Archival Impression: (Re)Collecting Gordon Matta-Clark

Abstract

This article examines the contested relationship between the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who was educated as an architect, and his father, the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, with regard to architecture and the archive. It argues that architecture was impressed, archived in Matta-Clark not only by his father, but also by his destructive drive and the reinscription of his work in his collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 2002. It discusses what it means to archive Matta-Clark’s personal architectural dimension, in light of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, and to collect his work in an architecture-centric institution.