Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
Introduction and interviews by Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard
Essays by Jeffrey A. Kroessler and Frances Richard
Softcover, 96 pages, 9.1 (w) × 10.6 (h) inches
Color and black-and-white illustrations
Cabinet Books, 2005
Support independent publishing: Our last few copies for sale at $96
In the early 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) discovered that the City of New York periodically auctioned off improbably tiny and frequently inaccessible parcels of land created by the exigencies of urban development. Fascinated by these eccentric spaces, he bought fifteen of them (fourteen in Queens, and one in Staten Island) for between $25 and $75 each, photographed them, and then collated the photographs with the associated deeds and maps. These collected materials are today known as Fake Estates.
Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates accompanied Cabinet’s exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns in New York, which was curated by Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, and Frances Richard. The show and book examine the historical conditions of Matta-Clark’s project, and extend it by including responses by eighteen contemporary artists: Francis Alÿs, Jimbo Blachly, Isidro Blasco, Mark Dion, Maximilian Goldfarb, Valerie Hegarty, Julia Mandle, Helen Mirra, Matthew Northridge, Dennis Oppenheim, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dan Price, Lisa Sigal, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Jane South, Jude Tallichet, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Clara Williams.
Odd Lots provides the definitive history of Fake Estates, thus adding to the scholarship on this important artist—all within the spirit of collaboration and experimentation that marked Matta-Clark’s short but influential career.