Cutting Matta-Clark by Mark WigleyCutting Matta-Clark by Mark Wigley

During this book launch Mark Wigley will present his latest book Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation.

Mark Wigley will give a lecture entitled Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation on the occasion of the publication of his new book with the same title. This major book, based on a wealth of previously unpublished images and documents, completely rethinks the transgressive building cuts by Gordon Matta-Clark, the legendary cult figure in both the art and architecture worlds.

• 14:30 presentation by Mark Wigley and Q&A
• 15:30 book signing and time for a drink

_Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation_ is a detective story. It relentlessly pursues the legendary but invisible Anarchitecture Group show and Gordon Matta-Clark's celebrated, hyper-visible, yet equally misunderstood building cuts. Of all the shows at the fabled 112 Greene Street Space--an epicenter of New York's downtown art scene in the 1970s--the Anarchitecture Group show of March 1974 is a constant reference point in discussion, despite the almost complete lack of evidence about it. It has become a foundational myth. Gordon Matta-Clark was supposedly the ringleader of an extended series of meetings with fellow artists that operated as a kind of collective research seminar challenging all conventional understandings of architecture. The meetings of this so-called Anarchitecture Group culminated in the exhibition as an anonymous statement in unlabeled photographs. But did it actually happen? It exists only through oblique archival traces and the conflicting memories of the participants. An unprecedented dossier of unpublished archival evidence is assembled here and subjected to ever deeper forensic analysis--cutting into both the concepts and the cuts to see what the elusive, mysterious, seductive, yet viral world Anarchitecture offers us today.

Mark Wigley is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. The historian and theorist explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His previous books include: Derrida's Haunt: The Architecture of Deconstruction; White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture; Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire; and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He is the co-author of _Are We Human: Notes on an Archeology of Design _with Beatriz Colomina in association with their curation of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. He has also curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and The Drawing Center in New York; the Witte de With in Rotterdam, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. His most recent exhibition, _The Human Insect: Antenna Architectures 1887-2017_, is on view at Het Nieuwe Instituut until September.