Construction & Destruction

The work of Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark stan in interesting complementary contrast to one another. Both artists planned their works, making extensive sketches, plans and diagrams of their various projects. But while Smithson was interested in creating shapes and forms, often using natural materials that would fall apart and decay over time, Matta-Clark was more concerned with taking those same materials, now altered by human intervention and fashioned into objects, and making a meta-comment on those objects’ existence before they returned to their previous state upon destruction.

Smithson made temporal works, while Matta-Clark tried to intervene temporally into the failed human production cycle.