Buried Stories of the City: Gordon Matta-Clark

Artist's conceptual drawing of communal space at Pruitt-Igoe.

I think I fell in love with St. Louis because I fell in love with a tree. It was growing inside of a building. Having grown up in Salt Lake City (which, if it were a house, would be all white and sparkly and smell strongly of bleach), it shocked me the same way Rimbaud's "To the Poet on the Subject of Flowers" shocked me when I first read it at the age of 14. My thought at the time (both in the case of the tree, and the poem): I didn't realize grown-ups would allow such a thing to occur!

It has been nine years since I blew past that bushy, crooked juniper on Delmar. And now I suppose I understand what that tree signifies for St. Louis, and it doesn't have a lot to do with poetry. When I moved to Old North St. Louis, I met people who had been displaced from Pruitt-Igoe and even Millcreek Valley. And I learned about the Team Four Plan. It was shocking, even more than the tree was shocking, to see how many stories St. Louis had willfully left untold, and buried deep. The tree started to mean something different; it twisted my heart in the other direction, and broke it. Some of these stories are so painful that the site on which they occurred has become, in a sense, a sort of spiritual Superfund site. The best-known example of this, i think, is Pruitt-Igoe.

There have been plans and more plans for Pruitt-Igoe site since the buildings were demolished 37 years ago (including, at one point, a golf course), but none have come to fruition. There were rumors that the site was a brownfield, or that the old foundations were too expensive to remove, an urban myth debunked by Steve Patterson. I think it is probably due more to what I mention above - the history was so painful, it was hard to look at the site or even begin to really know what to do with it. It is currently inside the footprint of developer Paul McKee's proposed 1500-acre NorthSide development (for the full, full story on NorthSide, see Jarrett Medlin and Jeannette Cooperman's amazing, exhaustively researched story, here). Currently, it is an accidental nature reserve, and the subject of many Flickr outings as well as a documentary-in-process. Some credit this new attention to the site to McKee's interest in it -- I credit the power of the collective unconscious, with perhaps a little help from whatever ghosts or land wights reside there now.

Here's a shocking thing - check out these two views, one a contemporary shot, the other a historical shot from the Pruitt-Igoe doc's Flickr page, both looking toward St. Stanislaus church:

The photo above shows Pruitt-Igoe shortly after it was completed. The site has now become a sanctuary for finches, bats, and as it turns, out, fungi and berry bushes:

Driving down Cass, it would be easy to conclude that the site is nothing more than a wily clutch of trash trees hemmed in by bent-up chain-link fencing, but these images tell a different story -- the site has been left to itself so long it is now revegetating with plants and animals that might have been here long before the site was developed in the first place. In a way, it reminds me of what has happened to the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, but the radioactivity is emotional.

One of the reasons I am so excited about the Pulitzer's upcoming exhibit, "Gordon Matta-Clark: Urban Alchemy," (which opens tomorrow), is that the Pulitzer will be doing lots of ancillary programming in relation with the exhibit, including collecting stories at the neighborhood level (those will be posted here, specifically under the "Your St. Louis," page.) I also think that Matta-Clark's work itself, his concern with community, with ecology and with the fact that built environments are built for people, are going to be interesting things for St. Louis to process, especially when it comes to sites filled with buried stories, like Pruitt-Igoe. As Artdaily.com observed, writing about a show at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein that included his work:

"In the early 1970s, the American artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark were already addressing themes such as the impact of capitalism on the structure not only of the city, but of society in general. They dealt mainly with complex ecological and social contiguities within the context of the phenomenal development of architecture in large American cities which, after the boom of the 1960s, in many cases declined into dilapidated sites of an anti-utopia, residential-estate ghettos and problem-ridden suburbs.

The term 'entropy' borrowed from the natural sciences and used by Robert Smithson in the sense of irreversible change, desegregation, is a major reference point in many of the works on show. While presenting processes both of construction and destruction, they also preserve aspects of crystalline texture, structure."

And from the Pulitzer's blog, just to give some further context:

"Trained as an architect, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He literally carved out sections of buildings with a chainsaw. In this way, he revealed their hidden construction, provided new ways of perceiving space, and created metaphors for the human condition. When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained, which is why the artist documented his work with photography, film, and video. He also kept a few building segments, known as 'cuts'. They include a piece of a floor from an apartment house in the Bronx, three sections of a house near Love Canal, a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City, and four corners from the roof of a house in New Jersey. For this exhibition, the Pulitzer is borrowing from important institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and from the private collection of John and Thomas Solomon. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark also plans to lend almost forty photographs that will be displayed throughout the Pulitzer. This will be the first time that the aforementioned 'cuts' and photographs have been exhibited in St. Louis.

Matta-Clark’s poetic and daring involvement with the urban fabric did much to represent and reinterpret abandoned buildings and places. Using his work as a springboard for dialogue, the Pulitzer will prepare innovative programs that will help address critically the fate of many of St. Louis’s neighborhoods, which are presently filled with unoccupied structures and empty lots. Moreover, by placing Matta-Clark’s rough domestic “cuts” into the pristine public architecture by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer, we hope not only to offer our audiences new ways to think about the artist and the architect, but also to incite questions concerning the social, political and geographical circumstances that give architecture its meaning."

 I urge you to go see the show when it opens tomorrow night from 5-9pm (the Pulitzer is located in Grand Center, at 3716 Washington). If you don't make it then, the show will be up through June 5, so there will be plenty of opportunities to see it. And if you can, if you think of it, take the time to give the Pulitzer your neighborhood stories, both the ones that sleep under razed foundations and asphalt, as well as the brighter ones. --Stefene Russell