Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

Published with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect surveys the practice of an artist who treated the building itself, cut open, gutted or partially demolished, as his primary material.

After training as an architect at Cornell, Matta-Clark returned to New York and coined the term "anarchitecture" to describe site-specific interventions staged in the economically devastated South Bronx. His Cuts series sliced through the walls and floors of abandoned buildings, turning demolition into an anatomical study of urban decline; Conical Intersect, made in Paris on row houses slated for demolition ahead of the Centre Pompidou's construction, became one of his best-known works of artistic protest. The volume reproduces 90 color illustrations alongside essays placing these projects within architectural and urban history.

Matta-Clark (1943-1978) worked at the edge of the Anarchitecture group and the downtown New York scene of the 1970s, and this book, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore with Cara M. Jordan and Xavier Wrona, situates his short career as a founding contribution to social practice and relational aesthetics.