GORDON MATTA-CLARK

Conical Intersect.

"Completion through removal.

Abstractions of surfaces.

Not-building, not-to-rebuild, not-built-space.

Creating spatial complexity, reading new openings against old surfaces.

Light admitted into space or beyond surfaces that are cut.

Breaking and entering.

Approaching structural collapse, separating the parts at the point of collapse"

- Gordon Matta-Clark, 1971

Best known for his large-scale “building cuts,” which radically altered architectural sites, Matta-Clark investigated space using a number of strategies and media.

He chopped up abandoned buildings, making huge, baroque cuts in them with chain saws, slicing and dicing like a chef peeling an orange or devising radish flowers. (The food analogy wasn’t lost on him.)

Splitting

"To a plain single-family suburban frame house in Englewood, N.J , Matta-Clark made a cut straight down the middle, bisecting the building, then severing the four corners of the roof like so many trophy heads. It was spectacular but not quite like the times he sawed tear-shaped holes into floors of an office building in Antwerp, or conical openings into a pair of antique houses in Paris slated for demolition next to where the Pompidou Center was being built. What resulted were vertiginous, Piranesean spaces, uncannily beautiful and kinetic, preserved on film and in drawings and in collaged photographs that, as you can see in the show, are like Rubik’s cubes or Eschers."

via The New York Times

The conical shape of the cuts has a strong resonance with the geometry of optics,

perspective and image-making technology. Matta-Clark himself described the shape as a

“spyglass,” through which to see things in new, secret ways.

PERRY KULPER

Bleached Out:Relational Drawing

These drawings, nuanced dislocations, incomplete thoughts and approximate moments operate as resistance to the fixation of known figuration, or as typological reinforcement- they offer a thickened space of possibilities of growth through multiple, or manifold of relations.

- Kulper

Central Califoria History Museum, Thematic drawing

Thematic Drawing, detail

For those who are interested, he writes about his work here.
Perry Kulper is also a teacher, and has taught courses similar to this one. Below are a range of works by students in one of these courses.

Project: Generative Removal

These projects focus on erasure as a means of generating an architectural proposition. Instead of contributing to architecture through additive means, the erasure work attempts to produce architecture through subtractive methods. Perry introduces an idea of “5 points of erasure as deconstructing towards a new architecture” which he likens to Le Corbusier’s “5 points of architecture.”

The work started by creating a diptych which, on one side, had the floor plan of a famous villa or house. The other side of the diptych was to be populated with a series of “marks” whose character and placement was determined by a series of rules. Once the diptych was populated with marks, the work of erasure could begin. Again, a very specific set of rules was used to govern the removal and/or remembering of the marks. The two sides of the diptych were governed by the same rules and meant to be worked as a single drawing.

Catharine Pyenson

Shaoxuan Dong

Harry (Me)

Project: Real Slow

This work tackles what Kulper refers to as Relational Thinking. Students were asked to select an image and then redraw the image by revealing the relationships and hidden connections behind the original image. SImilarly to our first task, the focus is not on recreating the same image, but utilizing drawing methods to reveal what lies under the surface of the image.

Xiang Liu

Catharine Pyenson

Harry

Jeeeun Ham

BRUNELLESCHI & A SENSE OF SPACE

Perspective drawing for Church of Santo Spirito in Florence,

Brunescelli, c.1428, early renaissance

The question of how to 'make space' in two dimensions is one which artists, and perhaps particularly architects, have grappled with for centuries. The method which we are probably most familiar with today is attributed to Brunelleschi, was an early renaissance architect, craftsman and goldsmith, who is said to have reinvented linear perspective.

reconstruction of Brunelleschi's first picture in perspective,
Samuel Y. Edgerton, (1975)

reflection of the perspective drawing of the Florentine Baptistery in the mirror experiment of Brunelleschi

‘Herod’s Feast’ by Masolino (1436);
‘The Annunciation’, by Fra Carnevale (1448);
‘The Flagellation of Christ’ by Piero della Francesca (1453).

Bruneschelli observed that when you have a fixed, single point of view, parallel lines seem to converge at together at an imaginary point in the distance. He then applied this idea of a single vanishing point to a canvas, and discovered a method for calculating -and drawing - depth. Bruneschelli's famous experiment used mirrors to aid him in sketching the Florence baptistry in perfect one-point perspective.

Prior to Bruneschelli's observations, artists either avoided depicting space, producing flattened images, or attempted to produce space using other means, often resulting in skewed space. While Bruneschelli's perspective might be the most 'correct' in the sense that the images produced reflect what the human eye sees, other methods of depicting space, including ones which might not yet be discovered, are also valuable

In making his first depiction of Florence’s baptistery, Brunelleschi himself recognised the limitations of his invention. To address those limitations, he added a sky of silver leaf, so that the clouds, the light, and their shifting environmental effects – all of which were outside the domain of perspectival drawing – could be represented alongside the spatial and formal qualities of the architecture.

These drawings address begin to not only the solidity of physical form but also the flow of architectural possibilities and spatial contingencies.

CY TWOMBLY & MARK MAKING

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970

The title blackboard paintings comes from the grey, painted background, with its lighter areas resembling erasure. The large linear marks (made with wax crayon) evoke the idea of "something almost being said". But these are not chalk marks on a blackboard, so the writing cannot be wiped away. The drawing is stuck in a tension between permanance and impermanence.

Some of the works in the series use just one form of mark, amplifying it; others play off several kinds of line with each other. The paintings operate in a language that only some of us speak: some elements are recognisable and categorisable; but even without writing a recognisable language, they act to evoke mysteries and emotion. Each work, says Roberta Smith (1987, p18) "is a kind of demonstration or rumination upon some isolated fact of gesture, movement or measurement. These paintings are...motion studies that diagram the action of air, water or the arm itself."

Untitled, 1968

The repeated looped elements resemble handwriting exercises, yet making the paintings is an unpredetermined process aiming for any particular outcome, and the viewer's experience is not about any particular mark or line, but about the repetition of the process and the accumulation of lines. Within the gesture of the loop, the effect of layering seems almost random, yet it is this process that generates the complexity of the painting, balancing order and disorder, randomness and control. The accumulation of lines flattens the field of the canvas, not offering a focal point. Even so, the drawing-as-handwriting makes the large canvas into an intimate and personal space. The intimate scribble has been skillfully scaled up. This physical release of energy from the hand speaks about nothing, but communicates a tremendous amount.

Here, the line is a visible action, liberated from the dictates of material; Barthes (1985) wrote that "however supple, light or uncertain it may be, [it] always refers to a force, to a direction; it is an energon, a labor which reveals - which makes legible - the trace of its pulsion and its expenditure."