In 1972, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) installed a dumpster on the street between 98 and 112 Greene Street in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, an architectural artwork he called Open House. Matta-Clark used discarded, scavenged materials—old pieces of wood, doors—to subdivide the space inside the dumpster, creating corridors and small rooms within the container. Dancers and artists moved around the space, their pedestrian movements activating the sculpture and captured in a Super-8 film of the piece.

Matta-Clark is best known for his building cuts and architectural interventions. Because of the nature of this work and its context—sited in spaces abandoned or slated . . . .go to book page >>

In 1991, as MAMCO Geneva was preparing to open, founder and museum director Christian Bernard asked several artists to think about how they would like to sum up their practice for presentation in the museum. German artist Franz Erhard Walther (born 1939) proposed a Werklager”—a storeroom containing works produced between 1961 and 1972. Walther’s Werklager” has been on display at MAMCO Geneva almost without interruption since the museum opened more than 20 years ago.

At the heart of this collection is Walther’s 1. Werksatz, or First Work Set, series of wearable fabric objects from 1963–69. Walther described these objects as . . . .go to book page >>

This book documents the scrupulous recreation, inside MAMCO Geneva, of a flat owned between 1975 and 1992 by Parisian collector and self-described agent d’art Ghislain Mollet-Viéville. Mollet-Viéville’s apartment on the rue Beauborg showcased his incredible collection of minimalist and conceptual art; the flat served flexibly as home, gallery and crossroads of international contemporary art. Featuring works by Victor Burgin, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Claude Rutault, Art & Language, John McCracken and Lawrence Weiner, Mollet-Viéville’s collection, and its display in his apartment, defined a radical approach to collecting and played an important role in publicizing the work of these . . . .go to book page >>