Nothing But Good: Katleen Vinck / Gordon Matta-Clark

Saturday, 30 January 2021

Katleen Vinck / Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark
Office Baroque
1977
101 x 50 cm
cibachrome

Gordon Matta-Clark
detail from a poster for Office Baroque
1977

Gordon Matta-Clark
View of Office Baroque, Antwerp
1977

I am Katleen Vinck and live in Antwerp, Belgium. In my work I combine architecture and sculpture.

I must have been 16 and I saw one of the first contemporary art exhibitions in my life. It was my first year at art school and we visited an exhibition in Muhka, the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp.

One wall was reserved for 'Office Baroque', a work of Gordon Matta-Clark. I never have real heroes, but his work, and especially 'Office Baroque', has remained in my head over the years.

These photo montage and drawings of 'Office Baroque', played an important role in the museum because it formed the basis for the creation of the museum. It was an initiative of Flor Bex who invited Gordon Matta-Clark. Later Flor became director of Muhka. The fact that this work was realized in 1977 and had such an impact on the art scene in the city where I studied and discovered contemporary art, was mythical to me at that time. When I discovered this work, the building / sculpture was already demolished and only drawings and photos remained.

At that time, I already had a great interest in both architecture and sculptural work. The way Gordon Matta-Clark combined both in a very natural way was new to me. Both disciplines worked together and blended completely in a way I never saw before.

Gordon Matta-Clark was given a building close to the current museum to realize 'Office Baroque'. It was there, for the first time, that he could work in such a large spatial structure. For me, by making different cuts in the floors, he exposed the real structure, the skeleton and history of the building and environment. The building has a kind of boat-like ground plan; in various places he created views and transparency through the cuts and made the structure an accessible sculpture. It’s a search for the origin of a place.

This is something that keeps recurring in my work; the analysis and origin of a form, structure and the sculptural intervention on this, although I do this in a completely different way. The natural combination of architecture and sculpture is also embedded in my work.

What also fascinates me in this is the idea of time and the cycle a building, an environment and by extension life, undergoes. The building that stood there for years, had a whole history in it and was transformed into a sculpture in that year. An intervention that also took time and was a performance or action that added an extra layer to this history. It underwent a transformation and could continue in this form for a while. After the demolition only the documents remained. But yet another new building has been erected in the same place which contains the whole history … the cycle never stops.

The starting point of an existing architecture, and the cycle that it undergoes through time, nature or human intervention, also forms the basis of my work, although I will reconstruct and transform it and I will not work with the original form. For me, the intermediate form that then arises is indebted to Gordon Matta-Clark.

Katleen Vinck, 2021