Gordon Matta-Clak in Italy: Communities Organizing Futures"

What makes art change? In the fall of 1975 Gordon Matta-Clark put together two gallery shows in Italy. The second one, at the Salvatore Ala gallery in Milan, led him into an aborted collaboration with a group of young Communists who were occupying an abandoned factory building in hopes of forcing the developers to put a community health center there. The police were brought into clear the building. “My exposure to this confrontation” Matta-Clark wrote upon his return to New York, “was my first awakening to doing my work not in artistic isolation but through an active exchange with people’s concern for their own neighborhood. My goal is to extend the Milan experience to the U.S.” In his interviews he began to bend the idea of the future for art into new perspectives.