In December 1976 the artist Gordon Matta Clark was invited to take part in a group show entitled Idea as a Model that was held in the attic of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where he would show together with other architects including Richard Meier, Graves and Guatheney. Together with Peter Eisenman, the director of the institute, they represented the formalist current at that time, which emerged from Cornell University, where Matta Clark had studied but critically rejected.
Matta Clark exhibited photographs of the urban disaster of South Bronx, which showed abandoned buildings revealing signs of the scant importance assigned to public housing issues at the time by architectural theory in the United States. The attack was clear, Meier himself had designed some of those buildings.
On the night before the opening of the Matta Clark show, the artist borrowed an airgun from his friend Dennis Oppenheim and fired at the windows of the Institute of Architecture, the exhibition venue. Eisenman ordered the panes of glass be replaced immediately before the opening. This work was titled Windows Blow Out.
My project consisted in recovering, almost theatrically, this referential piece through the construction of three windows, made to measure, to be installed in an old abandoned house near the town of Skibbereen in West Cork, Ireland, where I was invited to carry out a site-specific project.
video, 6’44”, monochannel, loop
and edition of 2000 posters
29,7 x 42 cm, offset, recycled paper 140 gr.
Produced by WCAC. Skibbereen, West Cork, Ireland.