Download or read book Gordon Matta Clark The Beginning of Trees and the End written by Gordon Matta-Clark and published by David Zwirner Books. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documenting the artist’s extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman, this publication originates from the 2015 solo presentation at David Zwirner, New York, entitled Energy & Abstraction, organized in close collaboration with Jane Crawford and Jessamyn Fiore from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Well known for his radical “anarchitectural” interventions throughout the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark was always deeply, though less publicly, committed to drawing. His works on paper—which span three-dimensional reliefs, calligraphy, and notebook entries—capture the interdisciplinary spirit that defined the art world in the 1970s. Intricate and concise, they testify to his interest in the crossovers between visual and performance arts, as well as the broader integration within his oeuvre of the natural and built environment. This catalogue presents in vibrant detail selections from Matta-Clark’s Cut Drawings, Energy Rooms, Energy Trees, and his own “calligraphy,” many of which have never been published. Perhaps the best known of the group, the Cut Drawings explore parallel, smaller-format versions of his physical interventions in architecture; slicing meticulously through several layers of paper, gesso, or cardboard, Matta-Clark created sculptural flat works that emphasized the voids created by the extraction of matter. Drawings with his own “calligraphy” emphasize the medium of drawing as an independent form. Abstract letters make up a code that remains indecipherable, but points toward a visionary longing to invent new languages and structures of experience. Some of the most elaborate and colorful compositions include trees, several of which refer explicitly to Matta-Clark’s Tree Dance performance at Vassar College in upstate New York in 1971. In full-color plates, the reader can see the physical structure of his trees “dissolving” into kinetic energy and, in some drawings, becoming reduced to a multitude of arrows. Near-abstract tree shapes also incorporate his calligraphic marks, with branches constructed from imaginary letters, again emphasizing the importance of language to a new visual experience. Matta-Clark’s notebooks, which he often insisted on completing in a single sitting, are presented in elegantly curated groups. Combining elements of Surrealist automatic drawing with an interest in choreography, these works appealed to performance artists at the time—including Laurie Anderson and Trisha Brown. This unparalleled presentation of Matta-Clark’s drawings is accompanied by new and exciting scholarship by Briony Fer, as well as a conversation between Jessamyn Fiore and contemporary artist Sarah Sze; it marks a major contribution to the literature on this highly influential artist.
Download or read book Gordon Matta Clark written by Gordon Matta-Clark and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential reference that provides new understanding of the thought processes of one of the most radical artists of the late twentieth century. Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) has never been an easy artist to categorize or to explain. Although trained as an architect, he has been described as a sculptor, a photographer, an organizer of performances, and a writer of manifestos, but he is best known for un-building abandoned structures. In the brief span of his career, from 1968 to his early death in 1978, he created an oeuvre that has made him an enduring cult figure. In 2002, when Gordon Matta-Clark’s widow, Jane Crawford, put his archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, it revealed a new voice in the ongoing discussion of artist/architect Matta-Clark’s work: his own. Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung’s careful selection and ordering of letters, interviews, statements, and the now-famous art cards from the CCA as well as other sources deepens our understanding of one of the most original thinkers of his generation. Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook creates a multidimensional portrait that provides an opportunity for readers to explore and enjoy the complexity and contradiction that was Gordon Matta-Clark.
Download or read book Gordon Matta Clark written by Frances Richard and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing a poet’s perspective to an artist’s archive, this highly original book examines wordplay in the art and thought of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978). A pivotal figure in the postminimalist generation who was also the son of a prominent Surrealist, Matta-Clark was a leader in the downtown artists' community in New York in the 1970s, and is widely seen as a pioneer of what has come to be known as social practice art. He is celebrated for his “anarchitectural” environments and performances, and the films, photographs, drawings, and sculptural fragments with which his site-specific work was documented. In studies of his career, the artist’s provocative and vivid language is referenced constantly. Yet the verbal aspect of his practice has not previously been examined in its own right. Blending close readings of Matta-Clark’s visual and verbal creations with reception history and critical biography, this extensively researched study engages with the linguistic and semiotic forms in Matta-Clark’s art, forms that activate what he called the “poetics of psycho-locus” and “total (semiotic) system.” Examining notes, statements, titles, letters, and interviews in light of what they reveal about his work at large, Frances Richard unearths archival, biographical, and historical information, linking Matta-Clark to Conceptualist peers and Surrealist and Dada forebears. Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics explores the paradoxical durability of Matta-Clark’s language, and its role in an aggressively physical oeuvre whose major works have been destroyed.
Download or read book Object to Be Destroyed written by Pamela M. Lee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-08-24 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Pamela M. Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs. Although highly regarded during his short life—and honored by artists and architects today—the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space. Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction—suggest about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the 1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making—that the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do these projects address the very writing of history, a history that imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of progress? In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.
Download or read book Gordon Matta Clark Conical Intersect written by Peter Muir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this in-depth analysis, Peter Muir argues that Gordon Matta-Clark?s Conical Intersect (1975) is emblematic of Henri Lefebvre?s understanding of art?s function in relation to urban space. By engaging with Lefebvre?s theory in conjunction with the perspectives of other writers, such as Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and George Bataille, the book elicits a story that presents the artwork?s significance, origins and legacies. Conical Intersect is a multi-media artwork, which involves the intersections of architecture, sculpture, film, and photography, as well as being a three-dimensional model that reflects aspects of urban, art, and architectural theory, along with a number of cultural and historiographic discourses which are still present and active. This book navigates these many complex narratives by using the central ?hole? of Conical Intersect as its focal point: this apparently vacuous circle around which the events, documents, and other historical or theoretical references surrounding Matta-Clark?s project, are perpetually in circulation. Thus, Conical Intersect is imagined as an insatiable absence around which discourses continually form, dissipate and resolve. Muir argues that Conical Intersect is much more than an ?artistic hole.? Due to its location at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris, it is simultaneously an object of art and an instrument of social critique.
Download or read book 112 Greene Street written by and published by David Zwirner Books. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 112 Greene Street was more than a physical space—it was a locus of energy and ideas that with a combination of genius and chance had a profound impact on the trajectory of contemporary art...its permeable walls became the center of an artistic community that challenged the traditional role of the artist, the gallery, the performer, the audience, and the work of art. — Jessamyn Fiore 112 Greene Street was one of New York’s first alternative, artist-run venues. Started in October 1970 by Jeffrey Lew, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Alan Saret, among others, the building became a focal point for a young generation of artists seeking a substitute for New York’s established gallery circuit, and provided the stage for a singular moment of artistic invention and freedom that was at its peak between 1970 and 1974. 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974) is the culmination of an exhibition by the same name that was on view at David Zwirner in New York in 2011. This extensively researched and historically important book brings together a number of works that were exhibited at the seminal space (including works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Larry Miller, Alan Saret, and Richard Serra); extensive interviews with many of the artists involved in the space; a fascinating timeline of all the activity at 112 Greene Street in the early years; and installation views of the 2011 exhibition. The interviews in the book have been prepared by the exhibition’s curator, Jessamyn Fiore, and Louise Sørensen, Head of Research at David Zwirner, has contributed an introductory text that illuminates the space’s significance and critical reception during the prime years of its operation, as well as commentary on individual works in the show.
Download or read book Obsolescence written by Daniel M. Abramson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Things fall apart. But in his innovative, wide-ranging, and well-illustrated book, Daniel Abramson investigates the American definition of what falling apart entails. We build new buildings partly in response to demand, but even more because we believe that existing buildings are slowly becoming obsolete and need to be replaced. Abramson shows that our idea of obsolescence is a product of our tax code, which was shaped by lobbying from building interests who benefit from the idea that buildings depreciate and need to be replaced. The belief in depreciation is not held worldwide which helps explain why preservation movements struggle more in America than elsewhere. Abramson s tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent tropes of sustainability, which struggle to cultivate the idea that the greenest building is the one that already exists."
Download or read book How Photography Became Contemporary Art written by Andy Grundberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading critic’s inside story of “the photo boom” during the crucial decades of the 1970s and 80s When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s through the medium of photography.
Download or read book Gordon Matta Clark written by Bruce Jenkins and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark work byGordon Matta-Clark, examined as an ldquo;act of communicationrdquo; aboutsustainability and the public role of art.
Download or read book Making Worlds Participating countries collateral events written by Daniel Birnbaum and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Anni Albers written by Ann Coxon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-overdue reassessment of one of the most important and influential woman artists working at midcentury Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a German textile designer, weaver, and printmaker, and among the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Although she has heavily influenced generations of artists and designers, her contribution to modernist art history has been comparatively overlooked, especially in relation to that of her husband, Josef. In this groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated volume, Albers’s most important works are examined to fully explore and redefine her contribution to 20th-century art and design and highlight her significance as an artist in her own right. Featured works—from her early activity at the Bauhaus as well as from her time at Black Mountain College, and spanning her entire fruitful career—include wall hangings, designs for commercial use, drawings and studies, jewelry, and prints. Essays by international experts focus on key works and themes, relate aspects of Albers’s practice to her seminal texts On Designing and On Weaving, and identify broader contextual material, including examples of the Andean textiles that Albers collected and in which she found inspiration for her understanding of woven thread as a form of language. Illuminating Albers’s skill as a weaver, her material awareness, and her deep understanding of art and design, this publication celebrates an artist of enormous importance and showcases the timeless nature of her creativity.
Download or read book Cutting Matta Clark written by Mark Wigley and published by Lars Muller Publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the many shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street gallery - an artistic epicenter of New York's downtown scene in the 1970s - the Anarchitecture group show of March 1974 has been the subject of the most enduring discussion, despite a complete lack of documentation about it. Anarchitecture has become a foundational myth, but one that remains to be properly understood. Stemming from a series of meetings organised by Gordon Matta-Clark and refl ecting his long-standing interest in architecture, the Anarchitecture exhibition was conceived as an anonymous group statement in photographs about the intersection of art and building. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the memories of the participants. Cutting Matta-Clark investigates the Anarchitecture group as a kind of collective research seminar, through extensive interviews with the protagonists and a dossier of all the available evidence. The dossier includes a collection of Matta-Clark's aphoristic "art cards," the 96 photographs that were produced by the various participants for possible inclusion in the exhibition, and images from a recently unearthed video of Matta-Clark's now famous bus trip to see Splitting in Englewood, New Jersey. 150 illustrations
Download or read book Ant Colony Optimization written by Marco Dorigo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-06-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the rapidly growing field of ant colony optimization that describes theoretical findings, the major algorithms, and current applications. The complex social behaviors of ants have been much studied by science, and computer scientists are now finding that these behavior patterns can provide models for solving difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The attempt to develop algorithms inspired by one aspect of ant behavior, the ability to find what computer scientists would call shortest paths, has become the field of ant colony optimization (ACO), the most successful and widely recognized algorithmic technique based on ant behavior. This book presents an overview of this rapidly growing field, from its theoretical inception to practical applications, including descriptions of many available ACO algorithms and their uses. The book first describes the translation of observed ant behavior into working optimization algorithms. The ant colony metaheuristic is then introduced and viewed in the general context of combinatorial optimization. This is followed by a detailed description and guide to all major ACO algorithms and a report on current theoretical findings. The book surveys ACO applications now in use, including routing, assignment, scheduling, subset, machine learning, and bioinformatics problems. AntNet, an ACO algorithm designed for the network routing problem, is described in detail. The authors conclude by summarizing the progress in the field and outlining future research directions. Each chapter ends with bibliographic material, bullet points setting out important ideas covered in the chapter, and exercises. Ant Colony Optimization will be of interest to academic and industry researchers, graduate students, and practitioners who wish to learn how to implement ACO algorithms.
Download or read book Eva Hesse written by Briony Fer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout her career, Eva Hesse produced a significant number of small, experimental works which she renamed 'studiowork'. This title contains a comprehensive catalogue of the studiowork, including many new works that have never before been seen in public.
Download or read book Nature the End of Art written by Alan Sonfist and published by Gli Ori Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This generously illustrated volume documents Sonfist's formidable body of work that continues to date. Featured are photographs and drawings that stand as independent works of art in their own right and also relate to the environmental landscapes for which he is best known. In addition to an informative interview by Robert Rosenblum and essays by a number of other art experts, the book also includes comments by the artist and quotes from a variety of sources that have inspired him. All these elements conjoin to reveal the fascinating story of this innovative artist who prefigured environmental art." -Inside back cover.
Download or read book Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities written by Monica Manolescu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities: Art, Literature and Urban Spaces explores phenomena of urban mapping in the discourses and strategies of a variety of postwar artists and practitioners of space: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Buckingham, contemporary Situationist projects. The distinctive approach of the book highlights the interplay between texts and site-oriented practices, which have often been treated separately in critical discussions. Monica Manolescu considers spatial investigations that engage with the historical and social conditions of the urban environment and reflect on its mediated nature. Cartographic procedures that involve walking and surveying are interpreted as unsettling and subversive possibilities of representing and navigating the postwar American city. The book posits mapping as a critical nexus that opens up new ways of studying some of the most important postwar artistic engagements with New York and other American cities.
Download or read book Gordon Matta Clark written by Antonio Sergio Bessa and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York, where he initiated a series of site-specific works in derelict areas of the South Bronx. The borough's many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark's raw material. His series 'Bronx Floors' dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of ther ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with 'Conical Interserct', a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of seventeenth-century row houses slatted for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou's construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark's practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.
