For choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who both lived in New York in the 1970s, the city provided both subject matter and material for collaboration and experimentation. Brown expanded on the vocabulary of conventional dance in site-specific interventions that incorporated everyday gestures. In Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, for instance, a performer walked down the surface of a building in Soho, suspended by mountaineering equipment. The artist described the work as a “natural activity under the stress of an unnatural setting.”
Matta-Clark similarly transformed his immediate surroundings into artistic material, questioning architecture’s intrinsic function as well as its cultural and symbolic status. In works such as Bingo, he cored, carved, sliced, or split the surfaces and interiors of abandoned buildings. He documented these actions on film and in photographs, collages, and drawings, and arranged the salvaged fragments into standalone sculptures. Matta-Clark’s experiments reflected his desire to “liberate” space from the “enormous compressive, confining forces” of the built environment.
Organized by Ana Janevski, Curator, Department of Media and Performance, and Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Danielle Johnson, former Curatorial Associate, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints and Curatorial Affairs.
