The result was eight separate building fragments (MoMA’s Bingo comprises three of them) and a Super 8 film documenting the deconstruction. In Matta-Clark’s process of subtraction and destruction, attributes that are conventionally associated with a house—domesticity, comfort, privacy—were displaced by a disorienting physical experience: the house became strange, a simple container for space now opened and incomplete.

Matta-Clark trained as an architect before developing the practice of “anarchitecture,” his term for the attacks he staged on the structural foundations of the built environment. As the tract houses of postwar suburban America began to decay in the 1970s, he sought to unearth the ideological assumptions attached to structures like the single-family home he demolished for Bingo. “Social mobility is the greatest spatial factor. . . . How one maneuvers in the system determines what kind of space [one] works and lives in,” Matta-Clark said, emphasizing the sociological critique that underpinned his work.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)

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