Displacement and ferment: Gordon Matta-Clark and Vicky Alvarez in the South Bronx

a talk by

laura harris

I've decided to present part of a piece that I have been working on about displacement, the displacement part of our global condition, in New York City in the 1970s. It is still a work in progress. It started as an attempt to think about the architectural cuttings made by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in the South Bronx in the 1970s and it has extended from there. I'm just going to put bits and pieces together for the presentation but I'm happy to expand on anything in the question and answer period.

          Matta-Clark went, in the 1970s, to supposedly abandoned buildings in the South Bronx and started cutting holes in them. I'm interested in them because I find them beautiful but also somewhat disturbing insofar as they seem so wholly disconnected from the sociality in the midst of which they are performed - even as Matta-Clark seems to want to effect a critique of the neglect and decimation of the spaces in which that sociality, which is in each cases a non-normative and dissident sociality, takes shape. What kind of practice is this cutting? I've been approaching and reapproaching this question.

Matta-Clark himself seems to be playing with the fact that it is a kind of labor, often donning the garb and wielding the equipment of a construction worker when making his cuts. But this is not a labor that produces any value, at least not immediately, for capitalism. It is a labor that attempts to extract itself from this circuit, appropriating materials that don't belong to it to pursue other ends. Could we read Matta-Clark's cutting as an exploration of living labor, what Marx thinks of as the generative force in and of all value, the very foundation of capitalism, the essential human activity that exists prior to the social relations of capitalism? In rereading Marx, I was struck by the way he imagined labor as a kind of ferment, explaining in Capital that “the capitalist incorporates labor as a living ferment with the lifeless constituents of the product”. Such incorporation itself is a kind of cutting, a biochemical breakdown of transformation of material that seemed a potentially interesting way to think about Matta-Clark's cutting practice insofar as what is generative in this practice begins with a kind of degeneration. He pushes the structures he works on almost to the point of collapse in order to make something new.

          Indeed, before making these cuttings, Matta-Clark himself experimented quite literally with fermentation as an art form. In this respect, his early experiments with agar, a gelatinous substance used in scientific experiments as a medium for sustaining the activities of organic matter, in fact might be read as a model or prototype for what he was trying to do - which he has at times described as a kind of alchemical practice “connected to those traditions that have always dealt with the preparation and transformation of material” - but it appears more biochemical in the ways it plays out in these experiments as, to quote one observer, "vats of bubbling substances of uncertain origin and containers of organic matter in various states of growth and decay".

Here is an account of the process that would be the basis for a work he would later display on the wall of a gallery, like a painting. This work, which he called Museum, exhibited organic matter in various stages of growth. Matta-Clark cooked up several products such as yeast, sugars, sperm oil, chocolate yoo-hoo and meat and vegetable extracts, which he added to the agar; he poured the mixture into shallow metal pans to provide nutrients for the various microbes that were circulating in the air. The microbes transformed this matter, decomposing it and recomposing it and themselves into new forms, “skin-like fragments of pullulating stuff,” one critic recalled “suspended from vines, festooned from one end of the room to the other”.

          In works such as this, in which cutting is also a kind of nourishment, in which the high cultural and the agricultural infuse, upgrade, and degrade one another, Matta-Clark seems intent on showing that life and art are so bound up with and by the degenerative and one another that life, art and their relation remain fundamentally unsettled. By calling this work "Museum", Matta-Clark appropriates this stuff in and as its own practice, to realize what he puts forward as his own idea, this idea of the idea being what Marx suggests makes this an essentially human activity, privileged over the activities of other lesser life forms. Marx argues, “labor is in the first place, a process in which both men and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants'. And further, "we are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labor that remind us of the mere animal. …We pre-suppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi". Museum would seem precisely to be such a realization of purpose.

          But Matta-Clark ends up destroying this work and shutting down these experiments because they are too volatile and unpredictable, exceeding Matta-Clark's idea by literally exploding - even after being dried and mounted on the gallery wall. It would seem perhaps that he is not the only active agent realizing the purpose here. His work, his art, is carried out in concert with these other life forms which even when put forward under the title Incendiary Wafers cannot be fully contained in or by his idea.

Matta-Clark's later, more famous architectural cuttings also enact a transformation of materials, in this case, the dead or objectified labor that assumes the form of built structures in and around New York City in a period in which the city, the structures, and many of their inhabitants are being subject to renewal by way other biopolitical cuttings, particularly those tied to the construction of new parks, bridges, tunnels and highways, acts which are carried out as a means of regulating other unruly forms of urbanization, shaped by non-normative forms of inhabitation, which people on the ground, the biochemical and anarchitectural agents of those other forms of inhabitation referred to, more precisely, as urban removal. Like "Museum", these cuttings move by way of what we might think of as a kind of fermentation, where the destruction or degeneration of materials, which appears here as what Marx would call dead objectified labor, owned by others, is the starting point for generating something new, some new and invaluable source of value, which holds both the potential for use and exchange in it.

          Matta-Clark seeks out structures which he understands to be not just dead but empty, what he describes at one point as “wholesale abandonment situations”, which he insists are, particularly in the case the South Bronx, where he first cuts, the “epitome of urban neglect”, existing, as he puts it, “outside of society, not part of anybody's protective property motives, free to all”, braved only by packs of wild dogs, junkies, and Matta-Clark himself. They are, he imagines, absolutely available for his cutting. But here too, at the scenes of such cuttings, Matta-Clark finds himself working alongside other living beings pursuing their own purposes, engaged in their own creative activities, their own transformation of these structures. And he appears not to know what to do with that fact, not to know what to do with what grows there, with what those who inhabit these spaces generate. The transformation or creation that Matta-Clark engages in by way of his acts of destruction or fermentation, the production, as Marx would understand it, of new use values for the objectified labor we find in the New York City architecture which Matta-Clark understands to be abandoned, would seem in the first place to be a kind of painting, an incisive impressionism,  something like what Yoko Ono describes as an exploration of the effects of light through its insertion into shadowy spaces. It is also an opening up of these spaces which Matta-Clark critiqued for their “containerization” of social life - a state he believed applied equally to the imprisonment of the poor in ghettos and the remarkably subtle self-containerization of higher social economic neighborhoods - onto the city, onto other social scenes, creating the conditions for other possible forms of a sociality, like those he shared as a kid with the “sill pals” that he knew and encountered only through the windows of his apartment.

          But again, Matta-Clark is unable to contend with the social scenes that are already there. The forms of inhabitation that are not simply the consumption of existing use values but forms of living labor practiced by what reformer Jacob Riis once called the "queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements" whose social lives are not contained or containerized either by the restrictive living arrangements of the normative home nor by the denial of the resources that comprise the normative home. This is a creative practice of composition, arrangement, organization, or rather recomposition, rearrangement, reorganization, since the structures are never theirs. Cutting is one of its modes, one which makes especially apparent the way generativity begins with and is articulated by degeneration, decay, destruction.

          Matta-Clark can only set what is already there, in progress, aside. And the light Matta-Clark introduces is strangely not unlike the light that Riis proposes be brought in, along with fresh air, to cleanse the toxic and potentially uncontained generativity-in-degenerativity of those other life forms he finds multiplying in dark tenements of downtown New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The light Riis proposes is tied to the light he himself brought in in the form of the reformers exposure and more emphatically the camera's flash which actually ignited at least one of the living spaces he photographed. In Splitting, for example, a project undertaken in 1974 in a condemned home in a black neighborhood of Englewood, New Jersey, that was being demolished for an urban renewal project that was never completed, Matta-Clark has to contend with all the belongings of the former residents who were hastily evicted from their home and whose shadows are, he notes, “still warm”. He “very willfully”, as he recalls, takes out all the furnishings as if an erasure of their placement in and for the lives that were lived there and puts them out of sight in the garden and the basement.

In Day's End, carried out in former pier in New York City in 1975, he illuminates the very shadows that the S&M community has claimed as the field and material for their erotic encounters. He explicitly reclaims these spaces which he describes as “completely overrun by the gays” from those practitioners and from the other dangers that might distract from the situation he hoped to create. As he recalls “the one thing I wanted was to make possible for people to see it in a peaceful enclosure, totally enclosed in an un-menacing kind of way. That when they went in there they wouldn't feel like every squeak or every shadow was a potential threat. I know in lots of earlier works that I did, the kind of paranoia of being in a space where you don't know who was there, what was happening, or whether there were menacing people lurking about was just distracting. I wanted to be a more joyous situation”. To do so, it would require avoiding those menacing people, ultimately by repairing the fencing and installing a lock and barring them from entering. And in deeming the buildings he cuts in the Bronx wholly outside of society he seems to completely overlook the presence of the junkies and wild dogs who congregate there..

Whenever, wherever Matta-Clark cuts, the spaces are ultimately demolished, sometimes they have already been condemned, slated for demolition, but sometimes in bringing these spaces to the point of collapse he becomes an agent of bringing about their demolition and the removal of those other forms of life, those devalued forms of life, which grow and find refuge there but are constantly subject to eviction. So while he seems at times to want to critique, even interrupt, the modes of urban renewal being carried out in postwar New York City and elsewhere by way of cuts, particularly those tied to the construction of new parks, bridges, tunnels, and highways, again to secure a safe passage for suburban commuters, his cuts seem also to rely on such cuts and the production of condemned properties that results from them.

        I am leaving out, in the interest of time, a whole discussion of the kind of cuts that were enacted in South Bronx between 1948 and 1972 under the supervision of unelected and unsupervised planning czar Robert Moses who decimated existing neighborhoods to create a space for the South Bronx expressway (which, as it turns out, wasn’t even necessary for the expressway to be properly situated). Moses’s practice, which he himself described as ''hacking through the city with meat axe" included demolishing buildings while people were actually still living there, chopping off the top floors while people were still in the bottom floors.

Those who remained in the South Bronx, primarily poor black and Latino residents, had to find a way to live among the debris that the smashing down of the buildings has created; amid the dust, dirt and broken glass and buildings that are structurally unstable because the buildings that were attached to them had been knocked down. That's the scene of the South Bronx where Matta-Clark did, in 1972-73, some of his earliest architectural cutting.  

What interests me about Matta-Clark’s South Bronx cutting is not the objects that result from it, the pieces of flooring that were exhibited in galleries, or the photographic and video documentation of it, but the performative gesture of the cut itself, the cut as aesthetic and social act, and the transformation -degeneration, and regeneration - of the space that it enacts. In so far as Matta-Clark’s cuts echo the kind of hacking that Moses performs, they seem to align themselves with the regulation of the unruly forms of urbanization that prompts urban removal in the first place. The question is whether anything capable of fermentation or fomentation remains in or of Matta-Clark cuts. Is there a trace that survives the regulatory critique that is the dual and contradictory purpose of the work? Something that might itself be cut by and with other agents not so much unknown but rather overlooked or temporarily and selectively unremembered by Matta-Clark.

          Despite the apparent decisiveness of the cuts themselves as well as the political and economic critique that seems to constitute a major part of their “purpose”, Matta-Clark seems unsure, unclear about what he is doing. He is, in the early experiments in the Bronx, not all that interested in their future function. In later cuttings, however, he begins to wonder about their implications, about how to expand on them, where to go from there. Reflecting on Splitting, the house in New Jersey, he imagines that it might be “interesting to make changes in a place that people still lived in…to take perhaps a very conventional notion of a living space and alter it beyond use…ah well…”. He had, in fact, already begun to consider these questions in 1973 while traveling in Milan looking for possible sites for new cuttings.  In a defunct factory he encounters, much to his surprise, occupants, squatters who won't leave. Matta-Clark finds himself suddenly wanting to work with these squatters, to work for them, to cut with them. He says ''Their proposal was that the area can be used for a much-needed community service center. My exposure to this confrontation was my first awakening to doing my work not in artistic isolation but through an active exchange with people's concern for their own neighborhood. My goal is to extend the Milan experience in the US, especially to neglected areas in NY, such as the South Bronx, where the city is just waiting for the social and physical deterioration to deteriorate to such a point that the borough can redevelop the whole area into the industrial park they really want. A specific project might be to work with an existing neighborhood youth group and to involve them in converting the all too plentiful abandoned buildings into a social space. In this way, the young could get both practical information about how buildings are made and, more essentially, some first-hand experience with one aspect of the very real possibility of transforming their space. In this way, I could adapt my work to still another level of the given situation. It would no longer be concerned with just personal or metaphorical treatment of the site, but finally responsive to the express will of its occupants”. He never did this. But what if he had? And what if he had cut with the people in these neighborhoods, not by teaching them to compose, arrange, and organize in legitimized ways in order to help them improve their situation, but by studying and joining in on the modes of cutting they have already been pursuing, to work with them to accommodate and shelter other ways of living? What if he had cut in concert with the cuttings of someone like Vickie Alvarez?

         Vickie Alvarez was in 1978 the 17-year-old president of the girl gang the Roman Queens. She lived in the Bronx in the wake of Moses’s cutting. She was precisely the kind of person who would be understood as in need of removal. In the South Bronx in the 1970s, many young people, who had joined together, organizing themselves into different kinds of social clubs or gangs, were actually using spaces that were seemingly abandoned. They were setting up clubhouses, where they lived alternative forms of domestic life; improvised and configured and reconfigured forms of domestic life in the very spaces that Matta-Clark was also operating. Alvarez recounts her own cutting practice in an extended interview with French-Algerian dancer and photographer Martine Barrat in a video entitled Vickie. Barrat collaborated with teenage gang members in the South Bronx in the 1970s to produce hundreds of such recordings, discussions with and among the young people Barrat met about how they lived and how they wanted to live. They passed the video camera back and forth, interviewed one another and had lengthy discussions about what a gang is, how it should be organized. There are a lot of interesting discussions among the women, many of whom were kicked out of their homes and in and out of jail, about their complex negotiations and reinventions of gender, sexuality, and kinship. They were working through these questions and experimenting together..

          In the particular tape that I am interested in today, the cameraman, Angie, a 14-year-old member of Roman Kings, records Vickie in a sustained, intimate close up shot—there are very few cuts—that leaves out of frame most of the space she is inhabiting. The intertitles, however, describe this space as a unit of a low-income project on prospect in a part of the South Bronx they call Korea. Many people lived in that three-bedroom apartment; Vickie and her daughters Jennifer and Liberty, her mother Arine, her brothers Dino, Ace, Anthony, Victor, and Benny, and all of their friends who had nowhere else to sleep. This was not a nuclear family but a fluctuating expansive formation. Together they performed something of a temporal cutting of the space by taking shifts. Arine, her mother, went to bed early; she had to be up at 5:00 a.m. to go to work in a small garment factory. The guys were awake in the living room, they didn't go to sleep until really late, and they never woke up before early afternoon. This tape of Vickie was shot at 4 am.

          In the interview, Vickie talks about witnessing the butchering of the South Bronx over the years she has lived there. When asked if she ever thinks about moving, she insists: "I was born and raised here and I guess I’m going to stay here. This is the South Bronx and I’m going to take it the way it is. When you come here you’ve got to live it". Then Vickie describes her own act of critical cutting in relation to which I would like to think and place the cuttings of Matta-Clark. I've just extracted a very short part for this presentation. In it she is describing the death and she is describing attending the funeral of a close friend of hers named Edna:

                    "I went to…I was there every day at her…you know the funerals…where they put her out for two days or something like that. I was                             there from the time it opened until the time it closed. And I would go out and come back in and sit there, you know, sit there with her.                       And the day that she got buried I was there, she got buried in New Jersey. I was there when she got buried. They wanted to take her                         out of the box. You know they take you out of the box so they could sell the box again and they put you in a wooden box. You know                           when you die they change your boxes because the box that you are buried in is brand new. And what me and my friends did, we                                 threw dirt and scratched it up. You know she was in there when we threw dirt and scratched it up so they’d keep her in the same box.                         So they don’t just throw her into a box and throw her down there".  

This seemingly volatile, explosive act begins as an act of destruction but doesn't break down the structure, here the coffin where Vickie's friend now rests so much as it breaks down its value in so far as that value defined or determined by the rules and pressures of an economic context organized around private property renders the otherwise creative practice of their denigrated non-normative forms of dwelling, even in one's final resting place here, insecure and contingent. Vickie's cutting breaks that down, extracting the structure from this economy, rendering non-transferable, unable to be sold or used by anyone else. But it is not a merely act of destruction, it is also an inscription that marks and preserves as definitively and permanently as possible the otherwise almost unregistered tenuous inhabitation of this space and the not yet abandoned but condemned spaces around it by Vickie and her friends, one that constitutes a resistance to eviction, an inappropriate and at the same time inappropriable claim on a space which they know does not belong to them. The cut here is the trace they insist on living behind, the trace, seemingly inert, deactivated, but still potentially incendiary, which can't be fully shut down or cleared away. It is an insistence even at the scene of Edna's death of a living labor whose purposes are not recognized as ideas and whose products are not recognized as having any legitimate value.

         What again, would happen, if Matta-Clark's cutting did not depend on the exclusion, the setting aside of this kind of cutting, but cut along with it? Then they might effect the kind of critical disruption of urban renewal that Matta-Clark seems to aspire to, one that is not attached to that of the developers and planners, who seek precisely to shut down the forms of renewal that Vickie and her friends practice but that moves alongside, or toward the kind of inappropriate and inappropriable claim on a space, however small, that Vickie and her friends make on behalf of their friend Edna. It could unfold then not as a destabilization and demolition of the kinds of structures Vickie inhabits but a rearticulation of those spaces along with those, even the junkies or wild dogs who seek shelter in the Bronx buildings where Matta-Clark first makes his cuts, who refused to relinquish them, or rather the possibilities for other modes of creative inhabitation, the creative recomposition, rearrangement, and reorganization of social life, the living labor, the creative and destructive degenerative and regenerative ferment for which those spaces are a laboratory and a refuge. Thank you.

Laura Harris, Simon Leung, and Robert Nichols Q&A

“You Do The Crime, You Do The Time” Part I: Vickie, President of the Roman Queens (excerpt)

Martine Barrat's website where you can purchase the whole movie and support the artist:

http://www.martinebarrat.com/