Curator, Laura Hoptman: Gordon Matta-Clark was trained as an architect. His work took on a lot of different guises at the very beginning of his career, at the beginning of the 1960s, and it wasn't till his first cutting experiment in 1971 where he really took on what he called “anarchitecture.” And that is the idea of a kind of literal deconstruction of architecture to see how it was made in conjunction with or in opposition to the human beings who would inhabit it.
Narrator: Matta-Clark made Bingo in 1974 by cutting into the facade of a house in Niagara Falls, New York that was slated to be demolished.
Laura Hoptman: This was a period of time when a lot of buildings had been condemned or were rotting. So by making an artwork out of these abandoned houses and abandoned industrial sites, he was drawing attention to them.
Narrator: He cut through the walls in frame of the house, creating nine equal sized rectangles that resembled the grid of a Bingo game card. This sculpture is made from three of those pieces.
Laura Hoptman: So that's why you see some of the interior. And when you see the stairway, you're seeing both the front side and the back side of the facade.
Narrator: The artist and a team of assistants worked 12 hours a day for 10 days to cut and remove the facade.
Laura Hoptman: And as soon as he and his crew left, the bulldozers came and bulldozed the house.