For his 1977 cutting piece Office Baroque, Gordon Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to a condemned office building in Antwerp, removing semi-circle and teardrop shapes from its roof and five floors to offer what he called “a stroll through panoramic arabesques.” Sunlight shifted and slanted as it shot through the previously sterile structure. The artist’s partner, Jane Crawford, described it as “the most beautiful fugue of light, air, weather and sculpture.” Our shame—and Matta-Clark’s intention—that we will never experience Office Baroque as such. As the art historian Pamela Lee wrote, “its imminent destruction is what granted the artist the use of it in the first place.” Documentation embalmed Matta-Clark’s site-objects; they were preserved from oblivion, sealed in a mediated state of permanent ruin.
The excavation of Office Baroque is captured in a 47-minute film of the same name by Matta-Clark and the Belgian filmmakers Eric Convents and Roger Steylaerts. It will screen on March 2 at Anthology Film Archives alongside Conical Intersect (1975), a short documentary about Matta-Clark’s eponymous Paris cutting. In Office Baroque (1977 - 2005), Matta-Clark describes the project as his most successful because “there’s no one vantage point that gives you any overall [view].” Where a photograph could capture his earlier “building cut” Splitting (1974), for example, here a “snapshot” would give the viewer “no sense of the depth or complexity of it.” Film rose to the occasion in photography’s place. Matta-Clark opts for a tracking shot within the first two minutes of Office Baroque, moving from one window to another to create a representative space equal to his architectural intervention.
Splicing together film could create new ways of seeing, just as cutting through buildings could create new experiences of space. Matta-Clark’s interest in film was such that as an architecture student at Cornell, he unsuccessfully tried to transfer to film schools in Paris and London. He graduated despite his misgivings about the program, moving to SoHo in 1969, where he opened the restaurant and performance space FOOD with the artists Carol Goodden and Tina Giourard. Many patrons of FOOD were later associated with the Anarchitecture Group, which advocated for the methods of deconstruction and removal Matta-Clark put into practice. FOOD and Anarchitecture both reflected the decay of New York in the ‘70s—a city on the brink of insolvency, with crumbling infrastructure, high unemployment, and a population which shrunk by nearly a million people—and served as utopian responses to these conditions. One fostered community through shared meals, the other reimagined communal space through acts of creative destruction. As in Fluxus, Judson, The Kitchen, Group Material, and other site-specific and performance artist communities, the ephemerality of FOOD and Anarchitecture’s activities made documentation both a necessity and an extension of their work. “There’s nothing worth documenting if it’s not difficult to get,” Matta-Clark says in Office Baroque, which was released one year after his death at 35. Absence, that most difficult subject to “get,” was what he was after—an architecture of memory, a cut into time.
Conical Intersect and Office Baroque screen tonight, March 2, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Constructions/Deconstructions/Instructions: The Films of Gordon Matta-Clark.” The former will be presented on 16mm.
