OM Books

PASSING THROUGH MOVING IN AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT
Gordon Matta-Clark
New York City
Graffiti Photographs, 1972–73

From 1972 to 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark took over fifteen hundred photographs of graffiti in New York City. These pictures are some of the earliest documentation of an emerging art form, and are an under-recognized body of work from Matta-Clark—an artist who used the city’s crumbling infrastructure to reveal the social and political implications of architecture and urban design.

This publication features every frame from every roll of film Matta-Clark shot, organized according to the sequence of contact sheets in the artist’s archive. Taken together, these pictures demonstrate Matta-Clark’s obsession with the graffiti that had exploded across the city’s walls, subways, and buses, and show him growing bolder as he moved from photographing on the streets and subway platforms, to trespassing in outer borough train yards. While he was out on these documentary missions, Matta-Clark also photographed abandoned architecture, infrastructure, and the social life of the city. Those pictures are included as well, as they show the relationship between graffiti and themes that are more commonly associated with the artist’s work.

An essay by Antonio Sergio Bessa and a text by Jonathan Lethem accompany the photographs.

Gordon Matta-Clark celebrated graffiti as a transgressive, anti-authoritarian act that shared many of the qualities he was exploring in his own work. The title of this publication comes from a text he wrote in a notebook a few years before he started taking these photographs. He could be describing his own artistic process, or the experience of a kid sneaking into a subway tunnel late at night with a can of pant:

PASSING THROUGH THE BOUNDARIES
PASSING AWAY WITH A PIECE TO GO
CHOOSING AND CLEARING OUT. A CRITICAL POINT IN
STRESS AND WORKING BETWEEN FAILURE
AND MINIMALISM REDUCTION AND
COLLAPSE. KEEPING EYES OPEN FOR
A NEW HIT
              THE JOY OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT
A COMPLETE DEVOTION TO GETTING
AWAY WITH IT.
                   PASSING THROUGH MOVING IN
AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT