Berlin’s new museum is not yet a museum. Herzog & de Meuron’s berlin modern, next to the Neue Nationalgalerie, is still a construction site, with completion not expected for several years. Yet for four days during Berlin Art Week, its spaces are opening to the public for the first time with an exhibition dedicated to Gordon Matta-Clark: the very artist who built his practice around cutting, carving and opening up buildings destined for demolition, turning architecture itself into a medium through which to question its rules, authority and permanence.
“Anarchitecture,” “syntactic manipulations,” a challenge to the idea of stable space, or a war against one of architecture’s defining conditions: permanence. Gordon Matta-Clark was both a student of architecture and a subverter of its authority. In his hands, buildings destined for demolition became material to be carved, pierced and brutally opened to the outside world, removing them, if only for a moment, from the fate of becoming fixed and definitive objects.