







































   

 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.8, Issue 1; January-Febuary - 2023; 

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Impact Factor: 6.91 

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DIALECTICAL SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY ART: 

INSIGHTS FROM ALFREDO JAAR AND GORDON MATTA-

CLARK 
 

Dr. Juan Simo and Dr. Maria Garcia 

University of Murcia, Spain, Campus de Espinardo, 30100 Murcia, Spain.   

University of Murcia, Spain, Campus de Espinardo, 30100 Murcia, Spain.  

  

Abstract: This text delves into the intricate relationship between space and time, particularly 

within the context of late capitalism's impact on the perceived space. Lefebvre's notion of the 

"perceived space" serves as the foundation for understanding how space is increasingly 

subjugated to the demands of capitalism, causing a crisis in its inherent premises. However, 

it is crucial to recognize that space is not static; rather, it exists as a vessel within which 

temporality defines its functional parameters. 

This exploration revolves around the concept of "contextual interventions" in artistic 

practices, which have the potential to reshape the social functions of space and provoke novel 

ways of contemplating the political and societal roles of these spaces. These interventions are 

not only catalysts but also critical tools for societal experimentation, challenging the 

conventions imposed by the society in which we live. 

Notably, the transformation and displacement of space and time are central elements in these 

artistic interventions. A significant portion of contextual art practices relies on a meticulous 

examination of the interplay between space and time, further elucidating the profound impact 

of these interventions on the fabric of society. 

 

Keywords: perceived space, late capitalism, contextual interventions, artistic practices, 

space-time study  

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Introduction  

“The perceived space” (Lefebvre, 1991) refers to a problematic space that is being 

subordinated to an imposed functionality by late capitalism and the placing in crisis of the 

premises in which they were enabled. However, the space itself is a container where the 

temporality defines and gives its functional framework. That is why the purpose of this text 

manages two inseparable frequencies to analyze the transformations and displacements of a 

place, an image and a specific context: the space and time.  

The thesis starting the text is based on the “contextual interventions” within the artistic 

practices that are able to transform the social uses of space and provide ways of thinking in 

order to change their political and social functions. Hence we can consider them as a catalyst 

and a critical means of experimentation around the society that produces us as individuals. 

But altering the temporality and spatiality as a cornerstone of the changes and transformations 

to which these intervention spaces have been exposed has configured these artistic 

interventions. And we can say that a great part of the contextual art practices methodology is 

based on the space-time study.  

For this purpose this text is meant to analyse, define and investigate the transformations and 

displacements of a context under production rhythms and spatio-temporal consumption that 

are grafted on it. In this way Alfredo Jaar reproduces the “heterochronic space” that enables 

a temporal multiplicity where the rhythms of production and consumption causes the latent 

temporalities to collide in order to articulate other features of space. And finally the “invasive 

space” in the case of Gordon Matta-Clark is meant to reactivate the forces of the context of 

intervention developing stratified spatialities to articulate a hybrid dialogue.  

This is managed by these recurrent alterations of temporality and spatiality that constitute 

modes of resistance to a conception of time and history. Since temporary architectures 

provide a discursive framework for analysing convulsions and transformations to which the 

discourses of space are subjected, thus addressing social, political and economic issues from 

a perspective where these ideals are not self proclaimed, nor are they decreed, but instead 

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they are inserted into the production process and configuration of space in the way that 

relations with the context are made and thought. It is these relationships that release their 

ideological characteristic, in short, those who develop a representational problem that delve 

into the confrontation of latent temporalities in space.  

In this sense we cannot ignore the interpretations of Edward Soja (1996) that open the way 

to a possibility of a socio-spatial dialectic to reconsider the notion of place versus space as 

closed expression. In short, what is meant is to interpret space and spatiality as an 

interdisciplinary matter. Whereas considering spaces as social, cultural constructs, political 

and essentially experimental and capable of being lived in. Thus, the three spaces proposed 

by Soja from the contributions of Henri Lefebvre (2008), attempt to deconstruct the binary 

logic of traditional spatial thinking.   

Soja proposes a first space that belongs to the physical, verifiable material world; a second 

space referring to the realm of ideas, imagination and mental and subjective performances, 

and a third space in which the author proposes a new way of thinking about space and social 

spatiality.  

The third space is derived from the definition of urban space in which the symbolic 

imagination or spatial contextualization is possible and is characterized by the narrative 

created by politics and culture, but that is also inseparable and interdependent of the other 

two spaces. As a critical strategy, this third space implies what Soja called the “critical 

thirdness as otherness” or “the third as other” whereas the third introduces an “other” critical, 

a choice that speaks and criticises through its otherness (Soja, 1996, p. 75). Soja also breaks 

the purely binary descriptive nature of spatial planning as a historical, ideological, economic, 

ecologicalprocess, in which space does not act or does not mean more than what it actually 

produces. In “the third space” Soja advocates a dynamic spatial construction where spatiality 

is taken into account as an element by itself. The third space alternative expands the scope of 

the previous two, particularly in its complexity of spatial geographical imagination, which is 

given by the factor of time experienced and lived, similar to a historiographical proposal of 

the urban spaces. In this sense Soja says:  

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Understanding the lived space can be compared to writing a biography, an interpretation of 

lived time of an individual, or more broadly to historiography, i.e. the attempt to describe and 

understand the lived time of the collectives or the human societies (...) The best we can do is 

to selectively investigate, the more subtly as possible, the infinite complexity of life through 

their intrinsic interrelated spatial, social and historical dimensions and its spatiality, 

sociability and historicity (Soja, 2008, p. 4041).   

2. The spatiality of the political subject: Alfredo Jaar  

Rosalyn Deutsche compares the artist Hans Haacke with the next generation of artists that 

includes Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine. Haacke's work, says Deutsche:   

(...) Invited viewers to decipher relationships and to find content already registered in the 

pictures, but he was not asking them to examine their own role and participation in the 

production of images.   

Instead, the next generation of artists saw the image itself as a social relationship and the 

viewer as a subject constructed by the subject hitherto claimed to be separate (Deutsche, 

2006).  

In this sense, the work of Alfredo Jaar is committed to construction of the subject through the 

object and space, especially the subject's relationship with the political and social space. Thus, 

it begins to dissect the image, casting up crucial questions in contemporary artistic creation. 

Some of these questions are formulated in a continuous process whose answers always are 

restructured. But if anything characterizes his work, it is critical reflection, or rather the 

constant doubt about the critique of images. The combination of excitement and media 

manipulation spread throughout his work from its inception, or put in another way, 

confrontation, merger and concatenation of artistic practice and political practice in its 

political-spatial dimension.  

In this sense, some works by Alfredo Jaar embrace the form of performances and 

interventions in public space, materializing in furtive signs, even negligible in the urban 

landscape, and revealing impossibilities, censorship, abolition of fundamental rights, etc., by 

the ruling dictatorship in Chile. The declarative and spatial strategies also reflect the idea of 

replacing a story to mean something else, so characteristic of dictatorial regimes. However 

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this process is done with a clear intention to “dialectize” the image, where his creations try to 

arouse emotions and generate thinking about the appropriation of public and political space.  

In Telecomunicación (1981), through a press clipping, he shows women in Belfast using the 

old ritual of hitting the road with trash can lids to vindicate the death of an activist. Alfredo 

Jaar in downtown Santiago aligned six can lids to take a picture. And that is all. The problem 

here lies in how to deploy spatially that which cannot be represented literally in a particular 

historical context. Although, maybe it is in Estudios sobre la felicidad (1979-1981) where 

one of his work strategies, repeated throughout his work, is fermented, creating devices in 

public spaces where people can play a role and whose outcome is unpredictable. The creation 

of spatial and temporal relational contexts allows a triggering of events that exceeds its 

significance. Alfredo Jaar proposed transforming the image linked to the spatial discourse, to 

the social production of space, as Lefebvre would say, and to the reinterpretation of the image 

from the coordinates of an artistic discourse based on the historical space that becomes social 

and political time, that is to say historical discourse.   

This sociability and historicity is found in the media. These questions often reveal a 

journalistic setting where you try to generate the voice and presence of a people who had lost 

their place, their social space. Didi-Huberman explains it as:  

A work resists, in this sense, if it knows how to “dislocate” the vision, that is to say involve 

it as “that which concerns us”, while rectifying at the same time the approach itself, i.e., 

explain and deploy, explicit, or criticize, by a concrete act (Didi-Huberman et al., 2008, p. 

41).   

These records lead him to an approach that allows him to articulate his thoughts on the 

manipulation of images. Therebyhe begins to draw press images or advertising modified by 

his framing from their spatial and temporal context and recontextualizes them through 

multiple strategies: insertion deviation, spatial relocation, where he makes that duality 

between the observed and the observer appear, creating distance and what concerns you 

directly.  

Thus, in You and Us (1984), he reverses the CBS phrase “If it concerns you, it concerns us” 

for “If it concerns us, it concerns you” revealing, as noted by Nancy Princenthal “the power 

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structures operating in the dissemination of information” (Didi-Huberman et al., 2008, p. 25). 

This work, carried out in the subway in New York, operating the original version posters 

coined by him, is one of his first interventions in public space.  

And so begins a line of investigation where the presence of the subject in space is the 

beginning of a process in which the document of a particular situation fluctuates in achieving 

images before returning to build and shape criticism of that of which the artist has witnessed. 

On a trip to the gold mines of Serra Pelada, he filmed and photographed the Garimpeiros 

(independent miners who come in search of fortune), and from these images come the movie 

Introduction to a Distant World (1985), a public intervention in the metro, Rushes (1986), the 

installations Gold in the Morning (1986), Frame of Mind (1987), Out of Balance (1989) and 

Unframe (1992).  

The various concerns in the development of these pieces focus on spatiotemporal 

contextualization of the image by choosing the frame and the assumption of a form-scene 

where theatricality stops or starts moving our eyes by moving the viewer.   

The strategy is then to articulate vision models that change the symbolic relationship and 

activate another way of meaning. Thus, the first work devoted to the slaughter in Rwanda 

was a spatial intervention in situ Signs of Life (1994). He acquired many tourist cards showing 

animals from natural parks and sent them to some friends with some brief information on 

each card including the name of a victim and his condition as a survivorof the genocide. This 

seemingly small gesture displays a poeticismwhere the fable and the litote develop an 

elliptical shape that by its explicit absence convenes a palpable presence.  

Another piece of this project is The Real Pictures (1995) a work in which the artist buries the 

images in boxes on which he writes the description of the image it contains. In this image 

inaccessibility manoeuvre he singles out each of the deaths and dignifies them in the face of 

the anonymous masses, putting into practice the motto:  

“An omission is stronger than an action”.  

Another work that emerged from this project is The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996), which 

consisted of a million slides representing a million people from minority Tutsis killed in a 

few weeks. The slides up close all showed the same image: the two eyes of a survivor with 

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whom the artist had met. Jaar uses metonymy to articulate a strategy, where he doesn’t show 

the thing but instead shows the effect it produces. This repetition of a look, the look that 

alludes to memory, but especially the emotion of a recreated event, restructured, made visible 

in its effects as George DidiHuberman points out: “The myth of Medusa first recalls that the 

real pain is a source of impotence (...) but the reflected horror, extended, reconstructed as 

image (...) can be a source of knowledge (...)” (Didi-Huberman et al., 2008, p. 28).  

This ellipse resource used by Jaar offers an absence that builds an intersubjective presence 

on the visitor. This is especially evident in Lament of the Images (2002), which brought the 

aforementionedworkstogether as a whole. However, we should note that in this series of 

papers Jaar does not delete the images but insteadhe redistributes them ideologically and 

emotionally, preferring to formulate a story and make the names visible. Here the investment 

procedures extracted from the media revert our relationship with the image and deploy a 

number of tools that allow us to establish a dialectic between the documentation of what is 

real and the management carried out by the media, thereby modulating our eyes in an 

appropriate direction to the dominant ideology.  

In his installation The Sound of Silence (2006) he registers our relationship as spectators and 

the consumption we make of them, producing new images. In this way, he explores blindness 

and understanding in one plane of interaction, trying to clarify a particular event through 

multiple viewpoints. In doing so, Jaar is rethinking not only the limits of the unrepresentable 

but also the very problem of liability in the face of the images of both photojournalism and 

the industry that controls the distribution and circulation of images.  

Using a text that tells the story of Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist who became 

famous for his photograph of a starving child crawling on the floor under the eye of a vulture, 

captured in a report in Sudan in 1993, Jaar implements an installation. By inserting flashes 

on a liquid text flowing through the wall, he modulates standard perceptual systems and 

connotes the industrial character of the images, but he also inverts a political program where 

words slide under things and things under words.  

In this sense, the construction of spaces and times articulated by devices that operate outside 

of the dominant ideology is subverting distribution channels and is bringing an idea to 

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“produce image” that opposes dynamics of hegemonic power. So it should be remembered 

here what Edward Soja tells us about the construction of postmodernism in his study of 

spatiality. The idea of image production and manufacturing by the media of hegemonic 

powers is addressed by the artwork of Jaar in the same sense as Soja discusses space and 

time: “The postmodern confusion of time and space, in which the temporal continuity 

collapses in extent and spatial dimension is lost for duplication, it transforms urban culture 

into a giant hologram able to produce any image in an apparent void” (Soja, 2008, p. 460).  

Therefore, the iconicity of image production in which both media producers and passive 

spectators act and become the artistic process of Jaar, in representing scenes in the same 

manner as in the game of spatial meanings in postmodernism in which “(...) the time and 

space become icons themselves and consequently become scenarios” (Soja, 2008, p. 460).  

The production image system and art installation that generates the work of Alfredo Jaar is 

designed from the interpretation of history generated by the media.  

This historicity of the media where Jaar finds the subject of his works builds “biographies”, 

as notedby Lefebvre, and is socially and historically connected with space, even beyond 

politics, and thus reconstructs the significance of thought and spatial reflection in the work 

of Jaar.  

Perhaps the work of Alfredo Jaar responds to the third space proposed by Soja, in the debate 

between space, politics and the reception of his works by the viewer. The wayin which he 

deconstructs the meaning of the images and media narratives and restores it to the viewer 

diversifying their meanings, confusing their identities and proposing an endless game of 

symbolic metaphors that expand without a final conclusion. As Soja points out, the third 

space “is not simply derived from an additive combination of their binary background but 

from a disorder, from a deconstruction and provisional reconstruction of their alleged 

totalization, producing an open alternative that is both similar and surprisingly different” 

(Soja, 1996, p. 61).  

Soja uses this strategyin his concept of the third space. Breaking the dialectic between binary 

to display a knowledge that goes beyond opposites, to build an imaginative otherness based 

on the thirdness, on the third visual and temporal space.  

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The third space is (...) build even more, to move forward, to continuously expand the 

production of knowledge beyond what is currently known, Lefebvre organizes the production 

of space around only to the third in his own long interest in the dialectic of the lived and 

conceived, the “real” and “imaginary” material world and our thoughts on it (Soja, 1996, p. 

70).  

The contrast of the images, the dialectic between the experience, the mediated and the 

simulated in the historical image of the media is the wayof processing images that Alfredo 

Jaar performs in his work.  

3. Gordon Matta-Clark: the invasive space   

  

Gordon Matta-Clark is known especially for his artistic interventions in buildings and in 

certain urban areas. His work was carried out between the sixties and seventies in relation to 

practices, strategies primarily site-specific, process art, minimalism and conceptual art. His 

range of proposals extends from cuts in buildings, architectural fragments, and experiments 

in the kitchen, performances, and appropriation of sunken ruins of urban objects. Matta-Clark 

and his work were at the forefront of the boldest discussions during these two decades: 

property, urban planning, architecture and the agenda in the role of institutions in the strategy 

of the art exhibitions of the seventies.  

What is interesting to note in the work of Matta-Clark is the violent gesture of cutting 

physiognomy in space and of the invasion in the space. This appearance of the invasive cut 

is one of the hallmarks of the work of Matta-Clark; and we would like to underline its history 

and the interdisciplinary approaches that can be made from the “spatial choreography” of the 

section line, separation, fragmentation and invasion following the cut made in space. His 

gesture causes and conditions the status of the artwork in its ontological security and 

traditional notion in Western aesthetics in the sense of something perceived as a whole, 

centrality, concluding, self-determined and rational.  

Matta-Clark was referring to his main activity with the term “deconstruct”, pointing out in 

two directions the reception of his work. First, split buildings without hermetic sealing exist 

today only as waste and fragments of the photographic record, documentary or movies. But 

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this feature is intrinsic to the design of their interventions and is something wanted and 

desired. Cuts made in buildings, in their most intimate parts, i.e. rooms, stairs, doors and in 

the same rational structure of the house: entrance, first floor, roof, bearing walls, spatial 

division into units, etc., make an appeal to the interpretative resistance as something 

established, defined and stable. These interventions are designed so that the in situ viewer 

could experience decentralization, vertigo and synesthetic passage through their boundaries, 

ultimately for the viewer to invade, occupy and penetrate the space.  

In 1974 Matta-Clark made a proposition to his dealers Horace and Holly Solomon: he wanted 

to cut a house. Horace Solomon had bought a house in a neighbourhood in decline, not for 

the house but for the buildinglot. This opportunity to have a home within reach helped him 

develop his Splitting project. What was a crude act of speculation by Solomon along with the 

drama that in only a few months it had to be demolished, became added ingredients for Matta-

Clark in the artistic intervention, and also meant that his work would not be finally permanent. 

The House on Humphrey Street in Englewood New Jersey had a prosaic narrative before and 

after the cutting that Matta-Clark incorporated into his documents. The house was a standard, 

single-family box type with front and rear porches and the floor was completely symmetrical 

and rigid. The centrality of the house and the sharpness of its gestalt are decisive in the cutting 

action. Matta-Clark emptied the whole house and all the debris and objects left by the 

previous occupants. He was now the new occupant and invader.  

  

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Figure 1. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974. Source: http://camilayelarte.blogspot.com.es.  

Creative commons.  

With this emptying of any human reference Matta-Clark refuses to work with any idea of 

anthropomorphism. After emptying the house he made two vertical cuts with a chainsaw 

through the midpoint that divided the house into two halves. This event was recorded with 

photographs and a film documenting the whole process of partition. Matta-Clark described 

the process of cutting the house as something akin to a “juggling with the syntax” (Lee, 2001, 

p. 28). And this is a valid metaphor for intervention, as Matta-Clark plays with the signs of 

architectural experience, breaking the unity and stability that organizes all the perception of 

domestic architecture. Cutting, fragmenting, sectioning, mauling, these are the weapons used 

by Matta-Clark and it is inevitable to interpret the reception of his work as an act of violence 

and invasion with their interventions.  

That brings us to the reflections of Henri Lefebvre about the production of space (2008), 

which suggest that the “Conceived space” that is projected, reduces experience to the visible 

andlegible. This produces what might be described as the fallacy of “spatial transparency”. 

The public space is shown as completely transparent, innocent, with no secrets and no 

surprises in which the actors are appropriate to the areas of consensus. Lefebvre’s spatial 

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concern leads to a conception of civic space consensus of public space as a continuation of 

domestic space.   

In this sense, the performative action of Matta-Clark can be understood as the opening of the 

domestic space outwards to the exterior, to the civic space and consensus that Lefebvre speaks 

about. But this spatial and gestural transposition of Matta-Clark contrasts with the position in 

space of consensus, to perfectly match the gesture of appropriation of domestic space to 

imbalances, differences, the conflict space separations, contradictions and segregation of the 

cultural and political of public space. As he points out:  

The space itself simultaneously a product of the capitalist mode of production, and economic-

political instrument of the bourgeoisie reveals its own contradictions. The dialectic emerges 

from timeand is performed; it works unexpectedly in the space. The contradictions of space, 

without abolishing those from the historical time, emerge from history and convey the old 

contradictions to another level inglobal simultaneity; some are tempered, others are worsen, 

and contradictory set takes on new meaning and comes to designate “something else”, another 

mode of production (Lefebvre, 2008, p. 182).  

Lefebvre's thesis on the production of space is formed on the basis that it is in “space and the 

space where capitalist relations of production reproduce” (Lefebvre, 1974, p. 223). Therefore 

the new relationship between the body and the society are defined, as points out Lefebvre, 

through a dialectical system that covers the entire space, between the dominant space and the 

dominated space. The contradiction, the dialectics arise from space and violence 

manipulation as resources of power and the social relationship that develops from the 

contradiction of treating large-scale space and private ownership of space. Matta-Clark used 

these contradictory and dialectical effects of space in his work, which connects the space and 

society, the urban and architectural territories and starts from some of these contradictions to 

operate the urban space as a criticism towards the fragmentation of the experiences and 

spaces.  

Lefebvre speaks of a negative appropriation of public space and in general about the urban 

space as being a space domination of capitalism. His proposal to socialize space, open to the 

participation of the inhabitants can be interpreted and translated into the spatial gesture works 

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of Matta-Clark. To open the space of buildings and appropriate them positively i.e. socialize 

them and eventually occupy the spaces. The appropriation of space is also inserted in the 

process of dislocation and transposition which is essential to the processes of collage and 

involves some violence: the construction process begins beyond the pictorial field in a 

destructive act, gutting and uprooting, and the quality of the act naturally plays a decisive role 

in determining the nature of the fragment (Parisier, 1983, p. 132).  

So says David Rostand on using the cut in the collage. He also says the neat, clean and incisive 

act of cutting forms is a deliberate act of deconstruction anticipating the 

reconstitutionprocesses following amputation. We must, however, make a distinction 

between sectioning and tear: Matta-Clark clearly cleanly severed his objects in a 

preconceived way, based on the idiosyncrasy and the history of the subject, respecting its 

functional, formal and allegorical concept before and after cutting.   

The post-partition is as important as the integrity of the building before the intervention, 

because the dissection of the building is based on a pre-existing totality that reinforces the 

physical and rhetorical act of cutting, opening and invadingits privacy. His way of proceeding 

is not to tear or gut the building but stays true to a plan that has conditions of scale, volume 

and precision cutting.  

In this sense there is a minimalist theatricality in performance. The shape of a regular cut of 

Matta-Clark is one that allows us to mentally reconstruct the fragment and leaves a visual 

icon on the place and spaceimprinted on the retina. It is in this sense that the work of Matta-

Clark has a clear conjunction with the neat cut of some collages made by Picasso or 

Schwitters, or even the type of design of Lissitski or Rodchenko. In an interview Matta-Clark 

made the marks of his work very clear, his work was “(...) all but Illusionist (...) it is rather a 

direct physical activity and not to make associations with something outside the own work 

itself” (Lee, 2001, p. 21). The close relationship Matta-Clark had with Robert Smithson, was 

of paramount importance; bringing together the notions of Smithson's “site and non-site” and 

the concept of entropy.   

These proposals, however, are based on the work done “in situ” by the possibility of 

producing the work in locations and spaces outside the continentof the gallery or museum. 

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Besides its metonymic displacement of reintroducing fragments in the enclosed space of the 

gallery, with all kinds of photographic, film and explanatory documentation of the work done. 

Smithson gave rise to a kind of “entropy of architecture” and certainly Matta-Clark’s work 

of sectioning the buildings reminds us of this entropic idea of the architecture of Smithson. 

But the contribution of MattaClark in this sense is overcoming the concrete framework and 

defined in the work of Smithson, since according to him, it needs a particular place and an 

entropic monumentality in the form of a ruin.   

The work of Matta-Clark as in the case of the work Day's End or Conical Intersect (1975), in 

which the intervention is made with simple holes, is separated from the work of Smithson 

and does not recycle a certain place, but instead it is based on the temporary loan of a physical 

space within the social and urban fabric of the city. No need for a real and lasting framework. 

It is the negation of monumentality, as understood by Smithson that stands for an idea of 

randomness and vacuum material. The idea of Matta-Clark spontaneously reopens the 

concept of cubism spaces and overlapping planes. At Day's End and Conical Intersect (1975) 

the arcs of the holes intersect to form an overlapping withdrawal of circles and arcs. This 

juxtaposition is far more evident when cutting through the different floors and rooms of the 

building. This juxtaposition in collage form also refers to the way of inserting “social spaces” 

through the cuts made by Matta-Clark.  

4. Conclusion  

Alfredo Jaar's strategy is to propose a scene, an encounter between a public and a picture that 

reveals the structures of a media world that is disabled by suffering. Thus, it proposes to 

generate the possibility that acting is possible and desirable. The creation of encounters in his 

installations takes the viewer into the abyss through the disclosure of a trauma. But here the 

invisible, the unnoticed and the sign are tense relations not only meaning the actual fact but 

symbolizing an idea of country, state, nation exposed to colonialism and cruelty. These 

processes that Jaar modulates in his works are configured as heterochronic spaces using 

spatial and temporal dimensions of the rhythms of advanced capitalism and mass media that 

make the latent temporalities break up to articulate other qualities of space.  

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In the work of Matta Clark a jump to the social space, to the substrate of time and real space 

of everyday life is proposed. And that's basically what Matta-Clark explores. By directly 

intervening in the real social and spatial basis Matta-Clark makes life and the everyday his 

true artistic matters. Like most artists in the sixties MattaClark puts the value of his work in 

real time and work as a force in contemporary life. And this is where the inclusion of social, 

spatial and politics of neo-avant-gardes of the 60s and 70s begins, which in this case we have 

illustrated with the invasion and occupation of real and imaginary space in the work of Matta-

Clark.  

References  

Deutsche, R. (1996). Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge. The MIT Press. 

[Online]Available: http://catalinavaughan.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/artenokia-

antagonimo-y-estetica-relacional. (August 15, 2015).  

Didi-Huberman, G. et al. (2008). Alfredo Jaar: La politica de las imágenes. Santiago de 

Chile: Metales Pesados.  

Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined 

Places. Oxford: Blackwell.  

Soja, E. W. (2008). Postmetrópolis. Estudios críticos sobre las ciudades y las regiones. 

Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.  

Lee, P. M. (2001). Object to Be Destroyed, The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark.Cambridge, 

Massachusetts: The MIT Press.  

Lefebvre, H. (1974). “La producción del espacio”. Papers: revista de sociología, Núm. 3, 

219 229.  

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.  

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 American Journal of Art and Communication 

Vol.8, Issue 1; January-Febuary - 2023; 

ISSN: 2994-0540 

Impact Factor: 6.91 

1252 Columbia Rd NW, Washington DC, United States 

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Lefebvre, H. (2008). La producción del espacio. Madrid: Capitán Swing Libros.  

Parisier, J. P., ed. (1983). Collage, Vol. 10-11. New York: New York Literary Forum.  

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