For those who don’t know about Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), check out his retrospective at the Whitney Musuem. I heard about him years ago when I saw a film called 14 Americans (by Michael Blackwood) about 14 New York artists in the early 1980’s. That film shows footage of Matta-Clark slicing a New Jersey house in half.

An early site-specific artist and the co-owner of Food, a SoHo restaurant managed and staffed by artists, Matta was an artist with an adventurous and experimental spirit. A photographer,
filmmaker, conceptual artist and restaurateur, Gordon Matta-Clark sliced buildings in half, bought tiny parcels of land around the five boroughs grew mushrooms in a gallery basement and more.

From Wikipedia: In the early 1970’s as part of the Anarchitecture group, Matta-Clark
was interested in the idea of entropy, metamorphic gaps, and
leftover/ambiguous space. Fake Estates was a project engaged with the
issue of land ownership and the myth of the American dream – that
everyone could become "landed gentry" by owning property. Matta-Clark
"buys" into this dream by purchasing 15 leftover and unwanted
properties in Manhattan for $25-$75 a plot. Ironically, these "estates"
were unusable or unaccessible for development, and so his ability to
capitalize on the land, and thus his ownership of them, existed
virtually only on paper.

The Whitney retrospective shows, what Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times calls: “that messianic, carefree ethos that arose when New
York was a crumbling capital with mean streets, cheap rents and bad air
and when art wasn’t worth much either, so nothing was impossible."

Through  June 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; (212) 570-3676. Screening and talk, 7 p.m. Screenings continue throughout the month.