Text page
Gordon Matta-Clark; ‘Somewhere Outside the Law'
A page that brings Gordon Matta-Clark's cuts and outsides into the geotrauma field through architecture, excavation, and material breach.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page treats architectural incision as a way of thinking the outside from within built form. Rupture becomes an epistemic and material event.
Matta-Clark's cuts function like operative holes. Architecture is opened to the outside not metaphorically but by literal subtraction and breach.
That matters because geotrauma often needs these middle scales between pure geology and pure concept. Cut architecture supplies one.
How to read this text
Read for cut, breach, and exteriority together. The page is about opening rather than just about art-historical reference.
Track how the law/outside formulation is grounded in material incision. That grounding is what makes the page useful here.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Keywords anarchitecture • architecture • contemporary art • diagram • Gordon Matta-Clark • photomontage • urban renewal • urbanism To take on the limits of architecture itself, confronting it at the clinical (or entropic) point of its material collapse (effondrement) and pushing it to the critical point of the ideo-logical ungrounding (effondement) of its economy – such will have been the primary function of Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural, or anarchitectural, anti-work.
Definition · paragraph 1
Keywords anarchitecture • architecture • contemporary art • diagram • Gordon Matta-Clark • photomontage • urban renewal • urbanism To take on the limits of architecture itself, confronting it at the clinical (or entropic) point of its material collapse (effondrement) and pushing it to the cri
Definition · paragraph 23
Matta-Clark’s expression ‘throw-aways’ is found in his interview with Judith Russi Kirshner (February 1978) in Moure (2006: 319, 317). At the beginning of the interview, he recalls that ‘no one in America outside of New York has ever seen – very few people have ever seen – any of [his] projects at all.’ 22.
History · paragraph 22
Matta-Clark, interview with Liza Bear (1974) ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building’, Avalanche, December 1974, reprinted in Moure (2006: 172). 11. See Matta-Clark’s ‘Proposal for Anarchitecture’ (1974), Notebook, reproduced in Sussman (2007: 97, plate 41).
Method · paragraph 1
Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav Vol 15(3): 317–333 DOI 10.1177/1470412916665139 Gordon Matta-Clark: ‘Somewhere Outside the Law’ Éric Alliez Translated by Robin Mackay 665139 VCU0010.1177/1470412916665139journal of visual culture<bold>Alliez</bold> Gordon Matta-Clark research-article2016 Abstract ‘Nobody could construct buildings the way Gordon destructed them’, we read in the issue of Flash Art published shortly after the artist’s death.
Appears in sections
Geotrauma and the Outside Primary section
Molten earth, Barker, the inhuman Outside, and the archive's geological imagination.