ODD LOTS: REVISITING GORDON MATTA-CLARK'S FAKE ESTATES by Matthew Higgs, et al.

Cabinet Books/The Queens Museum of Art/White Columns, 2005, First edition, 96 pp. 9" X 10 1/2", Softcover

Very good

In the early 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark 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, which accompanied the exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art and White Columns in New York, examines the historical conditions of the late artist’s project, and extends 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.