In the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners of land art, Conceptual art, and performance art embraced photography precisely because the medium’s lack of artistic pretension seemed in perfect harmony with the anticommodification stance that was at the heart their art. They preferred the deadpan presentation of a drugstore print to the finely crafted photographs valued by collectors and connoisseurs. Inevitably, however, such photographs became valued and saleable records of an art that was ephemeral or uncollectible.

Gordon Matta-Clark, though trained as an architect, made his mark by deconstructing what others had built, slicing derelict structures with a chainsaw to transform them into what he punningly dubbed “anarchitecture.” For Circus (alternately titled The Caribbean Orange)—Matta-Clark’s last project before his premature death at age thirty-five—he cut three large circles, or rings, through a residential building that the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, had recently purchased for conversion to gallery space. Although the museum’s invitation stripped Circus of the political critique that was inherent in Matta-Clark’s earlier surreptitious interventions, the results were no less spectacular or disorienting, as vividly conveyed in this photograph.