On Sunday afternoon I went to an exhibition at the Barbican gallery in London which is well worth a visit. Running from the 3rd March to the 22nd May 2011, ‘Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York in the 1970s’ examines the multidisciplinary work of the downtown arts scene in the midst of a recession. Their work varies from visual art, to photography, performance and installation, touching on themes of architecture, psychology, theatre and dance. Anderson, Brown and Matta-Clark were all concerned with performance, the body, the environment and found spaces. They used the city of New York as a canvas for their work, taking art out of the gallery and into the real world, to create experimental pieces, which challenged the thoughts of the time.
One of my favourite pieces, was by Gordon Matta-Clark; “Bronx Floors”, which are a series of interventions ‘building cuts’ or ‘building dissections’ of abandoned buildings in New York, drawing attention to urban blight and decay. “For ‘Splitting’ (1974), he bisected an empty two storey house on Humphrey Street in Englewood, New Jersey and split it open by tipping one half back on its foundation. He also removed the four upper corners of the house, the only fragments remaining of the structure. Matta-Clark described the process as like ‘a dance with a building’. These are the most spatial of his building cuts, affording the viewer an opportunity to traverse the space between them”.
There are also daily performances in the gallery:
Beginning at 11.30am everyday, dancers perform three groundbreaking and rarely seen early works by Trisha Brown: Planes (1968), Floor of the Forest (1970) and Walking on the Wall (1971). Dancers and other artists also reinterpret Gordon Matta-Clark’s Open House (1972). One work will be performed every hour.
See: Barbican
