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Gordon Matta-Clark’s Urban Slivers and “Word Works”

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Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes one of Matta-Clark ’s most conceptual projects, left unfinished at the time of his death, Reality Properties . Fake Estates (1974), which has survived as a mixed-media work consisting of maps, photographs and administrative documents that illustrate the ownership by the artist of fifteen tiny plots of land in New York. I discuss it in relation to the artist’s writings or “art cards.” I argue that while most of Matta-Clark ’s work is grounded in the derelict Lower Manhattan of the 1970s, some of its aspects are best understood in international and transatlantic artistic contexts. I suggest that Surrealism might provide interesting points of convergence and comparison with Matta-Clark’s playful interest in interstitial and useless urban spaces. I examine in particular the way he revisits the grid and questions its supposed infallibility as a form of spatial organization in urban planning and representation in the pictorial tradition of modernism.

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  1. University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

    Monica Manolescu

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  1. Monica Manolescu
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Correspondence to Monica Manolescu .

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Manolescu, M. (2018). Gordon Matta-Clark’s Urban Slivers and “Word Works”. In: Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98663-0_6

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