indignant artist/architect to the point where an aggressive response was called forth, required or not. Anger built up over a prolonged period of time, as a result of an unfair social climate, was ignited once confronted with the visible traces of prevailing social misery. Matta-Clark appears to have believed that aggression was somehow required and almost natural considering the absence of any further explanation or excuses for it.

The self-proclaimed aggressive wrestling with the physical framework of buildings was taken a step further once the conversions of lofts and galleries exceeded the scope of purely functional

modifications. Through the work of altering abandoned buildings, the artist/architect discovered a new direction for the artistic practice in the form of a different kind of tampering with the material fabric of built structures. This work, of a markedly different kind than the functional loft alterations that inspired them, saw cutting strategically into buildings as a new spatial/artistic opportunity and language to be explored. Matta-Clark explains that it was the rebuilding of the restaurant Food in the early 1970s that defined this turning point. While rebuilding the restaurant foremost served to make it more practical, the exercise marked a significant moment as it was to be the last time that Matta-Clark would cut up a space for functional alterations only. He explained:

One of the earliest times I can remember using cutting as a way of redefining a space was at Food Restaurant … The first design of the place was not as practical as we needed once the restaurant became a business. Consequently, I spend the second summer redesigning the space. I did this by cutting up what we had already built and rearranging it. This cutting up started with a number of counters and built-in workspaces. It then progressed to the walls and various other space dividers. This was perhaps, the last time I ever used cutting, the cutting process, in a pragmatic way. (249)

After the rebuilding of Food, Matta-Clark began to cut built structures in a non-pragmatic way starting with Bronx Floors (1972/73). A range of different building cuts followed, and if Splitting was only the third in this sequence, it was, however, the first dwelling house to be addressed in its totality by Matta-

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Sharon Zukin also refers to “the agony and the ecstasy of renovating raw space” in the caption to two images showing the conditions of a Greenwich Village loft before and after conversion (1985: 7).

Clark’s chainsaw. If the response to the house appears to follow a strategy selected specifically for the given situation, the desire to force a house open by cutting it straight through, which is to say to alter its foundation and sink one half down to open the central cleavage, is significant. In a statement made during the interview with Donald Wall a couple of years later, Matta-Clark explained:

Much of my life’s energies are simply about being denied. There’s so much in our society that purposely intends denial: deny entry, deny passage, deny participation etc. … My work directly reflects this. (1976: 79)

The statement indicates that the aspect of denial plays an important role in the work and operates on a number of levels, from prohibited access to a singular building to exclusion from the community or society at large. As such, forcing buildings open can be seen as an attempt to create a passageway where access has otherwise been prohibited or blocked, in Matta-Clark’s case in a very literal sense. At the same time, the cutting strategy is not simply an attempt to create an opening for the purpose of getting inside a building; it is the creation of an exit to let something or someone out. Matta-Clark said:

By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am gesturing: first, to open a state of enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for ensuring a passive, isolated

consumer – a virtually captive audience … I would not make a total distinction between the imprisonment of the poor and the remarkably subtle self-containerisation of higher socio-economic neighbourhoods. The question is a reaction to an ever less viable state of privacy, private property and isolation. (76) If dwellers had become trapped inside their houses, their homes, then Matta-Clark wanted to

demonstrate that a house was not a fixed entity, that it could be opened up, that it was perhaps already open. The social indignation, driving the work from the early loft alterations to the artistic building cuts, was, as such, a direct response to its context. Matta-Clark might have been angry with his father, his family, the architectural profession, the building industry, the New York City authorities, with American politics and the situation in his native Chile not least – he might have been deeply upset by all kinds of domination and exploitation.60 _{Eventually, this anger boiled down to one single address –} the building, the house, any house. That the buildings available for Matta-Clark’s cutting in most cases were abandoned and/or scheduled for demolition meant that they had already been excluded, that they already occupied the periphery, and if not literally, then in terms of real estate value or any kind of conventional value. Matta-Clark later recalled the early excursions into abandoned urban spaces:

They were free to all. The wild dogs, the junkies and I used these spaces to work out some life problem, in my case, having no socially acceptable place to work. (2006a: 250)