 It's really a great pleasure to welcome Mark Wigley this evening to present his most recent book, Cutting Meta Clark, The Anarchitecture Investigation, just fresh out of Lars Muller's publishing press. Few people need less of an introduction than Mark Wigley, especially in this auditorium. And yet it's a thrill to reintroduce him tonight in a slightly different capacity. That of one of the most influential and celebrated historian, critic, and theorist of architecture, a unique reader and writer of the discipline as it sits at the intersection of technology and contemporary culture, or as the book suggests, a uniquely compelling activist detective, once again disassembling and reassembling for us the discipline, undoing its myth to recast its foundations towards expanded potentials and inspiring new possibilities. In the same way that Mark has often done in this very auditorium, magically reducing something or someone to dust before building it back up again, Mark's body of work and thinking has time and time again uncovered and recovered much needed relevance for the field, always enabling a more open, inclusive, and ultimately more intelligent approach to the scholarship and practice of architecture as well as to the possible contributions it can make beyond itself. This constant opening up of architecture is not unlike the holes and cuts that the protagonist of the his book, Gordon Matta Clarke, performed across many buildings and structures. In the case of Mark, it is through incisive writing that the cutting has been performed across decades with every essay and every book empowering us to both look at and engage the field in new and liberated ways. And by liberated, I don't mean through some kind of American positivist, happy self-help kind of way. I mean liberated as in deconstructed only to be reassembled with equal doses of harsh reality, unmatched humor, and unique intellectual generosity. As I was thinking of this evening, I was reminded of all of Mark's writings that have formed several generations of students of architecture. His seminal essay, Network Fever, written for Grey Room in 2001 at the height of generalized giddiness about our age of information and interconnectedness already announced our current after-party, such as with one of the essay's very first sentences, I quote, in celebrating this new kind of territory, we recast questions of individual identity in terms of unimaginable levels of connectivity, ignoring the equally dramatic rise of new forms of inaccessibility to stage an institutionalized simulation of euphoria in which discourse about openness, democracy, free exchange, and speed dominates over that of control, surveillance, blockage, sedation, and crime. Sounds familiar? Mark's seminal books include his 1993, The Architecture of Deconstruction, Derrida's Hunt, White Walls, Designer Dresses, The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, published in 1995, and two of my favorites, his 1998, Constance Nubabilon, The Hyperarchitecture of Desire, and his co-edited, The Activist Drawing, Retracing Situationalist Architectures, Architectures for Constance Nubabilon to Beyond, published in 2001. And yes, his 2005 essay entitled, The Perforated School, published in Volume Magazine, which Mark co-founded in collaboration with Rem Koolhass and Ole Barman, not only announced the beginning of his amazing tenure as Dean of GSAP in 2004, but is still today an unbelievably inspiring manifesto for the future of architectural education and the landmark for anyone interested in the future of pedagogy or the future of the university. Finally, and on a personal note, it's been inspiring to reflect on all that Mark has done since stepping down from his deanship. Just to name a few of his recent endeavors. In 2015, he published Buckminster Fuller, Inc., Architecture in the Age of Radio, Tracing Fuller's thought and practice to reveal anew its compelling potential for us to reconsider the field today. In 2016, building on his long and often ground-breaking engagement with curating exhibitions, such as with the Museum of Modern Art, the Drawing Center, the Vitted DeVitt Museum in Rotterdam or the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, amongst others, he co-curated the third Istanbul design Biennale with Beatrice Colomina and entitled, Are We Human, The Design of the Species Two Seconds, Two Days, Two Years, 200 Years, 200,000 Years. And subsequently, Crow wrote, Are We Human, Notes on an Archaeology of Design. Tonight, he's offering us a privileged re-entry into the work of one of the most iconic, artistic and architectural figures of the 20th century. Please join me in welcoming Mark with me. Okay, it's a book launch, which at the end means I'll sign books if you are foolish enough to buy it. Why would you do that? Well, the reason to buy a book is because then you don't have to read it. Oh, isn't that true, right? That if you think about it, you buy a book so that you know that should you wanna read it, it's in your house waiting for you to read it. If you really wanna read it, you steal it, or you get a PDF, right? And you mark it in yellow like a dog peeing as evidence that you've read it. So actually buying a book is not about reading the book. So if the lecture really turns you off, like you have the feeling like I never wanna read this book, you're a potential candidate to buy it. Those of you who find it interesting, shouldn't. So that then creates a difficult dilemma for me to identify the right tone of the lecture. I think my main mission is to stop you from buying the book, by making Maddo Clarke. Interesting, because I can't stop, I'm kind of a fanboy more and more and more. And not alone in this, and I think it's one of the nice things to be in this room is to be with so many of the people who were really part of this long project. I think particularly of Mark Wasuda was really a partner in crime when we first did an exhibition a while ago very quickly joined by Craig Buckley. And I remember, you don't wanna know what we did in the back of the back of the back of the behind the scenes of Maddo Clarke. James Graham joined in soon after that. We worked a lot with a lot of people here at the school, also very closely with the CCA in Montreal, Mirko Zardini and his team. With Jane Crawford, the widow of Maddo Clarke who was unbelievably kind and thoughtful and quite inspirational in her openness to the idea of an archive and therefore the idea of kind of let's say a life. It's not that you live a life and then someone else records it, right? It's that you come to life afterwards in the stories that people tell about you. So you actually live not in yourself but in the stories of others. This is like vaguely true, right? So in that sense, if you are the widow of an artist and you allow people to write stories about the person by keeping the archive, you give a life to the person that you love in quite an obvious way. So archives are about love and death and life and sex and all of that. And that's what this project began as was part of what was called the Living Archive Project which was trying to say that actually archives are full of mysteries and crimes. It's not like dead documents from dead people but actually places where ideas are incubated. The matter clock that you know, the matter clock that everybody knows, one could say even the only matter clock is the matter clock that was born after he died and he died after only 10 years of work, right? 1968 to 78. So let's say one of the things to keep in the back of your head or the front, I don't know why we say the back of the head, right? It might be a sort of super safe place to keep ideas would be up front here but there is this idea you kind of keep them in the back, I think keeping the front of your head and I thought that how could he do so much in 10 years like such that we would be gathered to here tonight to again talk about him, like what is it that went on? Like why 10 years? Would things have been worse if it was 15 or 20? Like what does it mean? Of course it's a kind of an easy platitude that to be successful as an artist it's useful to die early. It has the advantage that you don't degenerate, you don't get a chance to degenerate but also there's a sort of mystical, mythical sense of desire that you, what might you have done and things like that. But nevertheless it's a kind of shocking statistic that he's doing his work from 68 to 78, everything that I will show you. He was trained as an architect at Cornell. His time in Cornell by the way was interrupted for a year spent in Paris. Why? Because he was driving with fellow students at Cornell late at night and he drove the car off the road and one of his friends died. So he's in Paris to kind of deal with the shock of that. Is that relevant? Like do we need to know such a thing? Like could we think of Madagascar without that information? Now that I've told you that, could you like forget it? And that would put him in Paris in 68, that would put him in contact the same moment that the situation is arguing that architecture is the enemy, that architecture is a crime, architecture is the monumentalization of authority and a developing strategies for undoing it. Strategies that involve locating the unconscious of architecture, the unconscious which would be revolutionary, that every city has inside of it, it's trying to keep you down, but inside of it it has another logic that could be pulled up by a psych geographical techniques. Madagac, very, very literary, very, very well read, totally in touch with all of those arguments. It's somehow related to those, but it's not gonna be in that scene without that particular trauma in that particular moment, which means he's gonna graduate a year later from Cornell. He's gonna be a very good student. He's gonna be like all A's. By the way, that's for those of you in the room, although here it's high pass, low pass, right? But in the world of A, B, C, D, E, A is not a good grade, because the people who get A's work for the people who get C's, right? You know how it works. So actually, if you're only aiming for a huge success in life, you wanna be pretty consistently mediocre, but he wasn't, he was an A student, right? We tend not to think of that. We don't want him to be like a good architecture student, because we don't think of him as a good architect. Actually, we don't think of him as an architect at all. Why? Because he's interesting. And if you're really interesting, you can't be an architect. You must be something else, an artist, right? Because architecture itself couldn't be interesting. Architecture's sort of boring. It just sort of sits there. It's kind of the opposite of interesting. It's like life is wild, the world is wild, and architecture will kind of bring things back to order. So if somebody makes architecture that's wild, well then it's not architecture, it's art. Or to say it another way around, we're used to the idea that architecture like answers questions, right? Deals with problems. And we're used to the idea that art asks questions. So if I make architecture that asks questions, then it must be something else. It must be art, right? So we don't want to think of metaclark as an architect. But of course I'm a member of the Architects Union, so I'm bound to make a kind of paternity claim that he belongs to us, that he's really an architect. I'm even gonna argue that what makes him even hardcore interesting in the art world is the extent to which he's, as it were, faithfully architectural. By the way, even if you thought he was an artist, and if you say that, you say, hey, hey, metaclark's an artist, you're not gonna be alone if you think that he's good. He's not just good. Everybody thinks he's good. But you just don't meet people who say, yeah, I looked at the work of metaclark, and I don't know, it doesn't do anything for me. Young artists, old artists, middle-aged artists, everybody admires it, right? You cannot be a museum of modern art without metaclark in your collection. That would be inadequacy. If you're being trained as an artist, or trained in art history, you're gonna meet metaclark. You're gonna meet him almost at the level that you will meet somebody like a Duchamp, for a reason. He's a kind of a reference point. Maybe that's simply because he was, during those 10 years, so thoroughly in touch with what it means to be an artist, so self-conscious about his performance that he exists not simply as an artist who did a certain kind of work, but as somebody who re-thinks what it is that an artist could do. Young artists are particularly inspired by metaclark. They don't imitate his work, but he acts as a kind of reference point for what art could be. This is the person I'm talking about, right? Not exactly, the heroic artists. Not even the heroic architect. Like, seems to be trapped by his work, right? Like, unable to move, kind of helpless, like in a cocoon, something like being incubated in his own work. He knows you're looking at him. Don't you see him looking back at you with that look of, okay, you caught me? You didn't just catch him, right? He's up a tree, which means someone else got up the tree with him to take the photograph and not only took the photograph, put it, printed it, put it in the archive so I could bring it back to you. In other words, he knows you're looking at him. So he gives you this look, this look which says, I'm nothing much, really. But then again, that's my thing, don't you? Doesn't he already sort of seduce you with this kind of canny, super, super professional look? By the way, everybody up on the tree with him, five or six people at the time that this photograph was taken, will eventually become known as an architecture group. They are artists and dancers and thinkers and writers and sculptors and so on. It's one day they're up on this tree at Vasa College. But anyway, if you say this is an artist and maybe this is like performance, right? It clearly is performance. But is he a sculptor, a performer, an installation artist, a photographer, a filmmaker, or could it be that this is architecture? And anyway, what would it mean? This is not exactly Renzo Piano, right? Almost any architect that you know that's famous, which means what, five of them, right? Wouldn't be caught dead up a tree with a net like this. That would be, as it were, the end of their career. Just think about it. So something about the helplessness. I mean, even if he said, this is the most amazing net ever invented. It's ecological, made out of the, you know, semen of a rare frog, you know. It's not gonna work, right? It's just gonna be a look of helplessness, not the heroic architect solving the problems of the world. And even if you say, oh, it's a net, it's architecture, it's space, it's Godfried Semper and the knot and all of that, there would be, I know, but that sounds like woman's work to me. It could be art, but it would be like art of the other, not art, art, definitely not shark herdshog, right? So in this little image, everything, every fantasy, every kind of racism that you have, every kind of gender bias you have, every single thought that you have about your field works on this photograph. And he, more or less, I'm gonna suggest you, knows what those thoughts are and is positioning himself to, as it were, respond to them. Of course, his work seems to be not about function and not about shelter, the two things that we normally think about with architecture. But are we so sure that architecture is about function? Like, is it really? By the way, are architects any good at function? Like, if you really want something to work, do you ask an architect, right? Or isn't it more the case that if you really want something to work and you know what it is that you want, that you ask someone else, like an engineer? You ask an architect when you don't even know what the question is, right? You almost say, when you ask an architect to do something, it's when you don't even know what it is that you wanna ask and the architect should say something to you or offer something to you that looks like you had asked an intelligent question. That's the great trick of the architect, is to offer something that looks like it's the answer to a question that wasn't asked, but then the client pretends from then on that it was asked, right? A little bit like when you buy some new clothes and you're not feeling yourself so you want something new, but you don't know what to ask for because you can't because you're not yourself, right? So someone says, try this, that's really you. They've never met you before, but they say that's you. And you go like, is it? And one of the other people working in the store walks by as it were accidentally, you say, oh, that looks absolutely great. And then heads off to the changing room, hoping that they've done their friend, the salesperson, a good deal. But then there is this, but maybe you do feel good or maybe you now think that the you is you and you say, look at this new, the new me, right? But the new me didn't buy the clothes, the clothes are making the new you, right? So the architect is someone, she's somebody that gives the client something they didn't ask for, but when given this gift feels like they did ask for it and feels different, feels like a new person. So in that strange way, architecture is not the answering of a question, but actually the kind of production of a question. So what if Matt O'Clock makes work that asks questions? Maybe it's because he's kind of outing architecture, right? He's not taking architecture to a new place, he's just letting something about architecture come forward. By the way, most architects, you know, really don't know what they're doing. They don't, right? And this is what the beauty of architecture, by the way, if you knew what you were doing, why would you do it, right? Architects love buildings because they're frankly the only people in society that don't know what buildings are. Everybody else knows perfectly what a building is for and they use it that way for architects, buildings are sources of mystery and confusion and so on, right? This is not rocket science, right? A painter is somebody that doesn't know what a painting is and spends their whole life painting to try to understand why it is that they can't do anything other than paint, right? So painting is an attempt to understand what is a painting, right? The great painters know more about painting than anyone else, but they still don't know what a painting is. The great architects don't know what a building is. The only difference is, we're used to the idea of somebody saying, I don't know what a painting is, but the idea that you don't know what a building is is some kind of heresy because buildings are supposed to be exactly the opposite of the answer to a question, right? So what if actually architects are not sure and architects don't know how to make function and they're not very good at shelter? And in reverse, are we so sure that metacliac is beyond the question of function and beyond the question of shelter? Also, by the way, might art not have a function, right? In today's society, art's function seems really clear and financially clear and architecture status seems radically unclear. To some extent, architects actually operate in society more with the kind of mindset and position and social status of an artist and artists are much more efficiently operated. Might it even be that art has a kind of a sheltering function? Might it even be that art is offering us more sort of security and comfort today than architecture? So in a kind of long-winded way, I'm trying to say that metacliac might not just be a kind of questioning of architecture, but it might be thinking of architecture as a kind of form of questioning and just kind of pursuing that, just asking the question. I think, by the way, this is a long-winded way to say, I think there are many ways to be an idiot in architecture. And most of us demonstrate quite a wide range of them, but one of the most obvious and easy ways to be an idiot is to not to pay attention to metacliac. I mean, I really think if you're in architecture and you know nothing about metacliac, you are a certified idiot. In that sense, you have a candidate to be president of this country. I mean, those are the qualifications. Anyway, so let's go. It's gonna be a roller coaster ride through the mind of metacliac. Horrible thought, right? The mind of anybody, but let's do it. Let's try to sort of rush through the mind of metacliac. It's gonna be super fast. Keep an eye on your personal property as it may move during the flight. Okay, here we go. Metacliac and architecture. People always call this work an architecture, right? And it's got like, metacliac and architecture. That's because they don't know what's on the left, but also they don't know what's on the right. In other words, imagine that you use as a word to describe a mystery, a word like mystery. You know what that is, son? That's a mystery. The kid says, I know, I wanted to know what it is. In other words, an architecture is not so obvious what it is. So there is a kind of a comfort. An architecture, by the way, what does it mean? It sounds, you know, like obviously it's kind of like the opposite of an architecture. It's more like kind of anarchy. Like it's not architecture, it's an architecture. But it's also an architecture, right? Not architecture's still sitting there very safely. So it might actually not be so much about a kind of anarchy of architecture, but it might also be even a kind of anarchy becoming more like architecture or more like anarchy texture, like the architecture of anarchy. I was like, could architecture kind of becoming anarchy or it could be anarchy becoming architectural? It's ambiguous there. By the way, this is a good time to leave the lecture. Because if you agree with me that those are the kind of vibrations that this word has, then it's kind of an undecidable word that sort of hovers at the limits of architecture as if we know what architecture is, right? Like we would say there is the limits to architecture as if that's kind of clear, like the discipline of architecture. You say the limits of art and people go, well, I don't know, art, it's not so clear. We have kind of a thought that architecture, because buildings seem to sit in a certain place that maybe the field sits in a certain place. Whatever this does, it sort of vibrates at the limit. It could be that why this word was so important for Matta Clarke and so important for the people who write about him is that it doesn't describe anything in particular, but a kind of troubling of conventional understandings of architecture. Nothing I'm gonna say to you now, which is why I recommend you leave, is gonna elaborate on that much. We're just gonna go into it. Every time you hit Matta Clarke's work, and this is conical intersect Paris, 1975, you see he's carving out a hole. You see the hole from the street, the accidental arrival of Renzo Piano, precisely, and you're looking up through the very same hole, right? And there is this kind of, as you see on the right, a kind of vertiginous effect. So in a kind of apartment building that seems to have clarity and so on is rendered super, super unclear, where here he is cutting some sort of arcs in Antwerp, in Office Baroque, that are becoming more and more complicated and layered, and eventually vertiginous, such that you don't know what is up and what is down. Architecture seems to no longer be doing what it's supposed to do, no sense of orientation, no sense of function, no way to put your furniture. By the way, I think a decent working definition of architecture is anything with furniture, right? Metaclark said art is simply, the difference between art and architecture is that it doesn't have plumbing that worked for a while, but actually now a lot of art has plumbing as you know. So we have to move to another definition. Maybe architecture is just anything with furniture and it's not easy to put furniture here, right? It just doesn't seem to offer. Architecture is not offering hospitality in the way that it normally will do. Here in his last work, Circus in Chicago, you're architects, right? Experts in space, the final frontier. You maybe have figured out whether we're looking up or down or sideways. There's no tricks in the photograph. It's a straight photograph of a non-straight situation, right? Again, architecture is being disobedient in this, or the same project. Again, if you've got it all figured out, good for you. Everybody attaches the word in architecture to Metaclark. Exhibitions, including right up in the one in the Bronx last year, as if we know what that means. Everybody who writes about Metaclark says that he called his work an architecture. Here's a bunch of quotes from the very beginning to the very end. These are all famous people. Everybody you admire is in there. If I tell you who they are, you will not admire them as much because they consistently say, that's his word for it. That's what he called his work. And they always put the word an architecture in quotes as if they're not sure, like that's his problem, like it's a dead fish. He calls it an architecture. It's like this. That's his word for it. But the funny thing is they feel like by saying that, that somehow the issue has been dealt with. He calls his work an architecture. End of story. The funny thing is, of course, he insisted that he doesn't call his work an architecture. Where did he get the word from? Did he get it from Dubuffet's set of prints and architecture, which relate? I mean, they're all to do with a kind of stressing surface of buildings, which is, of course, a big deal for him. And of course, he knew extremely well Dubuffet through his own family. Did he get it from Robin Evans towards an architecture? Did he get it from Gianni Petina, an architecto, 73? By the way, we know he read Petina's book, but after he's working with the concept of an architecture, this is the guy, right? This is a typical image of Matt O'Clarke. His reputation is to be the wild man from Borneo, always with a bottle of tequila, always incredibly spontaneous, not easy to understand, kind of dyslexic, crazy, spontaneous, multimedia, never know where he is. This image seems to represent that. But think about it. If you think as an architect, you say, no, no. He's photographing himself. He's worn his hair like in dreadlocks for a year and then has the hair placed geometrically relative to this grid, and then it's photographed. It's super German. This is exactly not the wild man of Borneo. Or let's say the wild man of Borneo German style. Yeah, we have a wild man, right? It's not wild. It's a super conceptual artist working intensely carefully. Essentially, my argument is that for those 10 years from 68 to 78, he was sort of a heat-seeking missile as a conceptual worker, architect or artist, that he was unbelievably consistent in his theory of what he was doing, that he had a theory of what he was doing, that he was generally theorizing what he was going to do years before he would do it, such that when he did it, it looked like it was fast and easy. Fast and easy was itself designed as a kind of effect. Still, this word, an architecture, supposedly is related to the Anarchitecture Group who has an exhibition supposedly in March of 1974. The exhibition that I did with Mark Wasuda all those years ago, 10, 12, whatever, years ago, we don't want to remember, was to try to figure out, did the show actually happen? Because despite the fact that everybody who writes about Madaglark describes this exhibition, this exhibition is enormously influential. It affects everybody, but there's actually no evidence that it ever took place. So we did an exhibition, none of the people that were in the exhibition agree upon what was in it, where it was in it, how, when, what, why. There were no photographs of the exhibition, despite the fact that everybody supposedly in the exhibition was a photographer and not just a photographer, a serial photographer, and especially of themselves and their work. So they just managed to do a show of photographs in which they didn't photograph themselves, making the show, nobody wrote about it, no reviews, nothing, nothing, nothing. We only got three pieces of evidence that the thing took place. This little note from Avalanche that says that there's gonna be this architecture show with Tina Gerard, Suzy Harris, Richard Nones, Gordon Madaglark, and then referring to the fact that he's in general doing an interesting project, the invitation card to the exhibition, saying like there's gonna be this exhibition, and then on the right, this kind of spread of photographs that appears in flash art about four months later, and that's all we've got, right? And there's no evidence that this thing connects to this thing which connects to this thing. The first time we get this note, you see this note, this is basically a downtown gossip magazine for the art world, highbrow, but gossip, this is the terrible moment of Smithson's death, but also the birth of the twins of Geoffrey Lou and the description of this upcoming and architecture show, this is the invitation card, like super architectural letters, just because you have an invitation card doesn't mean that there was a show from which the invitation card was done. Just put Duchamp in the back of your head now that you've got something else in the front. Keep Duchamp in the back, like warning, warning, warning. Duchamp is his godfather, right? So if you see an invitation card from Duchamp, what do you do? Look for the exhibition, or look at the card and say that's the exhibition, right? Wake up, it's 2018. Yeah, come on, come on. Art has been defined as a challenge to art for over a century. It's like an antique idea. You could sell that idea in an antique store. Somebody, an old guy, could come to you and say, ah yeah, art is actually a criticism of art itself. That's what they used to think, that's what they used to think in the 21st century, in the 20th century. So when you see a card like tune in, wake up, here's the second one, right, flash art. It says on the left an architecture, then it lists, now you see that the group of people in the exhibition has expanded. Laurie Anderson, Miss Felt, only Maddox Clarke, Miss Felt, Laurie Anderson, this particular way. So we know he's writing it, right? Again, go to Maddox Clarke, Tina Gerard, Gene Heist, Dean Susie Harris, Bernie Kirshenbaum, Dickey Landry, and Richard Nonas, all super interesting people in their own right are this group. Then immediately the word is spit again and architecture show. The show was comprised, as if it took place, of a collection of photographic notes evolving from a year of group discussion around mental, personal, non-structural, or architectural notions of space and place. If that helped things for you, good. It just sort of gives the sense that something happened and the images make it seem. By the way, the top left image splits the word a million times. So if you felt you knew what an architecture is, good luck. The only of those 12 images, the only one that looks sort of architectural is this one, but then it's architecture floating on a barge down a river. It's almost like a statement of, there goes architecture. The first time the word an architecture ever appears is in the same issue of Avalanche in which the first announcement of an architecture show comes. And in a photograph by Dickey Landry, who will be one of the people in this mythical exhibition, there is this photograph, which says an architectural project between two crepe myrtle trees by four acrobatic garden spires, Indian Bayou photo Dickey Landry. So it's a photograph of four spiders making an architectural project. But if this is an architectural project, like the spider's web, especially you don't see the web, you see the four spiders, and not by chance, at that time there are four enactics, right? So it's as if you were to look at an an architecture show made by four enactics, you wouldn't necessarily see it, even if that thing, like the spider's web, is what's holding the spider up. So in other words, the an architecture group could make a thing which is making them as a group, but it's not being necessarily visible. In other words, even if there was an architecture show, it might not necessarily be something that you could see so easily, or at least the evidence wouldn't be so clear, or let's just say an architecture is tricky, right? And these are tricky people, so this is warning, warning, warning. But as we will see later, I think this is a kind of prophetic and extremely important statement that sort of slid under the radar, but I think it's super important. Where does the word an architecture first appear? In this review of Matta Clark's project, Splitting. But Splitting will not be called Splitting at this moment, and it's just a small factoid to keep in mind that if there was this mythical exhibition in Green Street in the early months of 1974, during the time in which that exhibition would have taken place, Gordon Matta Clark will start his project of cutting a house in New Jersey. In other words, the most famous project of Matta Clark, one of the supposed and probably rightly masterpieces of 20th century art, the most famous work of one of the most famous artists is literally produced at the same time as the least known, least understood, no evidence, an architecture, and one of the an architecture group will be presenting this project as an architecture. You see it, an architecture in Englewood. In fact, with the three columns, it looks like the title reads as the caption to the image above. So if you wanna know what an architecture is, there it is, it's in Englewood, and it looks like that, a house split in the middle, and somebody writes the text saying, you know, we all went to visit this house on a bus trip, and we didn't know where our bodies and our brains and our emotions were. We all got sort of spun around, it was very physical, and it was an amazing piece of sculpture. But then on the second page, Take Two, another take, Laurie Anderson no less, like one of the people in the show that we don't have any evidence for, and an astonishingly elegant and precise writer, as you know, writes this piece about Take Two. Notice the images go from the outside, where the split of the house is perfectly symmetrical on the page, to two shots from the inside. Look at the top right, the house is split, we're like one floor up, it's split, but it's not just that it's split, because it's split, the light is coming down through the split, and it's lighting the split, so it's a kind of self-lit split. So weirdly, the split floats, literally floats in the light that the split itself has made. These are the kind of qualities that Metaclark is using. Again, the photograph is symmetrical, that is to say, the split is again understood as a split, and then we find ourselves in the top corner of the house, where we see that a corner has been removed, but it's still a corner. You could argue that with this extraction of this corner piece next to the window, it's even more of a corner than it was before. It's like saying corner, corner, corner, very, very loud. By the way, the house is saying house, house, house. This is not the breaking of the house. This is a house you never would have seen if he hadn't cut it. This is not the death of the house, or the demolition of the house. This is the birth of this house. You would not have been there, because this is in a working class neighborhood, African-American neighborhood, that you would not have gone, right? Nobody in this room would be hanging out in that neighborhood. Nobody would know what that life is. So this house that is born in the hands of Metaclark is precisely not the house that was being lived in by that family, and it is the house that will itself as it were about to be demolished for real estate purposes. Now it's a splendid car park, by the way. You wanna go and visit? We had one of the great CCP students track down the car park, where this masterpiece was destroyed. What does Lori Anderson say about it? She says it's got nothing, the experience has nothing to do with the physical split, right? Nothing to do with what's physical in this image, but what's conceptual. The thing about this house in New Jersey, though, was that it wasn't a house, but a single cut line. So it's not a house, but a line. The two halves were elaborate, non-functional buttresses, their purposes to reveal a line that changed everything. So the whole point of the house was simply to hold the line in place and sent his house reeling out of the realm of architectural possibility and architecture. This is Gordon's word for it, there's the fish, right? And he is the one that did it, saw the house in half. So again, something very physical. He was there, he's the one that named it, but it's not a thing, it's not a house, it's not an object, it's a line. He drew a line and held it together with the house. So here you have like a super physical reading of a physical experience and a kind of physical reading of a conceptual experience in the same page. But then the word and architecture is now being attached to this house by somebody who was a member of the architecture group, which you would think is a kind of authorized view. But nobody reads art right, right? Art right is a tiny leaflet as a result enormously valuable, impossible to buy, precisely because it was so tiny, right? Nobody's reading that other than other artists. And of course, Lori Anderson herself, right, is an artist, but art in America? Okay, now you're starting to move towards the galleries and to the market, but still you're with another artist, Elbranel writes, and it's the great divide, and architecture in quotation marks, danger, danger, by Matta Clarke. And now we get more images, right? We start to feel the house more, more deeply, and you get a repeat. The Englewood house is the latest in a series. Oh, it's not the first, it's one of the end of many, which Matta Clarke calls an architecture. And then Branel thinks that he's being funny, right? And he says he wants study to be an architect, right? To he. So now it's out, now it's kind of out there, that whatever it is that Matta Clarke does, it's an architecture, right? Nobody's said, told us yet what an architecture is, and you could say, yeah, but Mark, you don't have to do that. If it's an architecture, I don't need to hear what you think it is, I just need to look at the work, that's true. So this is what we'd have to look at, right? This is the first cut. He's cutting into the sauna of his girlfriend, Carol Gooden. By the way, I think as a sort of relationship strategy, not a smart move. Anyway, he cuts into her sauna in her loft, and notice that he cuts right through the electrical line so that the whole thing can be as it were sort of slid out, even with the towel on the rack, and now you're starting to get into Matta Clarke. So architecture is with his two slits, sort of literally becoming something else. Then we see him, you can tell by the hair that it's 1972, he's in the middle of the hair project, and he's now cutting horizontally through an apartment, often described as in the Bronx, actually Manhattan. Most of the so-called Bronx cuts are in Manhattan. For some reason, just doesn't sound as good to people. Manhattan cuts, right? Not as good. And look what he does, he's basically making a window, right? A window where there is a door and a wall, so he's turning a window and a door into a window, a window through which you look now that you couldn't look before, right? Into another room and beyond that through more windows, and for the first time, maybe you see the windows in the different distance, the same as the window, in other words, you realize that the windows that were already there had also been cut, that actually to be in that house was always to be surrounded by cuts. In other words, he's just adding. When he removes a piece of the building, he's always adding something, in particular, he's adding more cuts, he's showing you, exposing the fact that there were always cuts there. He gets trickier. He figures out that if he cuts this geometric square on the floor at an angle, and then makes another square cut on the wall, he produces that vertiginous fig. Look on the right, the apartment is no longer working as an apartment with rooms and so on. Actually what you see when you look at that image, it's much more malevich, right? A kind of black square on the floor, a kind of rectangular square, it's like a series of clear geometric holes around which whatever is left of architecture is just sort of floating like in a galaxy. In that sense, very malevich, very kind of cosmic in its sort of vertiginous quality. In other words, the cuts become the architecture, and architecture is normally known, it becomes kind of like a cloud. It's very, very consistent. He then makes this exhibition in 1972, I think totally brilliant exhibition, called Wall's Paper in 112 Green Street. Here it is, you can see that he's put the pieces that he's cut out on the wall and what look like photographs of the cuts above. Here's the first piece, he hated this piece, right? Doesn't mean it wouldn't cost you a fortune if you wanted to buy it, by the way. You can't, because it's in like a major museum. It looks like, it looks like it's very clear. There's a photograph of a hole above and there's the piece that comes from the hole, right? This is just a setup. This is to make you think whole object, whole object. The kind of factual nature of the piece in front of you, and the apparently factual nature of a black and white photography, they resonate with each other. They kind of reinforce each other. But it's a trick, right? Firstly anyway, that cut, you see it from the right. It's from the serverry in the food restaurant started with the gang, with Carol Godin, Tina Gerard, and Meta Clark. In fact, if you study the photographs of Meta Clark, you know that this cut was done literally about three days before the exhibition opened. Because the food restaurant started like a year and a half before, our earnest art historians of Meta Clark always describe it as a 1971 cut. Why, because they never look at the pictures, right? Looking at pictures is optional if you write about pictures, apparently, right? Or to say it another way around, if everybody that writes about Meta Clark would look at the work of Meta Clark, a whole different kind of Meta Clark would probably emerge. I'm not saying it's better. And by the way, if you're a writer and you don't, and it turns out that not looking at what you're writing about helps to write. Hey, you know, it's, why give, why stop? Why look? Here we go again. So now you've got, but you're in the groove, right? You're walking down the gallery and you see this object. Now it's, you recognize it from what I showed you before. It's this horizontal cut sitting on a table and the photograph of the hole from which it's been moved is on the table. But you would only call this a photograph of the hole. And by the way, you see that the proportion of the two prints, you can tell it's two prints that have been put together, right? They have almost the same size or enough of a size and exactly the same proportion as the cut that not only could you imagine putting the cut back into the hole that's in the photograph because it has the same shape. In a weird way, you can also imagine putting the cut into the hole made by the photograph itself. Because after all, if I put a kind of dark photograph on a white wall, it is also creating a kind of hole, right? So what you're looking at is what looks like something taken out of a hole and you're given actually two holes that it could go in and that's kind of vibrating very carefully. I would suggest you can make only minor alterations of the proportion of that photograph and it would not work. In other words, matter clock is entirely in control of that. Anyway, look at the photograph. It's not the photograph of a hole, right? It's actually two photographs, this one and this one that have been put together to produce which are entirely different scales which have been put together to produce this apparent hole. Again, as a highly successful but Neanderthal art historian, you could just call that a photograph of a hole, right? You would at least want to say something like, it's a photo work. You don't have to say it's good or bad, but it's definitely tricky. I think what startled Metal Clark is that nobody noticed. I actually think it changed his work a lot to realize that nobody noticed. And he tried really hard. For example, with this one, okay, it's sitting on the floor pretty clear. You look up, you see a photograph of a diamond shape that seems to fit, right? But again, just spend a little time. Actually, the photograph on the left is made up of two photographs from different angles that have been combined, one flipped upside down to produce a hole that was never there. He's actually photographed the hole from four different angles to produce two different images of the hole, entirely different holes. In other words, he set the whole thing spinning and nobody noticed. There's the negatives from which he was very precisely making that move. Look down further on the wall. There's another artwork never referred to, right? Just doesn't, you know, and you could say cynically while it's not referred to because it's not available. Doesn't exist, so you can't buy it, so nobody writes about things you can't buy and all of that. But you know, it's kind of sitting in all the pictures. You'd think you would write about it. It's not small, right? And remember, we're talking about one of the great artists of the 20th century. Everybody's desperate to find something to write about. There it is on the right. This is the photograph from which the work is produced, but you can see that actually the work on the right is made by two sets of five prints that are laid on top of each other, but the middle of the building has been removed. You see, of course, that Metaclark is very interested in the fact that when part of a building comes down, the secret life of the building is exposed. Everybody knows that. Everybody says that. And in that sense, the light shaft in the middle is boring to him because nothing's exposed. It's the same as it was before, so he just takes it out. So it's not that he's making a kind of photo work. He's making a new building and it's totally layered and totally flaky. Why does nobody notice? They're all looking at the other wall in which there's this astonishing work, the famous wall's paper in which he's putting photographs of the wall on the wall to make the wall and so on. And maybe this is a sharper work, which is, by the way, also folded up on the floor, incredibly cheap. Nobody bought it, right? As a result, he had to rework it into a book. Here's the book. The cover appears to be a photograph of one of these buildings in the Bronx that he was interested in, but look at the photograph more closely. It's not a photograph. It's a photo work. Notice that pieces of the images repeat. What's below? It's like a syncopation. He's taken four photographs, pulled them apart. He's pulled them apart by exactly the same amount as the light shaft. So it actually appears to be a light shaft and he's done the same thing in the other direction. In other words, he's actually made what looks like the facade of the building out of four photographs that are syncopated in both directions and yet they combine to produce weirdly the sense of a single building such that no one would notice. You're looking at the front and the back of the photograph. Again, never observed. And you could either say, it's because he's too good, too tricky, or we expect architecture to be stable so much that we don't see this kind of slippage, but never could you think of this as the work of the wild man of Borneo. This is a very, very precise crafting and cutting and reflection upon the image. Anyway, this is the inside of the book. Those are the images on the wall that nobody would buy, that they are now cut such that, depending on how you open the book, you get a continuous array based on the poster, which again, based on that same photo work, which is treated as a photo, which you see here, this is the original layout to produce the book, which is repetition of a repetition. Again, not very successful, so you cut the book in half again and gave it away to friends. Artists all got a copy of this stripped-down version. Here it is, the pint-sized, half-sized version. So it's sort of like half of a book that was half of a half of a half of a half of a wall. So now you've got like a little fragment. And then on the inside, you get this kind of totally clear description of what's going on and the inside of the book. And I say all of this because I think it's a brilliant exhibition and one of the things about Matta Clarke is he's using exhibition itself as a medium. In other words, he's one trying to indicate he's very, very precisely setting a kind of logical and perceptual and architectural trap in this exhibition, but there are even photographs of him making the exhibition. So if you're half-interested in Matta Clarke, you would be interested in these photographs. And by the way, it's impossible to write about Matta Clarke without showing some of these photographs that I'm showing you now. And here he is, he's at the other end. It's like catching the artist at work, like National Geographic, and his voice is whispering, here's the artist. It's this kind of, we shouldn't intrude, but we do intrude with a flash. Doesn't seem to affect him. So again, if you think this is a spontaneous activity on his part, but what is he doing? He's making that photo work that's not even recognized as a photo work. So if you're interested in it, you can see what he's doing. He's cutting up the prints, stitching them together, picking them up. So all of these pictures you can find in well-known books about Matta Clarke, but nobody's interested in saying, what is that thing that he's holding? And you even have photographs of him going over and looking at the empty wall where it will go, as if wondering what he should do, and then walking back kind of philosophically without noticing the flash again, and then settling to work again to finish it off, and then looks back at us with exactly the same look he gave us from up that tree. Like, you got me sort of, you got me, but not. I'm innocent, you know. Everybody loved him, by the way. If he was here, you wouldn't listen to me. He'd be much more, he's a very nice person. And he's giving you that look. Nice. But tricky. You sense that, right? Even with the hat, which is sort of surprisingly up to date today. Well, I think even then it must have been criminal. To some, you know, maybe his look is, you caught me with this hat, you know. Anyway, the exhibition gets reviewed. It's not like positive, but he's out there. You know, it's a big deal. It's an important show. And he gets kind of emboldened. He starts to become more surgical. You see, he's cutting out a simple geometric figure from the threshold of a door, but I can see that hole from the street, and I can see the street from the house. He basically photographs each of his cuts from multiple angles. Of course, it's an obvious question. Is the work in the cutting or in the photograph of the cutting, right? I, of course, I take the view, it's much more in the photographing of the cutting than it is in the cut itself and in the physical cut. If you're of a different generation than me, you will say it's all in the physical cut and you had to be there, man. Something like this. Which I think sounds like Gordon Maddaclark belongs to us, you know, and we are sculptors. Right, so it's this kind of claim. A claim I think he's so obviously challenging with the work. Right, what if I cut an L shape at the threshold between two doors and two floors, I get all of this kind. So in other words, very, very simple cuts produce a kind of vertiginous effect, right? And I think kind of totally brilliant. He does the same thing with his own department. Cooper's cut, right? Simple corner cut again, again. And cannily photographed. So there's a certain confusion about whether the surface you're looking at belongs to the room you're in or the next room. Right, always this kind of attention. He's in the pictures, right? So he's not taking the photographs again just to know. Of course, I think that somebody who asks other people to take photographs in a certain way is to some extent even more of an author of the photograph than if they actually have the camera, right? So there he is and the dog working sweaty. The image of the naked, sexy, sweaty mataclark is a huge part of the mataclark that we know. And here's the key. In that 10 years of work, 68 to 78, at the epicenter of that work, literally five years in, is splitting the most famous work of all. But just before it in January is the A-hole house and to the right is Bingo, done a little bit afterwards. So there's actually, and if you like, an architecture is between these two images on the left. This mythical exhibition is right in that spot. Why does he go to January? Because he's afraid that the relationship, he wants to be with his girlfriend Carol, who's a brilliant dancer, photographer, a very, very interesting person. Is here dancing on the world tour and you see Gordon Mataclark is in the dance itself, right, participating in the dance. So again, no easy assumption about where the figure of the artist would be. He's in dancing, you see him carrying the dancers. He's in the dance, in Milan, of his girlfriend Carol Gooden dancing in the Trisha Brown Company on their first kind of global tour. And he's desperate to cut into a building so he sneaks around industrial neighborhoods and finds this abandoned site and carves this triangle called Infraform and it's photographed by Giorgio Colombo who's traveling with him, but he's still desperate to cut. He encounters Gemana Cialano and says, no one in Milan will let you touch their gallery because they know you wanna just cut into it. But in January, it's possible. I'll introduce you to somebody and sure enough in January, the very, very interesting Paolo Minetti of Galleriaforma, who by the way, almost all of the main sculptors and conceptual artists of America were on show and Genoa says, you can have this building and Metaclack just can't believe it because it's not just a building, it's like a child's image of a building. It's perfectly symmetrical. It's got a roof that says roof, roof, roof and all of that. It's like a dream and there you see him photographing. You see him, by the way, in the shadow. So he's up in this crane being photographed like this is the kind of site. He draws it. You have any question that he's an architect, right? He draws it. He cuts horizontal lines about 18 inches apart sideways like this. And then you see the diagonal. The diagonal is coming from the light that will come if he would remove the peak of the roof, which he does and there he is. Same face, same look. Again, just ask yourself, I'm sorry to be boring but just remember, who's taking the picture? Why is it there? Why does he peak his head there? Why does he produce this innocence? I'm telling you, not an innocent artist. And part of his lack of innocence is the innocent look. This one, right? He's up there working, banging. It's incredibly thick. It's like this thick, concrete. It's concrete pretending to look like tiles. There is the cut, lifted up with his crane, same crane. Too big to bring into the gallery. So there is in the street outside the gallery. You go into the gallery, there's the piece from the middle on the floor but not just on the floor. It's on the floor like this, surrounded by two photo works. I think these photo works were done because he realized that nobody realized he was doing photo work. So he had to do photo works that say photo work, right? So you see how the photo works work. He repositions the prints so that the cut remains continuous. In other words, they're not simply photographs of a cut but it's a kind of cut. It's very much like what Laurie Anderson says. It's a cut that's being supported by the photographs of the architecture on this wall and on that wall. And on the other end is a cut drawing because again, if he makes a drawing of how to cut a building, turning the building into a kind of drawing, making the building light and ephemeral, shouldn't he do the reverse and turn a drawing seemingly light into a piece of architecture? So he takes stacks of 50 pieces of paper and makes it three-dimensional. Then two more on the walls like this just to give you a feeling for it. You see that he's drawing it and then cutting into it. It's really cut with a chisel like they're super physical works and you feel like, and they're kind of layered and they're kind of rough and yet precise. Then when you go outside the gallery, you meet this which is again, you have to remember he's up on the crane taking those photographs because he knows he's gonna produce this kind of serial work and then he's gonna do a cut drawing opposite it to match and there's his girlfriend Carol and another work called four ply which is of course again, the four facades of the building with the top cut off and then the top itself sitting there. Again, nothing innocent which is matched by this and then a documentation of the previous cuts that you've seen. So an exhibition which includes the kind of archeology of his own work. You can't see a Metaclark exhibition without getting a history lesson in Metaclark. Notice by the way that they're not just prints but they're all printed as series so that they could be works of art. So in other words, he's undermining the distinction between the documentation of his work and the work very, very clearly. Then the advertisement for the show, you see the same seriality. Look on the right, he went up on the camera and shot off a whole roll of film with the same shot. So it's not just a sequence, it's just like I'm gonna take the same shot because I know I'm gonna do this. Actually it was not quite sure, he thought it might be three strips and they cut it down to two to fit the format but super conceptual work, right? Including the theory, here's the theory for those of you waiting for the punchline, there it is, an architecture supposedly working with buildings without building within the structure between the walls. The more you get into meta-cleric and maybe it's a kind of like toxic thing or hallucinogenic thing, it all makes sense after a certain point, but it's very, very precise. Working with the absence, the last line, the whole house works to receive an intrusion. So he doesn't enter, he's not the intruder, the house works to receive him, right? So there's a kind of work of the house, very, very precise. Gemana Chalant wants to write about it and says you better give me some theory like it's architecture, right? Gemana Chalant, by the way, is writing about art and architecture. He's writing about art in an architecture magazine so he wants to describe it as architecture, he says architecture, you gotta write the theory. So Gordon sends him these notes of theory explaining his work and the key concept there is he says I prefer passing through than over under each surface and this I think is in a way the idiot's guide to meta-cleric, it's all about passing through, right? Like the wind, like the light. We think that architecture's not something you can pass through but actually it is, he just makes small cuts and your eye and your body and your brain go through. So he goes through architecture and I suppose the question of this lecture is did he go through architecture like from Cornell to reach some other place like art or is he still as it were going through? Gemana Chalant did and he sent him this sequence of photographs and wanted it published just like this. So it goes from finding the house to the photo works in the exhibition. Gemana Chalant did publish a sequence of the photograph but really concentrated on the gallery and the play between the piece that was cut and the piece sitting on the floor. But Gemana Chalant repeats the idea that architecture becomes an architecture, this is being published almost at the same moment that Laurie Anderson is describing, splitting as an architecture, they don't know each other's work. Neither of them will ever do it again, by the way. So this is the last moment and we can see that because here's a letter that Matt O'Clock is sending to Carol Gooden from his hotel room in Genoa and he's saying where they're gonna put the piece on the roof and he says, he finishes describing the exhibition, he says, I'm starting to put down some more notes on an architecture. We have to really talk, really get to getting, so I can continue shorthand and drink and talk. He was definitely a tequila based thinker to drink and talk and you could question the relationship or something to do with getting the ideas recorded. In other words, somebody would record him while he was talking. What's clear and important from this is the cutting is one thing and architecture's another thing. They are like different things in his world. What Germano Trellant does is describe it as a ready-made, describes Matt O'Clock as operating in a Duchamp way and I think he's super right about that. You even see when you look, for example, this photograph on the left of Intraform, that very ordinary chair you see through the cut is a totally Duchamp kind of move and of course these doors on the top of the doors is almost like a literal version. A vertical version of the famous Duchamp lateral door. So I think Trellant was right about that and wrong about the architecture thing and that project really lingers a lot in Matt O'Clock. So his next exhibition, it operates that way. He starts to figure out a sort of serial way of documenting his work. He starts to present his work more like this in sets of four photographs and then he does this interview which is extraordinarily important. If you're gonna write about Matt O'Clock, you must refer to this interview, extremely important interview with Liza Bear in Avalanche. Splitting, it's now called splitting. In fact, it's during this interview that he comes up with the name splitting and this is always referred to. The one thing you must never refer to is this. Liza, do you see the Humphrey Street building that's splitting as a piece of an architecture? Gordon, no. Do not ever refer to this. Like Mission Impossible, we don't. We will disavow any knowledge we've ever having seen this. If you wanna write, use this. No, our thinking, the architecture group, was more elusive than doing pieces that would demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings or rather attitudes that determine containerization of space. That's in every article about Matt O'Clock. Again, it has to all to do with people who don't want them to be an architect. That's the way this is operating. An architecture would be something other than architecture, right? If you've got a longer thing or like a longer essay, you can add this piece. The An Architecture Show at 112 Green Street last year, actually it was the same year, which never got very strongly expressed, hint, hint, it was not very good or didn't happen, was about something other than established architectural vocabulary without getting fixed in anything too formal. Good luck if you know what that means. Writers seem to know what it means. It's there all the time. Maybe you're doing a book chapter. You get to add this. I've always thought of you as working within an architectural context. Now we go to the jugular. It's like, are you or have you ever been an architect? It says, not architectural in this strict sense. That's a kind of tricky answer. Most of the things I've done that have quote architectural implications. Now it's architecture that gets the square quotes. I really about non-architecture, about something that's an alternative to what's normally considered architecture. So that's in there. Now if you're writing a book, you got this bit. And by the way, I'm not joking. Literally, we could map everything here. No, I thinking about an architecture was, architecture is environment too, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. But just never talk about that middle piece, right? So in other words, in this interview, which is done in splitting, he says splitting is not an architecture. Exactly at the moment that the leading critics are saying that it is, and they stop immediately afterwards. It's like message received. And it's only when he dies that it comes back again, like a virus is the convenient way to do it. So let's just check it out. Here is splitting. Again, you see the shadow of Maddo Clark taking the picture. It's like a crime scene and he's the detective of his own kind of crime. And we in this audience today are the detective of the detective of the criminal, or we are the criminals or whatever. It's not just that he takes a photograph of removing it. Look, this is the black and white shot of the same corner being taken off and slid down the side of the building, right? We see him choosing. He's interested in the fact that when it's halfway down the building, the building is a new building, right? It has this sort of lump on it. Then he photographs it sideways as it's coming down. He has to hang out of a window to do this. It's a major work to do this. And then down to the ground, but actually it never gets to the ground. It goes into the truck, right? And then onto the road and wherever it parks, it gets photographed. It's almost, again, it's very much like a police act, like the chain of evidence. It's taking the evidence back. It's gonna make a show of the John Gibson Gallery. The Genoa is gonna be the cover of the invitation. And pieces of building like Bingo are gonna be on the floor and the four corners are gonna be in the gallery like they were in the house. But not just that, they're gonna be photographs of the corners from which they were removed on the wall. So a kind of repeat of the strategy of 72. But more than that, in the adjacent room, a photograph of the corners being removed with cut drawings responding to those. So basically, very systematically takes you from a cut to a photograph of a cut, to a drawing of a cut, to a photograph of a cut, a very, very precise logic to produce this kind of cut. Then he makes a book, Splitting by Gordon Bader Clarke. Each spread, it has four phases. The first phase is like the building is found. Then a couple of collages showing how the building was found. Then he makes a one inch split down the whole building. Then he leans one half of the building back by five degrees and then he removes the corners. Like incredibly systematic. The photographs at the top are definitely like an architect like all four elevations, super systematic. And of course, our experts in photography recognize that this is a photo work, right? Of course, what's going on in the photograph again is what Laurie Anderson described. The prints are being moved to preserve the continuity of the line, but it's not so simple. Here are the photographs of the corners being removed and notice that the prints of the photographs have been cut to have exactly the same shape as the corner itself that's being removed. And again, just very slyly, very slyly, he's sliding in that little thought, that little confusion between the photograph and what it is that's being photographed. And then when you realize that the original photographs of the house before he's cut, that's where the real work is going on. That's where he's selecting the images, doing the drawings of how the book and there's the final result. But you see it's tricky because actually the photograph of the house before the cut was done actually is based on another photograph when it's already been cut. He cuts out of the photograph. You see that piece there? He cuts it out, you see on the right in order to insert it on the left. So the image of the building before it's been cut is actually an image of the building after it's been cut which he's then cut from one that it has been cut to put the piece of the cut of the one that's been cut into the photograph of the one that hasn't been cut to make it look like it hasn't been cut and you can see the same, right? So in other words, the real trickery here is the image that says I haven't cut anything yet. I'm innocent, right? I didn't do any cuts. The one where he moves the images around and makes a kind of photocallage not very complicated, not very interesting even compared to the history of collage is not nearly as interesting as this one. And then at the end, he shows this, at the end is this fold-out collage which is one of the great pieces of metaclark in which each of the rooms of the house that has been cut has been photographed but of course because the perspective is different from each image, it's actually shockingly difficult to produce. The stairway is never gonna get from the bottom to the top. You actually can see there's an awful lot of photographic prints in that stairway and he does many, many examples of that. It's a beautiful image of course because he's building the house back up again but the house doesn't have any of the structure, precisely the gap between the photographs is where the structure of the house was. It's like a kind of medical image of the inside of the organs without showing where the organs are hanging and this becomes not only the calling card for the splitting book but it is the image you use. Again, by the way, if you're really on a small budget and you need to use only one image, you have to use this one. Because it's great, right? But complicated because it's an image of a house and notice that the only thing that's not played around with is the roof. In other words, he keeps that kind of operation but it doesn't end there. He cuts into a book to make the cut. He doesn't cut book which has that same view in it. He cuts a cake in a performance downtown in the shape of a house. He films himself making the cut in splitting which is a film that operates with exactly the same structure. By the way, he eventually takes all of the pages of the book and they become artworks that are not affordable. And in this set of pages, which you see are all numbered as the pages, there are actually images that were not in the book but are sold as images from the book. There are images of things that he wanted to be in the book that were not in the book like this one which he wanted to have. Didn't appear in the book but that appears in the book and then so on and so on. And then it just doesn't stop. There might be 200, 300 works came out of splitting. Splitting is not a house that was cut. It's a kind of cloud of production on its part. At a certain point, it includes huge cyber-prome images of the cut taking place, combinations, black and white, strips, bigger cyber-chromes, more, more. He's in the photograph so they're not photographed. Again, he's not taking the photograph, he's in the photograph, right? Then you see the negative of the photograph and at this point our heroic art photographer reporters say, ha, negative, you see the negative, he's showing us the medium, come on. It was there all the time, of course, and he's there all the time performing, cutting, right? Endless photographs, endlessly staged, and then multiplying and then the first of those images will be published again by Jimana Chalan and now the word and architecture is gone. And what I would like to suggest to you in all of this production, all this kind of effervescence of images, each person thinking they're one image is magical and that this is one magical work, not understanding the extent to which this is conceptually rigorous and so on, all along Matta Clarke curated a set of about 30 photographs which he always called documentary photographs and he would send in packages to friends in order to explain his work and he always preserved the idea that these were not art and this is the sequence, right? You see the split, you go up, you see the building, you go higher up the stairs. I mean, there are all, I think, amazing photographs in their own way but he's absolutely insisting that they're documentary photographs. He writes notes on the back of them as to what's going on. We're now on the second floor, we look left, we look right, we're now in the corners, we look up, we look up to the attic, we go up into the attic, now we're up towards the roof, then we're on the roof and this set, which you never see normally together, I think it's kind of in our unconscious. In other words, we think there is a factual house, a physical house that was cut and these are the records of that and then there is, which might even be architecture and then there is art, right? But the secret is the consistency of this. In a certain way, he's wanting to say that the cut is so simple, it's so nothing, it's not more complicated than cutting a fish and again, these are non-accidental photographs and you see in one of these lesser-known photographs, this sort of astonishing revelation of the building that's produced by a simple photograph of a one-inch cut that's angled back. This of course is, if I could use the word, the genius of the work. Just do that and photograph it down and you get this kind of vertiginous complexity and of course, multiple images are treated as the same image, right? Again, again, a kind of a blindness and if you don't think I'm right, that he's super obsessive, look at him, follow the line, every time making sure that the line goes down the middle of the frame again and again and again, standing on the cut, looking up, looking down, thinking whether or not this could be used, photographing the corner before it gets removed, very cannily aware of the relationship between the window and what it's gonna remove and even this outside photograph, did it ever occur to you that the tree sort of weirdly symmetrical, right? He's really worked on those trees to produce this image? Again, back to 112 Green Street, this is where the exhibition should have taken place. These are the candidates from the bottom, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lisa Anderson, Bernie Cushion Brown, Susie Harris, Richard Narno's, Gene Heistine, sorry, Gene Heistine, Tina Gerard and Dickie Landry, right? This is the Anarchitecture Group. These are photographs that theoretically might have been in the exhibition, in other words, they exist in a form that means they might have been selected for the Anarchitecture Exhibition. By the way, if you wanna know what the Anarchitecture Exhibition was, you got it now, right? If you know what these photographs are about, this is it. I'm not saying you should, like in other words, if you don't know what it's about, then that's part of the show. But these are candidates that might have been shown, although none of the people who produced these photographs, they all produced it, it was a collaborative work, none of them all agree upon how many photographs, where they were, how they were, some would say it's all on one wall, some would say it's all around, on and on, right? You don't see architecture very often, when you see it, it's usually been sort of stressed in some way, falling down. This looks like the most obviously kind of Gordon Matta-Clark image in there, but actually these are images of holes produced by Suzy Harris in order to receive the beams, the pipes, for Gene Highstein's amazing exhibition, you see the hole in the right, and by the way, the four of them each put something secret in those holes before sealing them up. Here's the set of photographs that were in the flash art, none of them correspond to the photographs that I just showed you. All of them have been reworked and they're all of different proportions. Ones that had writing on them don't have writing anymore, ones of them that didn't have writing do have writing. It's clearly the work of Matta-Clark, we have all the fingerprints, all the DNA, all the forensic, it's him. But there's no evidence, no obvious evidence that this has a relationship to what was on show. Again, just to show you, words are there taken away, words were not there, then they're added. This is a sort of deal. Get used to it. One of the photograph shows a letter from him explaining to his friends what the unarchitecture show could be. It looks rambly, he describes in the letter being drunk and tired, right? He describes also using Gianni's pet in his book to kill a fly that's been tormenting him in the room for an hour, right? So he describes a kind of craze scene and he gives a list of possible intrusions. Some of what he says seem to correspond to the photographs. So if you wanna get forensic, there seems to be a relationship, direct relationship between what he's saying. There are a whole other set of photographs which look like they were also candidates. So the list of possible candidates gets wider and wider. We got even the last frame of the negative on which the unarchitecture thing was. And we know from, I know from the image that it's his loft, right? From the furniture. It's often described as the food restaurant. It's not. I mean, this becomes a really annoying lecture. I realize that it's kind of like they said this, but it's not. It doesn't worry me to annoy you in that way. I wanna try to defend it. It's like, if you look, what I'm saying is the same thing. If you look, something else emerges and my question is why they don't look and whether this is a problem with the people who are looking or it's set up by Metaclark, right? Even this thing that looks so random and so drunk, right here it is, like he's describing, look, it's a drizzle, drizzle, drool, drool, drool. Like he said, what do I know? In fact, if you know Metaclark, he never writes without crossing out, here's the draft for the letter. So he worked and worked and worked and worked on this. Then he wrote it out on an Aragram to look like a random thing. This is a work of art. If you're interested in art, this is a work of art. Very precise instructions, including the instructions for making that piece that you saw, he's the one that sends a note to Liza Bear saying, why don't you publish thing? He sometimes writes notes, cards about an architecture. You could say, oh yeah, I can figure out what an architecture is by reading cards in which the word an architecture appears, right? An architecture attempts to, like it seems to be an explanation. And it's true that if you put together the 10 cards that refer to an architecture, you get something very, very interesting. The most important thing is this one, an architecture working in several dimensions, making the discussions, the show and the work, that's them, right? Keeping it ongoing, open process, not finishing, just keep going and starting over and over. Actually, it seems like an invitation not to make a show, right? But to be always making a show that doesn't happen. Nobody in the architecture group remembers him making these cards, by the way. So if you take them seriously, you may be you're an idiot. The cards are usually used to explain his work, like it's just easy, you float an image of one of these cards in your book and everything about Matta Clarke becomes clear. But here's a photograph, one of the photographs from a very blurry negative of a domino's scene because Tina Gerard had the idea of a domino's photograph. And if you look closely in the right hand corner, you can actually see one of those cards. You can see a pile of cards and actually the card you can see is precisely this one. So in other words, in the middle of making the photographs, in the middle of making the photographs for the show, he's writing a card that explains what making the show is about. Again, warning, warning, like artist at work, right? Nobody's safe. These are the only photographs of an architecture meeting. You see them in the loft of Richard Nones, the photographs are kindly lent by Richard Nones that you see slightly asleep in the background, not really asleep, waiting for Gordon to finish rolling a joint. Nobody's very excited, watching very intently, sizing it up, you know, how much to share, still working on it, still working on it, no action. Okay, he finished. Now it's humming. The camera moves around, you see everybody. Gene Heistine, Susie Harris. By the way, Susie Harris, astonishing artist. I mean, just, you don't need like tips. Like Yelp review, but I give a Yelp review, Susie Harris, keep an eye. Susie, Gordon, drinking the milk that he needs to drink to deal with the tequila that he needs to drink to deal with his stomach, stomach problems so great that his mother told him very young, you will die early. Relevant or not, right? Super relevant, does die early, does die from the stomach, right? Just to give you a sense. Laurie Anderson arrives, but notice that it's now light. So this was a meeting that went all, and they were called meetings, like almost you can imagine them going with a briefcase. She arrives, it's now morning, and she looks cannelly. They're still operating. Gene Heistine, Susie Harris. You could even get forensic, figure out what they're talking about. But look at this image, by far my most favorite. There's Gordon at the end of the table with a typewriter, like somehow after that long, drunken, smoky evening, he's coming up with theory, and the theory is in his typewriter, like glowing, like a kind of renaissance image, you know? And he's giving us that look, right? It's the same damn look. Laurie Anderson's taking the photograph, and by the way, of course, if Laurie Anderson takes your photograph, you know, it's a good moment. But it's also one astonishingly intelligent artist looking at another, and you've got that there, right? And Laurie Anderson, the only one of them that never exhibits to my knowledge in 112 Green Street, so somebody that has a very particular sort of sideways angle on the operation of the group. And I think, by far, the most interesting account of Metaclark. Again, Metaclark is drawing, using the word in architecture, using it, making these comments like nothing, nothing, make the cut between the supports and the claps, that will appear in the theory that he uses. This is the first time the word in architecture appears between the group, and it's all about trees. Tina Gerard says she's looking for an architecture tree, now she's found it, she sends him this and says we need to work on it. I think that in the end, Metaclark's work is all about trees. The trees are the beginning and end of it. When he was hanging up in that tree in Vassar's, this is no accident. He's the one, you know, basically the idea is we live in dead trees, wooden houses, and birds live in living houses, but you could take dead trees and turn them into living trees, right? And that's what this text is at, down below. The text is written by Metaclark. And like anything else, he's practicing it on a roll of film, paper, right? People live in dead trees, birds live in live trees. Alan Serrat, again, astonishingly interesting person, writes to him from India and says, like, how are you getting on with your architecture thing? And he says, by the way, like those animals that live in trees, in order to eat things beyond the tree, you need to stay close to architecture in order to reach an architecture which is close to such a beautiful and tree-based kind of a theory which is explaining this, but also his drawing of that same tree. See how he draws a tree as architecture? It's not like he's just putting architecture in a tree. It's the architecture of the tree itself that interests him. And when you look at his drawings of trees like this, you look more closely to them, they're full of architecture. So trees are made of architecture and architecture is made of trees. He's up there. He does anything to do anything with trees, right? Here he is hanging above a tree in the pier. Very precise. His very first project in Green Street, digging and putting a cherry tree. Then he starts to imagine you could make architecture which is sort of half tree, half architecture, so-called garbage architecture. And it's exactly in that moment, 1971, that he writes a theory of his work. We don't have time to go into it, but this is almost exactly the same theory that he gives to Jimana Chalan, 73. In other words, he hasn't made any cuts yet. And he theorizes exactly the cuts and exactly the concept of passing through. This is the text of Chalan. Rest assured, it's the same theory and the same concept of passing through. So just to remind you, splitting itself is all about trees. They meet it in trees, they go up, they go up to the roof. So there's Laurie Anderson and Matta Clarke on the roof looking down, looking down at us. Then we join him. Gordon rushes to the edge of the roof to be the sort of hero of the show. Laurie Anderson, a bit more intelligent, looking down, looking through the cut at the trees, looking across to see another artist, upper tree, opposite. This is all in the film, which was anyway there in those pictures, if you look at it. It's all about the trees. And this image, which he worked on those trees so long to get the symmetrical view, the architecture of the trees. And again, remember the trees, something weird happened to them in this so-called documentary, they disappear. But they are there, they're constantly there, you can see it in color more obviously. There's the tree before the cut. And just to finish, so it's been an obsessive and annoying lecture, so I hopefully have accomplished my mission of making you not want to read this book and therefore buy it, in which case I'll sign it, like you idiot. But notice that he can't even say the word in architecture without stumbling. I'm not saying he's like a sort of a Zen God with all this mystery, and everybody who's tried to understand his work hasn't got it, and he's also mysterious. No, no, I think my point is almost the opposite, that an architecture was totally mysterious to him. He had no idea what it meant, but he was captivated, he was hooked, he was addicted to this word. This word just seemed to capture whatever it is, not what he was doing, but what he would like to do. So of course all of us don't know what it is. And of course if you expected me to explain to you what an architecture is, you would be non-smart. But just notice the sort of stumble, it happens again and again and again. Anyway, this is the one not to buy, it was fun to be with you. You may never think about Metaclark again. I can't stop thinking about it, and I just found myself committed to another exhibition about him. I think he's an architect. And all he does is take the weirdness that every architect has, the weirdness which is the basis of their love of architecture, the idea that Billings can talk, that they're fragile, that they're like the most fragile thing of all, he just outs that, that's all he's doing. And because he outs it, he's received as a transgressive artist. But deep down I think he's super transgressive, simply in the outing. And most, most, most of architecture is about repression, hiding, failing, concealing, editing. We're good at it, we're really, really good at it. And the only time the architect is called in, those moments I was talking about before, when people don't know what the question is, the gift of the architect is to be able to offer a way of hiding the complexity, like the family. Like imagine that you would have a house that would articulate the complexity, the intricacies, the violence of a family. Nobody would want that. The whole point is how to produce something that as it were, contains all of the nightmares and the pleasures, right? So architecture is like the repressive art. And what he does is just let it go, let it lose. And I think that's a gift, and I happily take it. Thanks. My head is spinning, thank you, Mark. There was an amazing talk and I want to make sure to give some time for questions. But I was thinking, well, I was listening to you and the lecture itself is, of course, like the work. And I was thinking about how one gives a lecture that is actually spatial, and it was really incredible to kind of hear you take us through the work almost as if we were in a kind of space and building an argument as an architect and giving a lecture as an architect, I think was kind of really inspiring. I also was thinking about then and now. I mean, we still float in images and we're still, I mean, more than ever. And yet the level of precision and control that Matta Klag had in mastering those images and kind of this drawing of lines in space, literally, and feeling a little envious of that level of precision somehow, which I think is, or immediacy, which I think is so difficult today. And wondering how we can recapture some of that immediacy and that kind of control at a time when the way we practice is so distributed and kind of, and so I was also thinking then about your own process of writing the book through people and people's stories and that process of discovery and interview and wanted to hear a little bit about that own process of kind of engaging with all these histories and the notion of kind of uncovering this archive through this process. Yeah, okay, so I mean, there's three or four things there. Yeah. I mean, the first question, the first part of your question seems to me super important and like what's going on today relative to this. And I think it would be a real downer if the story is sort of like, oh, there was back then this astonishing figure and it's true that the 70s, there's that sort of risk of a kind of, I mean, I know the 70s. I almost grew up during the 70s. I mean, I should have grown up during the 70s. And I remember thinking that our music will never be remembered. Like I just had this strong sense that just I, I was in a bad decade. You know, like 70s were destined for doom and everything else, even what my older brother would listen to, which was, you know, more Hendrix stones, et cetera, was more real than, and now of course the 70s is sort of cultivated and 70s art to some extent too. So I think it would be a real downer as if this is what this is about, like this amazing heroic kind of artwork and today we're all losers and trapped by the market. But, and it is important to note that, you know, Maddox Clarke was not naive about the market. He wanted to sell. He was very aware. He was very aware of the paradoxes if he would become famous and all of that. But in truth, he hardly sold anything and was in permanent war with all of the galleries and all of those. And all of those, all of those downtown gang, they thought of themselves as the people who would never win in the kind of struggle for art, which was being won by what they thought of was as a more uptown gang, which was people like Richard Sarah and others. And literally the uptown gang was literally about like 10 blocks uptown at Maxis, Kansas City. So there was this, the downtown gang thought that they were, they thought they were a romantically sort of dispossessed group that felt a lot of affinity for the dispossessed in the city. So there's a lot of kind of politics of the disenfranchised through color, race, economics. You know, that was their kind of vibration. And of that group, so maybe Laurie Anderson on one side and Maddox Clarke really just became sort of huge and to some extent, they became huge because of the sense of being disconnected, right? So they were more radical in their work because they didn't see really the possibility of success. And I think that's very, very hard, it's very, very hard for young architects, for example, to kind of take that posture. It's just very hard to even know what it means to be dispossessed. I think one of, you know, I think, you know, architects are massively entitled relative to most of society, but massively disentitled to almost every other profession. But we haven't really found ways of cultivating such a sense of dispossession that radical practices occur. But I think in the world of practice, you have to say that all of the work currently on decolonization, whether it be architectural practice or theory or pedagogy, has all of the smell, the good smell of hardcore subversive work dealing with issues. So I think, you know, there's any number of astonishing practices, to use your word, practices today that really are engaging with that. But I think to some extent, there is a kind, it requires a kind of resolute sense of disenfranchisement on one side and a sense that an even more tragic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement is occurring. So that would be the first thing. The second thing is about sort of media world and on one hand I agree, but on the other hand, the sense that we live in more and more in the world of media and more and more in the world of images, of course it has this like unbelievably extended arc. So in a certain way, what it means to be alive maybe is to feel like you're surrounded by more images than the generation before you that felt that they were. So in a way, it's not like Metaclark was in a kind of naive, image-less moment, actually was a superly sophisticated image person and again I feel like a lot of our most kind of gifted or transgressive architects and artists work with that and I've forgotten what the last part of the question but that was the most interesting part which is why maybe I forgot it. But it has to, but I really, getting back to the first point, oh I know what I'm gonna say. And it's not cool, I have become a serial monographer and that's just super unfashionable and super unacceptable conceptually, especially men, right? You're just not supposed to do it. That it's about the author and about biography and I'm going, if that's a crime, I'm much more of a criminal now than I was before. It just seemed, I just can't get over it and I think the idea that, I think there are two ways to address this issue, one is to really do micro work, sort of dental work on individual figures. I think this is one path to sort of disentangling the operations and another way is to really work from the beginning with a kind of a network model and the Anarchitecture Project was a network project, like it was a collaborative project of anonymous work, et cetera, et cetera. But as is so often the case, anonymous collaboratives have as one of their products, super individual authors. So I'm trying to defend myself because it's probably wrong, like I think all my colleagues say it's wrong and they're generally right. The monography? But I can't stop, yeah, the monographic thing, it is so desperately uncool. Of course, like the 70s, I could just hope that if I wait long enough. But it's a different, I mean, but it's a different, it feels like a different monography. I mean, one that is moving in and out of the work, the person, I mean, it's a kind of architectural collage in itself. Yeah, but you've been kind. It's like the lecture itself, right? Obviously, I can't stop talking. Yes, it's okay. Everybody enjoys it here. No, no, but that's their problem, not mine. And likewise, the book just can't stop. So in other words, I mean, I'm really talking about my own pathology. I love all of that stuff and all the questions and all the dates and all the interactions. I can't rationalize it, like I can't say, and that I think is what we should be doing kids because, no, it's really like something for a therapist. And what happens, of course, is that your own pathologies somehow start to resonate through projections of different kinds with the pathologies of the people that you're writing about. So there is some kind of, and I have always taken the view that the writing of theory is no different than the designing of a building and no less weird and just as pathological. And one of the things I love about Columbia is just such a density of fellow pathological creatures who can't stop writing. My answer to your question is the perfect example of what I'm just saying. Yes. But the lecture is also, yes, let's open it up. Yeah. The lesson for me from what you're saying is exactly racializing Madagascar. In other words, you racialize him, which I didn't mention in the lecture, but I thought I hinted at it. When he cuts the house in Englewood, he specifically removes evidence of that family that was living there. In other words, in the early photographs where it looks like it's the house as found, it's not the house as found, he removes everything from the house except for a cross. So he leaves only a kind of a sign. So that's what I meant when I said the house that he makes is a house that he invented, but I didn't go on to the specifics. In terms of the, the sort of sense of the colonial operation of his work, I really agree. And I think it's super strong. It's a super strong element. And the Tarzan is just unforgettably accurate. Having said that, he very specifically addresses racially each of the communities with which he's interacting. I think you're right that the interaction can be critiqued and should be as a kind of a form of exploitation in its own right, which ends up in the gallery. And obviously the people going to the gallery are not the same as the communities that he's engaging with. But just to give an example, his last three or four projects, which are not really realized, are very, very elaborate attempts to produce kind of community-based spaces for interactivity and creativity. In other words, it's not simply a kind of smash and grab. There was also this other gesture. Now we could criticize it and say, who are you to be setting up the host for community activity? But it would be wrong, I think, to say that he's quiet on the question of race. He's not. It would also be right, I think, to sense and think through the colonial nature of his work. And this again gets back to my monographs about white men. So I take the criticism to heart and also appreciate it because it's urgent. Yeah, but I feel like you should say something else and we keep going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's interesting. Yeah, he's the son of a Chilean artist, a horrible person. These two facts, Chilean and horrible father, have an enormous importance in the work, as you know, I think. And I think we'd add something to the colonizing reception of his work in the way that you frame it, I think, but. No, I'm really just dwelling in your thoughts and appreciate them very much. I'm just itching to spend an hour talking to you about it because it seems like much more interesting than the lecture. Yeah. The reason why we see Mata, we see Mata, Jorge Mata, or Jorge Mata, or? Roberto. Yes, Mata as horrible is because he was, he stole another man's wife and we kind of cast, we project a negative view also on that. So I think that there are many circles. So regardless of how we judge other people's in history, I think the idea of going deep monographically into somebody and looking at the picture and seeing the lack of correspondence that has been misunderstood before, it's so necessary. One of the things that I feel that our culture has right now, it's a kind of surface, multi, like so much information and so shallow. And so I think that this idea of going deep into somebody's mind, regardless of who that person is and who, whether it's a group or a person, it's very necessary. And the only way to discover new things. Yeah, it would be foolish for me to disagree. But of course the title of the book tries to capture this idea that Mata Clark has to be cut into. In other words, it's not, of course at one level it's really trying to identify where his craft was. His craft is not located, I think, where it's normally positioned, right? But it is also trying to kind of cut into it, that is to discover what's going on. For me, the horror of the father is, and my view is kind of simplistic, but brutal. His father is an architect who becomes a famous artist, encourages his son to also become an architect and rejects all of the artwork of his son explicitly and repeatedly until the moment he dies. So, and you could say, not unusual, a father jealous of the son, cruel to the son, convinced that the twin is the genius. So such that when the twin dies, it's a wound of such depth that Mata Clark says that he wished for a terminal illness and the day before he died he told a friend, you know, I wished for this when Batan died and now I have it, I don't want it. The father's cruelty is really particular, but you could say, would there be the Mata Clark that we're talking about without this cruelty? Of course, the answer would be no. It would be like saying, like I was saying before, without the sense of dispossession, there wouldn't be this drive. I think getting back to the kind of a wider perspective of the colonizing aspect, that's also why I try to hint, dispossessed relative to a highly entitled group, but somehow aware of a wider dispossession, right? I think the father is, you know, without the father there is no Mata Clark and the name Mata Clark is his statement, his choice to use his mother's name is his counter move to the father. This was his return aggression. Of course, the inverse would also be worth exploring, the extent to which Roberta Mata used the jealousy he had about his son to energize his own work, but I could tell stories that are, I mean, it's hard not to cry when you hear what the father did. Relative to that, the wives and all of that, I mean, certainly Mata Clark is not the person to have that conversation with. There would be too many wives to discuss simultaneously. Anyway, any question from the left? Like this could be the middle, the right, the left. You know, the faculty are always on the right. They think they're on the left. I know where he's at. Well, because they're sitting there looking this way. Yeah, yeah, I know. Anything from the left? Because we can go, right? It's enough. Signing? I went to a concert once in New Zealand, which was really Keith Jarrett extemporizing for hours and hours and hours, and we all pleaded for one more, and he just simply said to the microphone, there is such a thing as overeating. And it just stopped. So in that spirit, let's stop. Okay, thank you. Thank you.