Office Baroque – a video documenting Matta- Clark’s works, 1977/2005

Directed by Eric Convents and Roger Steylaerts

“Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much more a challenging medium?,” wondered Gordon Matta-Clark, a pivotal figure in 1970s New York avant-garde, an architect by training who coined the terms “ANARCHITECTURE” and “NONUMENT”. Matta-Clark operated in the urban sphere, just as artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria operated throughout the United States. It is hard to define his actions and moves unequivocally, for they were always on the borderline between drawing, sculpture, architecture and installation. His subversive work freed itself from dependence on an isolated art object in the gallery space, penetrating the urban texture, the slums, deserted suburban homes, industrial structures and prestigious institutions. Performing acts of structure cutting and slicing, the very core of his practice, he deconstructed and estranged notions such as “space” and “home,” generating a new relationship between interior and exterior, volume and surface. In his work Matta-Clark set out to expose the intricacy inherent in the structure and the lack of clarity underlying space and place.