ABSTRACT
Gordon Matta-Clark’s building-cuts from the mid- to late-1970s provide concrete examples of art that seeks to challenge basic standard artistic categories. The categories in question are perhaps as basic as they come, i.e. ones having to do with art modalities, here architecture and sculpture. Matta-Clark meant the building-cuts to instantiate principles of ontology that are recognizably sculptural in their inception but that verge on architecture and that, in so doing, offer criticism of both the purported limits of sculpture and of architecture. In particular, his conception of the relation of negative and positive space and an allied rethinking of the relation of foreground to background were meant to unseat standard ways of thinking of sculpture and architecture as separate. This paper investigates this ontological framework and Matta-Clark’s claims that his work ushers in new dimensions in experiencing art, by looking in some depth at three main works: Splitting, Conical Section, and Circus or the Caribbean Orange.
