The case is everything in the world that resists.
Seeing and witnessing you read on Chile &
Pinochet--Allende's assasination, "their" September
11th--this past weekend, sent me back to Gordon
Matta Clark's work & a project I did after him
called "Towards Exterior" ostensibly about the
problems of alterity and ethics his work evidences.
I recalled that his father was the European-em-
braced Matta of Surrealism & revolutionary politics
but that he took his mother's name, Clark, after a trip
to Chile not long before Allende's "removal" from
power. This decision interests me, compels me in fact,
as an uncanny transference between gendered cultural
geneologies. Is the assuming of the maternal name,
a name that within Latin-American and Jewish cultures
remains dominant for establishing & preserving identity,
significant of a larger social upheaval, disaster or
occultation not yet occured as history? What is in this rep-
etition of dates that won't "go away," that therefore remains
impossible in historicity or historical structures--the Real
(Lacan) or Truth-Event (Badiou)? Matta Clark's radical
Gnostical materialities lead me to an important
convergence between "spirit" (so called), artistic
labor, and politics; his brief life seeming an allegory
of these tragically incommensurable categories.
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