Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures

A joining of two artists, exploring their shared fixation on the problematics of architecture, language, institutions, scale, and value

＂[The exhibition is] powerful and unhinged and overbuilt--a monument to the entropy of the postindustrial city, and the tenuous dance of its inhabitants.＂ --New York Times

Gordon Matta-Clark and Pope.L are esteemed for their respective interdisciplinary practices that examine the value and paradoxes of urban life as well as the risk inherent in art making. Utilizing performance, film, drawing, and various multimedia projects, the two artists often open up interstitial spaces by realizing sweeping gestures that take into account shifting, decentralized zones. Grounded in the concept of failure, the sixth exhibition at 52 Walker and its accompanying catalogue reconsider societal, artistic, and structural failure--and its related expressions of hope.

With an introduction by the curator and director of 52 Walker, Ebony L. Haynes, this publication also includes a conversation between Haynes, Pope.L, and the director of LAXART, Hamza Walker, where they discuss the visual, material, and conceptual similarities between Pope.L’s and Matta-Clark’s work and what it means to treat the possibilities of failure as an artistic medium. Writings by Matta-Clark related to works in the exhibition highlight his interest in working with the void as material.

A central figure of the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) pioneered a radical approach to art making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it. Through his many projects--including large-scale architectural interventions in which he physically cut through buildings slated for demolition--Matta-Clark developed a singular and prodigious oeuvre that critically examined the structures of the built environment. With actions and experimentations across a wide range of media, his work transcended the genres of performance, conceptual, process, and land art, making him one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. As Roberta Smith notes, Matta-Clark ＂used his skills to reshape and transform architecture into an art of structural explication and spatial revelation.＂

Pope.L (b. 1955) was born in Newark, New Jersey, and presently resides and works in Chicago. He received his B.A. from Montclair State College, New Jersey, in 1978, and also attended the prestigious Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, from 1977 to 1978. In 1981 the artist received his M.F.A. from the Mason Gross School at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and later participated in the Mabou Mines Re.Cher.Chez Theater Intensive from 1983 to 1985 in New York. The artist has been distinguished by a multitude of grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship (2006), and more recently the Bucksbaum Award (2017).