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"Anarchitect" Gordon Matta-Clark will be the subject of a three-part film series presented by the University of Houston's Gerald Hines College of Architecture.
Matta-Clark, who died in 1976, studied architecture at Cornell University. He moved to New York City soon after graduation and became more interested in social commentary than architecture. He later reconciled the two by working as an "anarchitect," combining architecture with anarchy.
His work included splitting condemned houses down the middle with a chain saw in order to expose their interiors as a commentary on urban decay. All but one of the buildings, known as "cuttings," were torn down; the remaining one, a three-story town house, is part of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art.
In addition to being a sculptor, artist and photographer, Matta-Clark was a pioneer of the performance-art movement. None of his moving-image pieces make up the Houston exhibit, which is one of the largest ever organized of his work.
Three films will be screened today at 3 p.m. in the College of Architecture Theater. The first, Splitting, is a video of Matta-Clark's first American house-splitting. Bingo X Ninths, the second film, deals with a house-cutting in Niagara Falls - the house was torn down an hour after it was split. Finally, Substrate deals with the underground spaces of New York City. Friday at 7 p.m., the Rice Design Alliance will screen three more of Matta-Clark's films: Clockshower, in which the artist scales a clock tower in New York and practices personal hygiene using the clock face as a mirror; Automation House, which involves mirror images of people and their movements; and Days End, chronicling the two months Matta-Clark spent living on, and cutting, a New York pier.
The screenings at UH and Rice are free and open to the public.
The Hines College, the Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, the Rice Design Alliance and the Texas Gallery worked together to bring the exhibit to Houston.
Dwayne Bohuslav, the show's organizer and a visiting UH architecture professor, said the groups' cooperation was essential to mounting the exhibit.
"Matta-Clark's work is very experimental and provocative, and it's difficult to show a collection of work on this scale without help," he said.