ART-REVIEW: Gordon Matta Clarck

There are few times that I do not understand the reason for the existence of an exhibition, one of these is the exhibition “Anarchitect” with works by Gordon Matta-Clarck at Jeu de Paume. Considering that someone could answer me that the exhibition highlights a side of the artist not well known to the general public, the one of architectural intervention. To some extent, if this exhibition was on presentation at an American Museum, where the audience is more familiar with work of the artist and was on presentation another side of him, I could understand it. But in a French cultural institution, where the French audience is not at all familiar with the work of the artist, due to the reason that Gordon Matta Clarck created only two works in the city, the “Conical Intersect” for the 9th Biennale de Paris (1975) and the documentation of the inner core of Paris in the video “Sous-Sols de Paris” (1977), both fragmentary and disconnected, I cannot figure the reason of the exhibition, since a distorted image is created. I believe that such exhibitions on the one hand, the audience finds them disconcerting (I noted it because it happened to spend an entire afternoon at Jeu de Paume) and on the other, there is no complete picture of the artist’s work, since a distorted image is created. Now regarding the imbalance in relation to Bouchra Khalili’s exhibition that is on presentation at the upper floor is characteristic of Jeu de Paume’s exhibitions, which seems to arise from the agony of the institution to attract a wide audience, due its location, but this cannot happen because the institution has a stigma in Contemporary Art which it needs to be kept.–Efi Michalarou