Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between

Berlin Wall Graffiti now exists, as with many of Matta-Clark's larger scale works, only as a documentary photograph. However, our experience of it is enriched by a letter Matta-Clark wrote from Berlin, a classic surrealist document rich in irony, that describes the Wall in purely aesthetic terms, separate from any political or social context. "There is no work that matches its shameless grace," he wrote, "which now runs in smooth serpentine curves through the city.... the Berliners' dull or oblivious sense of its presence is heightened, rekindled into a captive round of applause especially for the children who play along it and the patient vigilant army who caress it with their aimed binoculars from within and without.... Elegance. I wondered who it is for, who the architect of this labor of blinded love. Such a creative monument cannot be without its personalities without its inspired originators but in a magnanimous act of community spirit the pleasure of its inventors remains annonimous." He was particularly taken with the new, smooth Ferro blocks which replaced the "folksy, rustic finish" of the Walls, hastily erected earlier version, seeing it as the "moral and physical renewal of preworld war Bauhaus vision. The German design machine has conquered America and the world only to return to Berlin through the wall."


Attlee, J. and L. Le Feuvre (2003). Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between, Architectural Association.