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Matta
SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, CA1994
“Nominalism [literal] = No more generic, specific numeric distinction between words (tables is not the plural of table, ate has nothing in common with eat). No more physical adaptation of concrete words; no more conceptual value of abstract words.” Duchamp
From my rudimentary but fast-evolving undergraduate perspective, many doubts about both Modernism and Postmodernism were justified. I stumbled on the work of both Roberto Matta and Gordon Matta-Clark in 1988, a pivotal year. I spent much of that summer, my twenty-first, trying to read Manfredo Tafuri and Michel Foucault to the pulse of Public Enemy’s “Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” while riding the subway to work for Robert A.M. Stern, where I built models of EuroDisney. The gulf between the discipline and practice of architecture seemed kaleidoscopic. That July, as my internship at RAMSA wound down, I decided to take the fall semester off from college, stop drinking, and study prisons.
It was in that frame of mind that I first encountered Roberto Matta’s Vertigo of Eros (1943) at the Museum of Modern Art. A dark, square-ish canvas, Vertigo is a miasma of deep and shallow spaces defined by all manner of drafting and painterly techniques — perspective wireframe, atmospheric blurring and sharpening, erasure and decalcomania. This spatial and representational riddle haunted me on a long drive cross country to Berkeley, where I happened on Gordon Matta-Clark at the University Museum of Art, in the first retrospective of his borings and incisions through buildings. Matta and Matta-Clark were so new to me, and so startlingly different in their methods, that I didn’t confirm the familial tie between them for a few weeks and only learned of their shared training in architecture — and parallel renunciations of it — much later.
My graduate thesis, Museo Matta3/2/3+1, documents a five-year obsession with that family of “fallen architects.” Exhibited in 1994, Museo Matta includes a range of approaches I developed to grasp and then extrapolate from the legacy of Matta and Matta-Clark and their nominalist lineage of architects-turned-artists. An outline of research tabulates all of the then-extant scholarship on both artists; a series of genealogical diagrams tethers Matta and Matta-Clark not only to Piranesi and Duchamp, but an outer-ring of fellow travelers including Adolf Loos, J.J. Lequeu, Joseph Gandy, and (though I now doubt his affiliation) Viollet-le-Duc. Three bodies of design work form the bulk of Museo Matta: first, a series of close analyses of single works by Piranesi (Carceri XIV), Duchamp (The Large Glass), Matta (The Splitting of the Ergo), and Matta-Clark (Circus, or the Caribbean Orange); second, four Viewing Machines that allow one to see those four pieces in the company of related works; and finally, a proposal for a museum in Matta’s city of origin, Santiago de Chile.
In response to Thierry de Duve’s pioneering scholarship on Duchamp in Pictorial Nominalism (Minnesota, 1991), I tried to imagine and codify in the introduction to Museo Matta a “Spatial Nominalism.” Spatial Nominalism would toggle between two and three dimensions, and reject totalizing modernities — and singular perspectives — in favor of multiple, simultaneous points-of-view and means of viewing. The layering of perspectives — both notionally and technically — is still at the center of my ambitions. When Museo Matta 3/2/3+1 was accepted for sale at Printed Matter, the DIA bookstore, then in Soho, that specializes in books made by artists, it was both a New York homecoming and a vindication for me, proof that architectural speculation could rival the pitch and velocity of art.