The Reading Life: Gordon Matta-Clark's 'Conical Intersect'

What was he up to? That's the question at the center of any consideration of Gordon Matta-Clark, an architecture student-turned-installation artist who died of cancer in 1978, when he was just 35.

Matta-Clark doesn't have the name recognition of contemporaries such as Robert Smithson, whose work his superficially resembles, or Laurie Anderson, who was part of an "informal collective of downtown artists he brought together under the banner of anarchitecture," writes Bruce Jenkins in his monograph "Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect."

Nonetheless, Jenkins suggests, his influence is significant -- if not for the public, who remain mostly ignorant of his large-scale, space-specific installations, then for other artists who share his experimentalism and his belief in art as a social force.

For Matta-Clark, Jenkins argues, this pair of interlocking imperatives came together most vividly in "Conical Intersect," created for the ninth Biennale de Paris in 1975. The idea is simple, but with implications -- which could be said of all of Matta-Clark's work. A block from the Centre Georges Pompidou, then under construction, the artist cut into two 16th century townhouses that had been scheduled for demolition, creating a vast circular opening "contracting from the exterior towards the interior of a building (from four metres to two metres) in the manner of a spyglass."

The experimental aspects are obvious; the social, perhaps, not so much. But, notes Jenkins, part of the point was to comment on what the Pompidou project was doing to its neighborhood, while also offering a new way of looking at (and thinking about) two buildings that would be destroyed. As Matta-Clark noted in a 1977 interview:

The first thing one notices is that violence has been done. Then the violence turns into visual order and, hopefully, then to a sense of heightened awareness.... You see that light enters places it otherwise couldn't. Angles and depths can be perceived where they should have been hidden. Spaces are available to move through that were previously inaccessible.... My hope is that the dynamism of the action can be seen as an alternative vocabulary with which to question the static, inert building environment.

For his Paris project, Jenkins suggests, Matta-Clark was influenced by the son et lumiere tradition, with its sense of architecture as spectacle. But equally important was his desire to comment on "the street-drama of the construction and demolition," his sense of urban renewal as a source of flattening, of forgetting, in which the old (people, buildings, communities) are consistently uprooted or left behind. A native New Yorker, he has seen this in Manhattan in the 1950s and '60s, when Robert Moses sought to remake the city in his own image.

In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark began to express a counter-sensibility in his artwork, most notably "Pig Roast," in which he "roasted a whole pig in the derelict Lower East Side environs under the [Brooklyn Bridge] and served it up to the resident homeless population and his fellow artists," and "Fresh Air Cart," a public art collaboration in which oxygen was offered to "air-starved passersby."

There's a bit of the put-on to such projects, or perhaps more accurately of the spectacle -- again, son et lumiere. But what Matta-Clark was really exploring was the hidden intersection between the conceptual and the everyday. How does art shake us out of our complacency? How does it help us reframe the world? For Matta-Clark, the issue was never permanence -- "Conical Intersect" existed for only a few weeks before it was demolished -- but rather the challenge of teaching a new way to see.

-- David L. Ulin

Last gasp of the Gatsby house

A Long Island mansion said to have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald in writing his classic American novel "The Great Gatsby" has poured its last drink, rolled up the dance floor and kicked out the guests for good. No more parties, no more gazing out of windows. Heck, no more windows. The once-elegant mansion has been razed.

A planned demolition took place this week, but not before writer Christine Lee Zilka rushed out with her camera to capture the home's last moments. Above, the demolition of the Sands Point mansion nears completion in April 2011. Below, the mansion as it stood in 2009, already entering its decrepitude.

The 1902 home was owned, during its jazz-age heyday, by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope, one of the first recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and editor of the New York World. F. Scott Fitzgerald was said to have attended Swope's parties; the house, in Sands Point, N.Y., was the model for Daisy Buchanan's place, according to local legend.

 

In January, Sands Point Village approved plans to raze the house and divide the property into lots for five custom homes, to be sold for $10 million each. Demolition began this week.

Tonight: Architect Tadao Ando at the Hammer Museum

Architect Tadao Ando is the only person to have won the four most prestigious prizes in his field -- the Pritzker, the Carlsberg, the  Praemium Imperiale and the Kyoto. His U.S. works include the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; foodies may have noticed his design of Morimoto Restaurant in the Chelsea area of Manhattan.

Taschen is publishing a whalloping  new compedium of his work, "Ando's Complete Works to Date 1975-2010," which Ando will sign from 6:30 to 7 tonight at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, before his lecture at 7 p.m. The famed Japanese architect will also appear at the Taschen store in Beverly Hills for a book signing on Wednesday from 7 to 8 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Tadao Ando in 2006. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha /Los Angeles Times

Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis

Barbra Streisand to bring glitz to Book Expo

Publishing's trade conference Book Expo America announced Tuesday that Barbra Streisand will headline opening night, May 25, at the New York event. She won't be singing, though; she'll be talking about her upcoming book, "My Passion for Design," due out in November from Viking.

Streisand's design taste can be seen in Southern California at Ramirez Canyon Park in Malibu. The 25-acre property, was once owned by Streisand, includes a Craftsman home, the separate Deco House and a Mediterranean-style villa. (The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy offices are now in the main house).

Streisand talked about her evolving design sensibility with David Keeps in November. "I remember thinking, 'How could I ever have spent $45,000 for a Tiffany lamp?'" she said. "But you look at it, and that just cannot be duplicated today. God is in the details, to me."

She explained that she likes to design rooms around a specific object, like a lamp or, with a living room, a set of pillows. "Those must be some pillows," Keeps prompted. Streisand explained:

They are this beautiful shade of green. How do I describe it? There's no way to say. I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia. This green has the right amount of yellow, of gray, in it.

The book, Streisand told him, will focus on her current home, which was based on 1904 architecture. "It's a mill house and a farmhouse around a pond with a water wheel and vegetable gardens and a chicken coop," the star said, "so we can grow our own vegetables and have our own eggs."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Barbra Streisand at the 2010 Academy Awards. Credit: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

A New Yorker escape to Las Vegas?

As a New Yorker subscriber, I carelessly checked the wrong box someplace that plops its non-magazine advertisements in my mailbox. Today's was a doozy, for a weekend appreciating CityCenter in Las Vegas. Maybe it's just me, but the thought of a bunch of erudite cartoon fans, tweedy academics and reedy black-clad artists descending upon Vegas en masse seemed, well, funny. Like a photo in need of a caption.

The idea behind the New Yorker desert adventure is to appreciate the art and architecture. People who sign up for the weekend -- at hotels running $200-plus per night -- are to treat themselves to self-guided tours of works by luminaries Pelli Clarke Pelli, Claes Oldenburg, Daniel Libeskind, Maya Lin, Henry Moore and more. The first 20 people who signed up for the weekend will have Adam Gopnik as their private art tour guide. There's a spa included, because luxury fits the profile, but if you want to check out "Thunder From Down Under,"  you're on your own. 

It's the combination of highbrow New Yorker readers with lowbrow Las Vegas that seems so silly. Sure, Las Vegas isn't all about jello shots, slot machines, Engelbert Humperdinck and strip clubs anymore; it has Cirque du Soleil, lots of art and genuine rock shows. It's got, as CityCenter would remind us, big fancy architecture. And anything that keeps magazines rolling off the presses has got to be good.

But will discussions of the latest pieces by Sy Hersh and Atul Gawande ring across newly lain terraces? Will Susan Orlean's chicken-and-whatnot blog be the talk of the (Vegas) town? Most important, if you're going, will you tell us all about it?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Las Vegas' CityCenter at twilight. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Deconstructing Eric Owen Moss' 'Construction Manual'

For the last few weeks, I've been working my way through Eric Owen Moss' "Construction Manual" (Aadcu: 1,560 pp., $124), an archival record of the architect's projects from 1988 to 2008. Moss, for the uninitiated, is the director of Sci-Arc, the experimental architecture school in downtown Los Angeles, and head of the eponymous Culver City-based Eric Owen Moss Architects.

"Construction Manual" is designed to look like a reference book: red leatherette cover with gold block lettering, alphabetical dictionary tags. That's both a put-on and not a put-on, for at its most basic level, a reference is what it provides. Tracking 40 projects, built and un-built, it takes us through the layers of production, from design (beginning in many cases with raw sketches) through the building process. Each stage is lavishly illustrated, in color and black and white, with blueprints, computer simulations, models and photographs.

The buildings here include professional and domestic spaces: the UC Irvine Central Housing Office, several remodeled industrial structures in Culver City, Brentwood's Lawson-Westen House. And yet, to think about "Construction Manual" purely as a compendium of these efforts is to miss at least half the point.

Moss, after all, is an architect in the way that, say, Dave Eggers is a writer: All his work feeds back into a larger core. Talking to Scott Timberg last August for a piece in The Times, he discussed his desire to "do for L.A. urbanism in the 21st century what we did for L.A. architecture in the 20th" -- to think, in other words, not about particular buildings but how they add up to a more organic cityscape, one in which architecture and infrastructure might, finally and fundamentally, go hand in hand.

This is the subtext of "Construction Manual," which seeks to reveal its own underpinnings, even as it connects them to a more expansive whole.

"We learn as we go," Moss writes in a brief introductory statement. "And the results of that learning process are in evidence in the final result. ...

"No durable signature is my signature.

"My signature is never dry."

-- David L. Ulin

Photo: A Culver City building designed by Eric Owen Moss. Credit: Naquib Hossain via Flickr.