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.” In Conical Intersect, he cut the walls of an 18th-century house in Paris. 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. Inevitably, however, such photographs became valued and salable records of an art that was ephemeral or uncollectible.