Above and Below: Gordon Matta-Clark at David Zwirner

April 2 to May 4, 2013
519 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York City, (212) 727-2070

The introduction to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 2007 Whitney retrospective catalog muses that “in many ways, an exhibition of [Matta-Clark’s] art is an oxymoron.” That’s not an inaccurate or infrequent assumption. An artist best known for his architectural modifications (called “cuts”) on now demolished structures, Matta-Clark exists to his contemporary audiences primarily through photographic documentation of his work. His enigmatic career also loses some of its tangibility because of its tragic brevity; Matta-Clark was active for less than a decade before he died from cancer at the age of 35. Still, the idea that Matta-Clark’s oeuvre is at odds with a traditional art exhibition—an idea that the Whitney ultimately flouted—overemphasizes the transitory quality of his work, at the expense of appreciating his cross-medium interest and foresight. Matta-Clark made sure to find multiple ways to present each of his projects, in part to give his ideas longevity through material. Lest we forget, he was the author of the vast body of photographs, films, drawings, artist books, and sculptural objects that serve as the base of his scholarship and these exhibitions.

David Zwirner’s current exhibition of Matta-Clark’s work, its fifth since taking on representation of the artist’s estate in 1998, is devoted to some of the understated parts of his career and goals. It presents work from the last four years of Matta-Clark’s life with a particular emphasis on his films and film-based photographic collages. The selection of work, according to curator Jessamyn Fiore, has been chosen to demonstrate the artist’s frequently overlooked idealism, and anticipate what would have been the new pursuits in his career. “At that point, he wanted to be known as more than the guy who cuts buildings in half,” Fiore said. “He was ready for the next thing.”

Above and Below follows Matta-Clark’s interest in the structural layering of cities, and architectural possibilities both above and below ground. The show’s title refers to the lateral theme that unites this particular selection of works, and the exhibition’s diminutive king pin: an eponymous photo diptych from 1977 featuring a topical and subterranean view of a city street. This work, coincidentally, doubles as a map for the exhibition’s layout. The first room is devoted to his works on and above street level, anchored by the iconic Conical Intersect (1975) and Office Baroque (1977)—in which Matta-Clark cut a series of tapering circles to create a monocular shape across two uninhabited seventeenth-century buildings near the Centres Georges Pompidou, and sawed concentric tear-shaped holes through five floors of an office building in Antwerp—are present in the form of photo collages made from disjointed and tunneling sequences of film frames. The next room features two black and white 16mm film projections, Substrait (Underground Dalies) (1976) and Sous-Sols de Paris (Paris Underground) (1977), which document the artist’s exploration of manmade underground tunnels. His expeditions took place in labyrinths that ranged broadly in use and historic origin, from the catacombs beneath Paris to the underbelly of Grand Central Station in New York. These works were markedly different from those in the preceding room, from earlier years, because they were envisioned as film projects in themselves, not as documents of an action or performance. The films and a number of drawings and sketches that offer context and alternate views of Matta-Clark’s formal interests, finely demonstrate a medium-specific dexterity and a mastery of both space and two-dimensional representation.

The exhibition then proceeds like a dialectical argument to rise up into the air with two lesser-known Matta-Clark works: An installation for Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, called Jacob’s Ladder (1977), a beautifully delicate aerial structure suspended fifteen feet off the ground, rendered all the more poignant when we learn that visitors were too afraid to use it, and a series of sketches for the never-realized Sky Hook (study for a balloon building) (1978), a network of houses that would float above an urban environment, buoyed by a city’s radiating heat. These two projects, envisioned in the final two years of Matta-Clark’s life, perhaps best articulate the show’s thesis by suggesting the artist’s positivist vision of urbanism and architecture. It underscores a sometimes neglected but hopeful notion, that Matta-Clark left Cornell University not having forsaken architecture as a practice, but in search of new approaches to constructing spaces for society.

Additional Programs:

Guided tour with curator Jessamyn Fiore. David Zwirner (519 West 19th Street, New York) on Saturday April 20, 11:30 AM. RSVP required, contact Jill Smith (jill@davidzwirner.com or 212-727-2070 x 100).

World premier screening of Sous-sols de Paris (1977) and Q&A with curator Jessamyn Fiore, and filmmakers Jane Crawford and Robert Fiore. Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, New York) on Sunday, April 21, 7:30 PM.

A tribute to FOOD, the legendary SoHo restaurant opened in 1971 by Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden in collaboration with other artists. Frieze Projects at Frieze New York (Randall’s Island, New York), Friday May 10 to Monday May 13.

The post Other Sights of a Career: Gordon Matta-Clark at David Zwirner appeared first on artcritical.

April 4 to July 7, 2012
26 Wooster Street, between Grand and Canal streets
New York City, 212-431-2609

This fascinating, intelligently-conceived, at once astute  and celebratory exhibition, organized by Jonathan Weinberg and artist Darren Jones, documents, mostly through photographs, a moment of unique intersection between several histories: gay, art, industrial and New York. From 1971 to 1983 – post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, and at a time of social liberation and economic distress – the rapidly decaying wharfs and docks on the West Side below 14th Street were the site of unprecedented sexual and artistic experimentation.  As commercial shipping moved to Jersey and Brooklyn and a bankrupt city could not afford to police its abandoned industrial stock along the waterfront, artists and gays, for varying reasons, seized the day (and night).

In a heady fusion of hedonism and politics, the Stonewall riots of 1969 empowered new levels of public affection.  Docks and sailors held historic associations of gay adventure anyway, but the virtual police no-go piers proved an enticing playground for those who liked it rough. “Why do gays love ruins?” asks a character in Andrew Holleran’s novel, Nostalgia for the Mud, quoted by Weinberg as the epigraph to his accompanying essay.  “The Lower West Side, the docks.  Why do we love slums so much?”  “One can hardly suck cock on Madison Avenue, darling” comes the reply.  With the ocean liners gone, cruising began in earnest.

But the piers were also compelling for artists, regardless of their orientation.  The abandoned real estate proved a perfect canvas for Gordon Matta-Clark’s literally breakthrough environmental interventions, his “building cuts.”  The show is rich in photographs of Day’s End (Pier 52), his iconic cutout at the river’s end, steel wall of a mammoth shed, an Ellsworth Kelly-like sail-shaped puncture opening the dark interior to daylight.  Beside Matta-Clark’s own photographic diptych of his work there are images by urban photographers who documented the Piers scene such as Harry Shunk, Leonard Fink, Frank Hallam and Shelley Seccombe, who captures guys sunbathing along a jetty oblivious of the cut formed behind them in the name of art.  In contrast to literally and sexually cold nocturnal activities, the piers became a great place for mass gay sunbathing, and were soon dubbed “Manhattan Beach.”

For Vito Acconci, the dark, sinister, edgy quality of the wharfs made a suitable locus for Untitled Project for Pier 17 (1971). As announced in a printed statement posted at the John Gibson Gallery, the artist waited at a designated hour at the end of the pier and to anyone who came to see him there he would reveal “something that has not been exposed before and that would be disturbing for me to make public.”  Matta-Clark and Acconci were both made aware of the piers by ground-breaking curator Willoughby Sharp who anticipated the post-studio potential of the waterfront.

Artists and queers are by no means mutually exclusive groups, of course, but as cohabiters of the abandoned piers they were an odd couple.  Could this come down to the fact that for gays, whether there to cruise or sunbathe, the piers were perfect just as they were, a place in which life could improve, while for the artists, the piers were mere raw material, awaiting their magic touch?  The relations were active and passive: for gays, the piers were transformative whereas for artists the piers awaited transformation. Matta-Clark, as if anticipating a charge of vandalism of city property, defended himself in a rather prissy manifesto of 1975 in which he lamented the way the properties had been taken over by “a recently popularized sado-masochistic fringe,” arguing that his interventions would “transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascination and value.”  The city would ultimately do its own improvements, leveling the piers to create the running and cycling trails we have today.

Of course, both Matta-Clark’s macho hole busting and Acconci’s whispered secrets can be read as playing, with innuendo, upon the gayness of what was going on around them, a collision of sub and high culture.  But art in the piers was not all about cold cuts and furtive revelations: there was “gay abandon” aplenty.  At the end of the period covered by this show, in 1983, Mike Bidlo and David Wojnarowicz took over the Ward Line Pier which they made an extension of the then burgeoning East Village scene.  For artists they attracted like Luis Frangella and Judy Glantzman, the vacant industrial spaces were Sistine chapels awaiting their mural painting exuberance.  The Austrian street artist Tava (Gustav von Will) was already decorating the piers with stories high gay graphics of great skill and verve.

Sometimes, business and pleasure could be combined.  Colleagues Stanley Stellar and Peter Hujar ran into one another during a photo shoot at Pier 46 in 1981, as Weinberg recounts.  The photographers shot pictures of one another on Stellar’s camera.  And Hujar posed, getting a blow job, in the background of Stellar’s portrait of J.D. Slater as the celebrated porn-star leaned half-naked against a door jam with Keith Haring graffiti behind him, “a startling juxtaposition between an act of fellatio, a beautiful male body, and a signature Haring,” as Weinberg writes. This sumptuous photograph seems to be saying, in paraphrase of a chant made popular at the time: It’s a pier, we’re all here, get used to it.

The post Beyond the Studio & Out of the Closet: Art and Sex on the Waterfront, 1971-83 appeared first on artcritical.

June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

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