NEW YORK—It’s tempting to let the myth attached to Gordon Matta-Clark’s life overshadow the details of his body of work. After all, he has become something of a tragic legend, thanks to his early death (from cancer at age 35), and his best-remembered work, in which he carved up, dissected and split open buildings. Not to mention that he is often portrayed as the patron saint of a not-yet-bourgeois downtown Manhattan where, in the 1970s, artists turned a do-it-yourself spirit loose on a neglected city.

But Matta-Clark’s legacy isn’t that tidy a story, and the strength of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s current retrospective, which runs through June 3, is that it offers a reverently messy look at the artist’s multiple influences, changing concerns and polyvalent practice.

Curated by Elisabeth Sussman, it is the first full retrospective treatment of Matta-Clark in two decades. Across the museum’s fourth-floor galleries, the sprawling and energetic show scatters excised sections from his building cuts, drawings, films and photographs among performance documents, notes and other archival material.

The exhibition design is strategically cluttered, with multiple paths through the galleries allowing different projects to bleed into one another. Even small flourishes—subtly tattered wall placards, antiquated video monitors and tables constructed from unfinished wood—show a playfully stylized lack of polish.

Taken together, the rambling collection of objects creates a fittingly three-dimensional portrait of Matta-Clark, but it is as an architectural iconoclast that he first comes into focus.

Building a Reputation

Trained as an architect at Cornell University, he returned to his hometown of New York in 1969 and parlayed that background into art. Soon after, he began to remove sections of existing buildings to open new sightlines and create new plays of light in the structures, a practice he called “Anarchitecture,” demonstrating a lifelong affection for plays on words.

Separating the museum’s elevator bank from the galleries is a section from the exterior wall of an upstate house that the artist carved into a grid for Bingo (1974). It offers a first view into the exhibition. From there, photographs and artifacts from his building cuts appear throughout the show, beginning with Bronx Floors (1973), executed illegally in derelict buildings in the South Bronx, to the geometric shapes of his first sanctioned architectural intervention, A W-Hole House (1973), and the arcs and arabesques of his later work, such as Conical Intersect (1975) and Office Baroque (1977).

The exhibition, however, doesn’t paint Matta-Clark solely as a recalcitrant architect or let the building cuts stand as monolithic achievements. Before graduating from Cornell, he assisted on the seminal “Earth Art” exhibition, which featured work by Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim and Hans Haacke, among others, and the retrospective is just as easily a primer on how Matta-Clark applied their ideas about site-specificity to his urban landscape.

More than that, Sussman makes a point in her catalog essay of mentioning that he also adapted Smithson’s strategies for presenting portable—and saleable—evocations of site-specific works in commercial galleries by exhibiting working drawings, photographs and other relics from their creation.

Perhaps his most famous building cut, Splitting (1974), the bisection of a condemned home in suburban New Jersey, gets the most comprehensive collection of representative objects in the show. Sections removed from the corners of the house stand in an iconic arrangement in the center of a gallery, while on the walls, the artist’s collaged photographs offer a vertigo-inducing sense of the sunlit lines that his intervention created.

Processed Art

The highlight, though, is the 16mm film that Matta-Clark made to document the process. As it loops on a 1970s projector, the film follows the artist and his assistants as they carve a 2-inch section from the center of the building. We then see them remove several cinder blocks supporting one side of the structure and slowly lower it using hand-cranked jacks. The crack through the middle of the building widens and a stream of daylight enters the interior.

As Matta-Clark toils in jeans and work gear, the film catches on a third—and undeniably pervasive—premise running through the retrospective: the centrality of process and transformation in his work.

We frequently see the artist convey the physical labor of construction as a process-based art, on the model of Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, with a boyish version of Richard Serra’s bravado. Photographs documenting Day’s End (1975), his triumphant transformation of a West Side pier into a sun-channeling cathedral, show him hanging, blowtorch in hand, carving a half-moon shape into the corrugated metal facade.

The absence of set thematic or chronological trajectories through the galleries also allows similarities among Matta-Clark’s many practices to emerge. Whether he is cutting up buildings, surveying forgotten parcels of land or planning dinner, the retrospective makes the singular products of his work seem secondary to the transformative rituals that he invented to enact them.

In some cases, his interest in process and change looks more like alchemy than labor. In an early performance, Photo-Fry (1969), the artist took several Polaroid photographs of Christmas trees and literally fried them in cooking oil. He added gold leaf to the mixture, as if to infuse the miasma with value, and then sent the products to friends as gifts. (Two of the grisly photos make an appearance in the show.)

Feeding the Movement

Equal parts enchantment and physical work, Matta-Clark also co-founded the collectively run SoHo eatery Food in 1971. A film that he edited together from three years of footage taken at the restaurant is one of the exhibition’s standout pieces.

As it documents the clientele eating, drinking and having everyday conversations, the film captures the legendary space that quietly transformed ordinary meals into events. We see the labor of cooking celebrated with an open kitchen; curated menus feature pointedly exotic ingredients; and everything about the restaurant strives to turn mundane acts into an extraordinary situation.

The daily happenings at Food helped define the downtown art community. And the portrait of Matta-Clark that the retrospective constructs is inseparable from his place in the mythology of 1970s New York. But unlike some exhibitions that deal with these glory days of Manhattan bohemia, the show avoids romance and keeps the focus on Matta-Clark’s ability to turn the environment at hand into a project.

It’s a lesson well learned in our era when a hyperactive market and an increasingly professionalized art world have many people pining for more innocent times. The exhibition proposes that being attuned to—and working within—his circumstances, rather than the circumstances themselves, gave Matta-Clark’s polymorphous interventions their sense of alchemical wonder. It’s a more complex portrait than that of a SoHo messiah, but much more timely.