Artwork of the month August

Gordon Matta-Clark, Reality Properties Fake Estates: Glendale Sliver (behind houses), Block 3660, Lot 140, 1973

Gordon Matta-Clark

* 1943 in New York, USA; † 1978 in New York, USA


Reality Properties Fake Estates: Glendale Sliver (behind houses), Block 3660, Lot 140, 1973


Collaged black-and-white photographs, property deed, photograph of a cadastral map, 4 parts
Frame size: 26 x 133 x 5.5 cm, 30 x 74.5 x 5.5 cm, 23.9 x 168 x 5.5 cm, 50 x 90.3 x 5.5 cm

In 1973, U.S. artist Gordon Matta-Clark purchased a number of small, "useless", barely accessible, and mostly less than one-metre-wide segments of land for little money at an auction, leftovers of New York's precise rectangular urban planning system. Possessed of the appropriate land register entries, Matta-Clark finally set out in search of his newly acquired property, documenting it in photographs.

Reality Properties Fake Estates presents the land map from the land registry alongside the photograph of a hand-drawn cadastral map and a black-and-white representation showing the property recorded here and the abstract schematic plan to be an urban situation. The image shows a small, undeveloped plot of land enclosed on one side by a fence and by a house wall on the other. Three rows of different lengths of collaged black-and-white photographs hang above, illustrating this narrow piece of urban waste land – this unspecific interspace – section by section.

By purchasing what appear to be worthless plots of land, Matta-Clark goes against the logic of capital, thus using his Fake Estates to question the nature of private property, the division of living space, and the condition and definition of social action in general. But what does such an undetermined, "arbitrary" space enable us to do, what precious utopia does it hold? With the Reality Properties Fake Estates series the artist focuses on the unheeded aberrations, the residual leftover of the stringent grid created by the urban planners, thus emphasising the difference – the "cut" – to the determined order in "actual space".

Denise Rigaud

<b>Gordon Matta-Clark, Reality Properties Fake Estates: Glendale Sliver (behind houses), Block 3660, Lot 140, 1973</b>
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein highlights a work from the permanent collection each month throughout the year. Works from the collection of the Hilti Art Foundation are also included in this series on a regular basis.