Concrete, vastness, nature of America: “Out of the box”
Gordon Matta-Clark, born in New York in 1943, was not even 40 years old. Nonetheless, he left behind a comprehensive, meticulously documented work that, with its innovative approaches, became a central position in conceptual art. The show “Out of the Box” in the Salzburg Museum der Moderne opens up new perspectives on the artist and his work, which is surprisingly topical with its social and content-related aspects.
Show comes from Canada
“He was downright visionary in relation to our relationship with nature,” says Thorsten Sadowsky, director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. The exhibition was originally designed by the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, which manages the artist’s estate. The CCA invited three curators with different backgrounds from contemporary art to film to social work – Yann Chateigne, Hila Peleg and Kitty Scott – to study Matta-Clark’s work and archive materials and to design exhibition chapters.
Austrian Schabus reacts to Matta-Clark
When the C this exhibition offered the Salzburgers the idea of adding a fourth to the three chapters CA The Museum der Moderne invited the Austrian artist Hans Schabus to enter into a creative dialogue with Matta-Clark. Salzburg was an obvious partner for the CCA because the Generali Foundation’s collection here includes not only key works by the American artist but also a copy of the estate.
The artist was a trained architect
“The exhibition can be read in two ways,” said Jürgen Tabor, who curated the show in Salzburg: Gordon Matta-Clark, but also one about how to work with an artistic archive.
With metal shelves in which books, notes and photos are shown atmosphere, the exhibition follows the typical archive. You need time to immerse yourself in the cosmos of the trained architect, who also dealt intensively with topics such as alchemy, transformation or cooking.
Huge holes punched in demolished houses
A handwritten recipe for making coffee mold can be discovered as well as photographs from the 1970s of trips to Central and South America. In the chapter “Rough Cuts and Outtakes” films are shown with which Matta-Clark documents how he works on architecture. With hammer, chisel and saws he breaks out huge holes piece by piece from buildings that are about to be demolished, opens up new lines of sight through these cuts and shows hidden things. One of these interventions, which have given him terms such as “house cutter” or “anarchitect”, took place in the middle of Paris – where the Center Pompidou now stands.
Main topic: food: soup project for Caritas
And what occurred to Schabus when dealing with Matta-Clark’s work? Among other things, he took up the artist’s strong connection to cooking and eating as a social act and made soup out of beef bones and pig’s feet for 24 hours and filled glasses. Caritas Salzburg distributes the consommé soup to people in need during the winter months.