Movies: Gordon Matta-Clark

Lyrical and powerfully personal essay film that reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance, and Buddhist teachings....

This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists' cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. A...

This film records the complete process of the destruction of Matta-Clark's truck (which he called "Herman Meydag") by a bulldozer in a rubbish dump. Part of 98.5, a compilation of films by Ed Baynard, George Schneemar and Charles Simons, this piece w...

In May 1972, Matta-Clark installed an industrial waste container between 98 and 112 Greene Street in New York?s SoHo district. He collected discarded doors and pieces of timber and divided the interior into three openings. This piece records an openi...

Matta-Clark was invited to create Conical Intersect for the Paris Biennale in 1975. For this piece, he cut a giant conical shape into two adjacent seventeenth-century buildings designated for demolition as part of the urban redevelopment program that...

“I met Gordon Matta-Clark at the 1975 Paris Biennale. He was looking for a place to make a piece. I led him to a building across the street from my place on rue Beaubourg that I had been taking photos of for the past year and which was about to be de...

In May 1972, Matta-Clark worked on an abandoned pier in New York for two months, where he cut sections of the door, floor, and roof. Camera: Betsy Susler....

In August 1974 Matta-Clark carried out a ‘cutting’ in a house at Niagara Falls, New York. The artist divided the north façade into nine parts. In the film you hear him ask the builders to postpone the demolition. Hence the word play Bingo/Ninths, whi...

In this film Matta-Clark explores underground Paris. The artist shows the complexity of underground spaces with scenes of architectural ruins, car parks, tunnels, ossuaries, cellars, crypts and basements in the Opera district....

For the exhibition Twenty-Six by Twenty Six at the Vassar College of Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, New York, Matta-Clark created a performance inspired by spring fertility rituals. He performed in a structure made of ladders, ropes and other materials...

In 1971 Matta-Clark produced works for the exhibition Brooklyn Bridge Event. This film records his process of making a sculpture - a small wall made of rubbish, waste paper and tin cans collected from the area. —EAI...

Automation House 1972, 32 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video This tape is an exercise in spatial perception, using mirror reflections of people and their movements. Producer: Carlotta Schoolman...

For his 'Splitting' project, Matta-Clark found a house in Englewood, NJ (322 Humphrey Street to be precise) set for demolition, and bisected it neatly down the middle. Half-documentation, half-exploration: Splitting shows the laborious process and he...

This space and texture work, created specifically for video, is a tour of the skyline and domestic interiors of New York's Chinatown....

In this film of one of his most daring performances, Matta-Clark climbed to the top of the Clocktower in New York and washed, shaved and brushed his teeth while suspended over the streets in front of the huge clockface....

Matta-Clark made a cut in a five-story commercial building located in front of the Steen, a tourist spot in Antwerp. (On Matta-Clark's death shortly after, an attempt was made to save the work as a future museum of contemporary art, but the building ...

For City Slivers, which was made with a camera borrowed from Robert Rauschenberg, Matta-Clark affixed vertical matte strips in front of an anamorphic camera lens, thereby allowing only slivers of light to penetrate the film. He then rewound the film...

In this film, Matta-Clark explored and documented the underground spaces of New York City. The artist chose a range of sites (New York Central railroad tracks, Grand Central Station, 13th Street, Croton Aqueduct in Highgate, etc.) to show the variety...

Matta-Clark made a video of his friends having a sauna; he later cut a section of the sauna to reveal the structure of the wall....

In 1976 Matta-Clark left for Berlin claiming that he intended to blow-up the Berlin Wall as his contribution to the New York–Downtown Manhattan: Soho show. Friends dissuaded him from such a suicidal action, and so instead he created Made in America,...