Outer Space
“The Chilean painter, Roberto Matta, one of the last of the surrealists, asked this as yet unanswerable question. All disasters - earthquakes, plane or car crashes - seem to reveal for a brief moment the secret formulae of the world around us, but a disaster in space rewrites the rules of the continuum itself.”- Ballard, J.G. and Burroughs, W.S. (1993) ‘ A Watching Trinity’, in The atrocity exhibition 43
Roberto Matta, was acquainted with threshold, the space between interior and exterior, as was his son Gordon Matta Clark the anarchitect, who made work in NYC at a time of economic and infrastructural entropy.44 Matta-Clark grew up in the building next to the townhouse that exploded due to a faulty bomb in the process of being assembled in a basement furnace room by members of the Weather Underground. Disaster often supersedes time, thrusts the interior into the exterior, buildings become porous, and fragmented materials, blood and time, act accordingly. Gordon Matta-Clark and his surrealist father made a practice around rendering the interior in the exterior. While disasters of the sea, earth and sky reveal something more about the inner entropic rules that govern society, space is the true exterior, a disaster in space would fundamentally alter our views around the laws of nature. Perhaps a disaster in space would be an example of a true 'Event', since it would have to erupt from nothing and would change everything; objects in space follow predictable orbits, which can be calculated using mathematical models and observations, and the laws of physics apply everywhere in space. Including the laws of thermodynamics the second of which states that the total entropy of a closed system always increases over time.