The Piers From Here: Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark by Open Eye Gallery

The Piers From Here

Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark

Open Eye Gallery Director Lorenzo Fusi Deputy Director Deborah Wintle Exhibition Coordinator Jill Carruthers Operations Coordinator Ceri-Jayne Griffith Marketing and Communication Assistant Charlotte Down Gallery and Retail Assistant Katie Dixon We are grateful to all Open Eye Volunteers and Interns

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. All images are copyrighted as indicated in the image captions. Thanks and acknowledgements Third Streaming, New York David Zwirner, London, New York Jane Crawford, The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark Open Eye Gallery 19 Mann Island Liverpool Waterfront Liverpool L3 1BP www.openeye.org.uk 0151 236 6768

This e-book has been published on the occasion of The Piers From Here, 6 December 2013 - 9 February 2014, curated by Lorenzo Fusi Editing and design Jill Carruthers Authors Jessamyn Fiore Lorenzo Fusi Robert F. Reid-Pharr Jonathan Weinberg

Cover Image ÂŠ Alvin Baltrop, Super Cream, 1980

Contents Lorenzo Fusi Foreword 2

Jonathan Weinberg City-Condoned Anarchy 20

Robert F. Reid-Pharr Alvin Baltrop 44

Jessamyn Fiore and Lorenzo Fusi in conversation Remembering Gordon Matta-Clark 58

Biographies 95

Bibliography 100

Foreword Lorenzo Fusi The idea of bringing together the work of Alvin Baltrop and that of Gordon Matta-Clark might appear at first arbitrary, since the two seem to have very little in common. They lived in the same city (New York), belonged to the same generation and operated during the same historical period. Besides, they both died of cancer and were male artists. One might venture as far as claiming that both artists used photographic apparatus to produce work. But whilst Baltrop can be said to be a photographer tout court, someone who had made street-photography the core of his investigation and activity, Matta-Clark was hardly interested in photography per

se or authoring photographs in a conventional sense. Rather, he was using photography (amongst other means), often in a collaborative or unorthodox manner, for documenting his interventions and visualising his ideas. Acutely aware of the transient and ephemeral nature of his anti-monumental approach to sculpture, performance and installation and of the consequences of pursuing his â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;anarchitecturalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; practice, (a wordplay that blends the terms anarchy and architecture) Matta-Clark treated photography quite disrespectfully. He started his career as an artist by frying photos in oil and gold leaf (Photo Fry, 1969) looking at the transformational/alchemic potentials of art and ref lecting on the notion of cooking as a relational strategy. I guess neither artist was interested in good photography in a traditional sense and each one tested the limits of the medium in their own way. Baltrop and Matta-Clark were not studio-artists, they both worked in the city using different areas of New York as their playground and field of experimentation. Their contextresponsive work (engaging a wide range of issues such as poverty, inequality, marginalisation, the relations between the urban environment and the communities who inhabit it, ownership of public and private space, re-appropriation, etc.) was indeed political. However, while Gordon by means of poetical acts of sabotage and physical interventions was actively looking for change, Alvin primarily immersed himself in the 3

documentation of otherwise unrecorded chronicles. In doing so, he radically changed our viewpoint and perspective, although he did not aim at immediately transforming the context as such, but maybe rearticulating its socio-political meaning. Arguably, one could attempt a simplistic reading of the difference in their approaches by establishing an equation based on their sexual identity and ethnic background: Matta-Clark as the ‘active-maker’ and Baltrop as the ‘passive-documenter.’ However, to interpret the work of Matta-Clark against that of Baltrop as the white, heterosexual and privileged male agent 4

versus the passive and therefore disempowered, black, gaybisexual, self-taught witness does not do justice to either artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s endeavours. It also creates a false hierarchy amongst disciplines (as if pure photography, as per the case of Baltrop, could not achieve change by simply bearing witness). Both artists were fully aware of the potential of their artistic strategies and radicalism that were intrinsic to their respective positions. They used this potential to their advantage so as to pursue their socio-political agendas and challenge the art world by delivering cultural products that were difficult to position in the market. But, while the art system (and its ecology) quite rapidly recognised and regarded Matta-Clark as a pivotal figure in the cultural landscape of the time, Baltrop remained a marginalised presence and his work has only been rediscovered quite recently. Instead of insisting in their biographical differences, which are quite obvious, I think we should ref lect on the difference in the reception their work had, rather than simply emphasising their diverse attitude in art-making as a result of their respective personal histories. For as radical and unconventional Matta-Clark was, still he operated against the art world from within the system: he was familiar with its myths, idols and internal regulations. Coming from a family of artists (his father was the well-known Chilean painter Roberto SebastiĂĄn Antonio Matta Echaurren, 5

his mother, artist Anne Clark and his Godmother was Marcel Duchampâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife, Teeny), he first studied French literature at the Sorbonne then enrolled at Cornell University to study architecture. Cornell School of Architecture was one of the most innovative centres of research and experimentation at the time, attracting artists such as Dennis Hoppenheim, Hans Haacke and Robert Smithson, who all presented their work at the campus in the seminal exhibition entitled Earth Art, curated by Willoughby Sharp in 1969. During these formative years, it became clear to Gordon that he was never to become a practising architect. He instead became part of a community of artists who were dissatisfied by the way art was taught, produced, brought to fruition and ultimately commodified by market and institutions alike. Within that community, Matta-Clark started deconstructing the very language that the art system used, reassembling it in new and unexpected configurations. He challenged notions such as authorship or ownership by choreographing and taking part in collective projects. He questioned where the real value of an artwork lies, whether in its conception, making or in the residues of a project. He tested ideas of art as a commodity and a fetish. He freely moved across disciplines, often disregarding what it was to be considered â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;good practiceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in each of these fields. 6

Gordon’s output was both prolific and varied. He established FOOD in SoHo, a restaurant-cum-performance, a strategy of survival and community enterprise, with his then fiancé Carol Goodden. He also gave prominence to street-art in a photographic series entitled Photoglyphs as early as 1973. In these images, documenting graffiti inscribed on subway carriages, street-art was interpreted as an art form that was reclaiming its right to occupy the public sphere as opposed to simple vandalism. He masked the lens of a video-camera with tape, borrowed from Robert Rauschenberg, and shot time and time again the same film, until he had created simultaneous filmic visions of different times and places (City Slivers, 1976). He collaged negatives and film frames so as to create new images; he cut and pasted, superimposed and re-assembled images in order to enable photography to become more three-dimensional and sculptural, defying photography’s traditional documentation role in an attempt to achieve a spatial experience. His urge to challenge photography, thus brutalising the medium, surely derived from his dissatisfaction with conventional documentation. Matta-Clark soon realised that there was no real alternative to first-hand experience, when it came to some of his most ambitious projects such as the famous ‘building cuts.’ Even the moving image, with all its realism and 7

ÂŠ Mark McNulty, installation view of The Piers From Here, 2013,

persuasive power was somewhat inadequate to the task: it was more suitable for documenting the process than providing his audiences with a valid surrogate experience of the work. MattaClark was compelled to push the boundaries of photography and film, he felt constricted by their limitations, particularly when illustrating and documenting his idiosyncratic relationship with Modernist architecture, urban-planning strategies and its regulations. Gordon unquestionably interpreted architecture in a rather singular way. He was more interested in transformation 8

rather than construction. Amongst his earliest work it is worth remembering Garbage Wall (1970), which represents one of the few attempts pursued by Gordon to actually build something. By recycling garbage (reusing the leftovers discarded by a consumerism-led society) for the construction of a DIY modular construction unit, Gordon proposed a solution to socio-political and environmental issues: he responded to environmental concerns and provided the homeless with a tool-kit for creating a temporary shelter and refuge. This piece constitutes almost a manifesto of the type of architecture Matta-Clark was interested in. At the time, there was an abundance of under used built spaces in New York. “Why should I build anything new,” Gordon seemed to wonder “when there are so many buildings that simply cannot be accessed and lie inert in a state of abandonment and dilapidation?” Day’s End, the ‘cut’ that stands at the core of this publication, perfectly exemplifies his concerns. In 1975, Matta-Clark revisited the New York piers where he had previously intervened 4 years earlier. He was invited by Willoughby Sharp as part of a larger group of artists for Projects: Pier 18, an exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art. The press release of the show reads: “[This] exhibition consists of series of photographs by Shunk-Kender, documenting the work of 27 artists on an abandoned pier in 9

the Hudson River last February and March [1971]. The artists were invited to use the pier […], and each work was recorded in photographs under their instructions. The works take a variety of forms but all relate to the pier. Some artists used the space for carrying out an activity or stage an event […] others responded to the site itself.” 1 On that occasion, Matta-Clark “did an untitled work in which he suspended himself upside2 down above piled-up trees and debris.” Gordon could not predict at the time of this performance that only few years later, another artist would reprise the same unusual image (photographing a man hanging upside-down on a pier), although with very different finalities and intentions. The artist in question was Alvin Baltrop, a black photographer from the Bronx, who indeed was not featured on Sharp’s hot list for his all-white and all-male 1971 MoMA show. Symbolically, this ‘visual coincidence’ represents the first point of contact between Matta-Clark and Baltrop. The second occurrence is Day’s End. In both cases, the New York piers stand in the background of their encounter. Allegedly, Baltrop and Matta-Clark never met. And if they did, there is no record of their meeting. They seem to have operated 1. http://www.moma.org/pdfs/docs/press_archives/4679/releases/MOMA_1971_0116_80.pdf ?2010 2. Jeff Ryan, “Rocking the Foundations”, in Frieze, 11, June-August 1993: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/rocking_the_foundation/

in parallel worlds, their paths and careers only sporadically intersecting. It is hard to say whether they were simply disinterested in each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice or did not know of each other at all, for they were occupying diverse social, economical and intellectual spaces amidst the same geo-political realm. Although Baltrop and Matta-Clark adopted different operational and engagement tactics, they both endured forms of struggle. Their attention was equally directed towards issues considered invisible in the eyes of the media, not generally acknowledged by mainstream cultural platforms and peripheral to or non-existent in the American political debate of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;70s. Baltrop and Matta-Clark were both activists and, as such, they intervened in the reality of their time. To consider Baltrop a mere observer, or social voyeur, would result in not fully understanding the role that photography played in the context of the period as a catalyst for social change and political emancipation. Alvin Baltrop not only documented, but ennobled life at the margins, bringing with compassion to the fore the brutal beauty and potentially revolutionary lyricism that there could be found, hidden amongst the interstices of society.

Similarly, Matta-Clark inhabited a realm where there was no separation between life and art, a dimension where every daily act (however futile) was political. One could argue that his privileged background and education infused a confidence and defiance in young Gordon that someone like self-taught Baltrop would struggle to achieve in his work. But if we closely re-examine the complex history of the period (the way in which civil rights and Black Power movements, antimilitarist and anti-discriminatory campaigning, emerging environmental concerns, sexual liberation, feminism and LGBT activism seemingly merged, overlapped, clashed, collided and differentiated) it would be short-sighted to consider their artistic strategies and political positioning purely antithetical or irreconcilable. Within this struggle a multitude of voices started to become audible and art became one of the forums for addressing (if not dictating) the singular and shared agendas that all these groups had. This said, it stands clear that Baltrop was something of an outcast in the art world whilst Gordon Matta-Clark wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, regardless of how controversial and ground-breaking his work might have been. Baltropâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work instead, went largely unnoticed and was rarely exhibited publicly. Unlike Gordon, he was not invited to take part in museum surveys or show work at events such as Documenta or the Biennale de Paris during his lifetime. His first museum retrospective was staged by the Contemporary 12

ÂŠ Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (male drinking with cigarette), 1975-1986, Courtesy The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York

Arts Museum Houston (Texas) only in 2012. After his death in 2004, an increasing number of publications and exhibitions paid tribute to the late Baltrop and it is mainly thanks to the art critic Douglas Crimp that his work has now achieved recognition and attracted international attention. One of his photos made the front cover of Artforum in February 2008 and the New York Times positively reviewed his posthumous 3

3. Perspectives 179â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Alvin Baltrop: Dreams Into Glass, 20 July-21 October 2012, CAMH, Houston (TX).

exhibition at Third Streaming in New York in 2011. The exhibition at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool represents the UK premiere of his work. His photographs have rarely been seen in Europe. 4

Gordon feared to be soon forgotten after his death, since none of his most spectacular interventions outlived the artist, and Alvin would probably be surprised to be remembered at all as his work was under-acknowledged during his lifetime. Baltrop was well aware, as a photographer, of the implications of being visible in front of his subjects. As an intellectual and political agent he also knew what instead it means to be invisible in social terms. In an interview with Randal Wilcox discussing a photograph that he shot through a fence, Baltrop remarked, “I am always on the outside looking in.” “He furthered his imposed outsider status using a technique he termed practicing invisibility: photographing in public with a camera hidden in a specially constructed shoulder bag,” recalls Wilcox. 6 5

4. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/arts/design/galleries-in-soho 5. Trustee of The Alvin Baltrop Trust. 6. From an unedited version of Wilcox’s contribution to the CAMH’s exhibition catalogue.

You shut your mouth and you disappear. ‘Practice Invisibility’ and you will get the best shots. If they saw a camera in my hand, they would see what I was doing and act differently. I didn’t want that. Who looks at a Black man with a bag in his hand? Alvin Baltrop

One might argue that Baltrop practised invisibility to the point of disappearing not only in front of his subjects. There are many reasons why this could have been. Naturally, being black, bisexual and not having received formal education in the arts could all be valid motivations for his institutional invisibility at the time. The subject matter of his aesthetic interests and poetic research also did not facilitate a wider circulation of his oeuvre. His work is often graphic and sexually explicit. Nevertheless, many of his white peers managed to surface from the underground world or gay ghetto, overcoming the label of pornography imprinted on their work for their direct dealing with sexuality, sexual identity/orientation and genderrelated issues. Several of them have achieved recognition and visibility at some stage, often post-mortem, as a consequence of the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. It is undeniable that race also played a role in Baltrop’s rarefied presence in the art world, especially during the ‘70s when the number of African-American visual artists acknowledged by the art system (whether or not they were engaging with sexuality by means of their work) was very limited. It is also true that the image of 15

Blackness Baltrop was conveying through his work encompassed a wide range of estrangement from the white bourgeois heterosexual norm. His work was not exactly everybody’s cup of tea. The public and collective image it was projecting was difficult to digest even for many African-Americans and Latinos. After having served in the US Navy for three years (19691972), during which time Baltrop documented the environment and life on board of a military vessel tinted with homoerotic connotations, the artist “again turned his eyes and lens on the city [New York] that had become a post-industrial wasteland. With its economy in ruins and manufacturing companies 16

moving out of the city, Manhattan’s West Side piers had become littered with empty and dilapidated buildings that stretched th from West 59 Street down to Tribeca. For over a decade, Baltrop would obsessively photograph the piers. No other site embodied the microcosm of New York with its constituency of sunbathers, prostitutes, drag queens, artists, runaways, and gay men nonchalantly cruising for anonymous sex. The piers, with its complexity of lure, loathing, desire, and acceptance, became a magnet for the disenfranchised and empowered. And Baltrop would not only capture prostitutes plying their trade, sex acts between men, the plight of runaways, but also the intense beauty in the midst of what was construed by many as a dark, foreboding, and violent site”. 7 Whilst Baltrop was mapping the psycho-geography of the piers with his twin-lens medium format camera (capturing the dramas, intimate pleasures, living conditions, deaths and interactions of the varied humanity who lived in or ventured into those premises), Gordon Matta-Clark broke in one of the buildings, Pier 52, realising one of his most ambitious projects to date: a temple of sun and water, an indoor park, which he 8 called Day’s End (1975). 7. Excerpt from the CAMH press release: http://camh.org/exhibitions/perspectives-179-alvin-baltrop-dreams-glass#.Un-2yygx_zI 8. Interview with Matta-Clark in: Matta-Clark, (exhib. cat., Antwerp: International Cultureel Centrum, 1977), 11: “The water and sun move constantly in the pier throughout the day in what I see as an indoor park, a sun-and-water-temple.”

Work with abandoned structures began with my concern for the life of the city of which a major side effect is the metabolization of old buildings. Here as in many urban centers the availability of empty and neglected structures was a prime textural reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through modernization. The omnipresence of emptiness, of abandoned housing and imminent demolition gave me the freedom to experiment with the multiple alternatives to one’s life in a box as well as popular attitudes about the need for enclosure… The earliest works were also a foray into a city that was still evolving for me. It was an exploration of New York’s least remembered parts of the space between the walls of views inside out. I would drive around in my pick-up hunting for emptiness, for a quiet abandoned spot on which to concentrate my piercing attention. Gordon Matta-Clark

This book and relevant exhibition document the occasional encounter between the two men, taking Day’s End as a centre piece from which to depart for exploring their respective practice, interests and concerns: a journey that accompanies us along their careers and short-lived existences.

9. Cit. in Douglas Crimp, “Action Around the Edges”, 2010: http://www.post-post.net/psychogeography/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/krimp_textonly.pdf

Whereas people are absent from Matta-Clarkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s images, Baltrop (by zooming in and out with his camera) reveals different degrees of physical and emotional proximity to the population that had spontaneously re-appropriated the area of the piers over the years. Their complementary visions offer us an important opportunity for ref lection today on the role played by art in the process of urban regeneration and subsequent gentrification. Through the lens of their work, we can also reevaluate the often-problematic relationship that ties harbour cities to their waterfront in the post-industrial era. I believe that there are important stimuli and suggestions to be found through taking a second look at The Piers From Here. ÂŠ Mark McNulty, installation view of The Piers From Here, 2013

City-Condoned Anarchy Jonathan Weinberg “Why do gays love ruins?” I said to my friends when we emerged into the crisp autumn sunlight of a Sunday afternoon. “The Lower West Side, the docks. Why do we love slums so much?” “One can hardly suck cock on Madison Avenue, darling...”

Andrew Holleran, Nostalgia for the Mud

Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the piles, some seated upon the pier heads. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed

to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Between 1971 and 1983, the piers below Fourteenth Street were the site of an enormous range of works by artists as different in their mediums and intentions as Vito Acconci and Alvin Baltrop, Shelley Seccombe and Tava, Gordon MattaClark and David Wojnarowicz. At the same time, the fight for the rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered people, spurred by the 1969 Stonewall riots, was literally transforming the cultural and social landscape of New York City. Stepping out of the closet in droves, gay men suddenly felt free to sunbathe on the piers naked, cruise and have sex in public. Within walking distance of the World Trade Centre and the posh brownstones of Greenwich Village, this “arena for sexual theatre,” as the painter Delmas Howe put it, became the backdrop for elaborate photographic tableaux, sometimes staged as in Arthur Tress’ picture of a leather queen taking a drag on a cigarette, or seemingly spontaneous, as in Stanley Stellar’s image taken from the rooftop of a man below giving a hand job to a fellow sunbather. 1 Other photographers like Alvin Baltrop, Frank Hallam, Shelley Seccombe, Lee Snider, and Rich Wandel, were intent on making a direct record of the

1. Jonathan Weinberg, Unpublished telephone interview with Delmas Howe, 8 December 2010.

collapsing structures, and the people that used them knowing that this strange world on the water’s edge would not last. The expatriate filmmaker Ivan Galietti saw in the pier’s firescorched walls and obscene murals an updated version of the ruins of Pompeii of his native Italy. These same ruins were the perfect Arabian Nights backdrop for the famous avant-gardist 22

Jack Smith to perform his alter-ego, Sinbad Glick for Uzí Parnes’ camera. A visit to the piers was often the occasion for chance meetings between artists and friends outside their daily routine or the art gallery scene. For example, the photographer Stanley Stellar ran into his colleague Peter Hujar during a photo shoot on Pier 46 in 1981. Hujar allowed Stellar to photograph him having sex in the background of a picture of the half-naked porn star J.D. Slater leaning against a doorway alongside a Keith Haring graffiti. This picture creates a startling juxtaposition between an act of fellatio, a beautiful male body, and a signature Haring work that is only intensified when we learn that it also includes the image of Hujar, one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. In an act of mutual trust and respect, Stellar lent his camera to Hujar and both photographers used it to take portraits of each other. Another fortuitous moment was when Hallam just happened to be on Pier 46 in 1982 when Ivan Galietti was filming Pompeii New York, which includes a cameo performance by Wojnarowicz and a musical performance by singer accordionist Phoebe Legere. Hallam, thinking that he was filming some sort of porn shoot, took slides of Galietti in the midst of acting in his own film. (The two artists only met and learned about each other’s work years later.) 23

The piers were not only the focus of visual artists; a new generation of queer writers included evocative descriptions of the waterfront sex scene in their writings. But whereas the ambivalent meditations of Andrew Holleran, John Rechy, and Edmund White evoked the metaphor of the decaying waterfront as the restless and furtive nature of homosexual desire, for Samuel Delany the scene spoke of the revolutionary potential of having sex with multiple strangers. In Delany’s Motion of Light in Water, he speculates: ...the first direct sense of political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies. That I’d felt it and was frightened 24

by it means that others had felt it too. The myth said we, as isolated perverts, were only beings of desire, manifestations of the subject... But what this experience said was that there was a populationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not of individual homosexuals... not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex... 2

How did so many of these once grand wharf buildings that bordered the river come to be left empty and in decay? From the late-nineteenth century to World War II, the piers were part of a vibrant trade and transportation system that constituted the busiest port in the world. The docks functioned not so much as destinations in and of themselves, but as passageways, porous edges to enter and leave the city. The enormous Beaux-Arts structures contained halls the size of football fields with exposed truss framing and skylights that followed the length of their roofs. Here passengers would arrive or wait to depart, while their baggage and vast quantities of cargo from all over the world would be received or sent off. Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tightly packed finger pier system, in which every square inch of space was used by people, freight, and trucks, became obsolete by the by the rise of

2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957- 1965 (New York: New American Library, 1988), 174.

trans-Atlantic air transport, and even more by the advent of container shipping requiring direct rail connections and enormous amounts of space. By the 1960s most commercial shipping had moved to New Jersey and Brooklyn and most of the piers below Fourteenth Street were closed down and fell 3 into disrepair. As many of Baltrop, Hallam’s and Seccombe’s photographs record, a series of fires turned Piers 46, 48 and 51 into charred ruins. The fiscal bankruptcy of New York City in the late 1970s meant there was little money for their demolition or to adequately keep people out. Adding to the overall decay of the Hudson waterfront was the collapse and nd closing of the elevated West Side highway below 42 street. Ignoring the no-trespassing signs, people walked out onto this skyway, now empty of cars, to take in the views of the Hudson River and Lower Manhattan and the decaying docks and pier sheds. The long and ultimately successful battle to stop the city’s wildly ambitious West Way scheme to sink the West Side Highway below ground and replace the grumbling piers with parks left the waterfront in a state of limbo, allowing dangerous collapsed structures to exist in proximity to some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

3. For a history of the waterfront, see Kevin Bone, ed. The New York Waterfront: Evolution and Building Culture of the Port and Harbor (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997).

ÂŠ Leonard Fink, Pier 48, Interior, 1980. Courtesy of the LGBT Community Center National History Archive

And yet in a city where space is always at a premium, the piers did not stay empty, particularly in the midst of an economic recession. Many homeless people camped out in the pier buildings throughout the 1970s and 80s. But they were not the only squatters. In 1983 a group of artists led by David Wojnarowicz and Mike Bidlo took over Pier 34, the socalled Ward Line Pier, and made it an extension of the East Village scene. Andreas Sterzingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s remarkable photographs of the various projects realised there by artists including those by Louis Frangella, John Fekner, David Finn, and Judy Glantzman, display a marvellous sense of freedom and community. Yet with the notable exception of Fekner, whose site-specific 27

signage directly relates to its environment, most of these artists were mostly using the spaces to make the kind of sculpture and painting they might have done elsewhere. This was not the case for the first great communal art project on the piers curated by Willoughby Sharp in 1971. This avantgarde impresario and editor of the magazine Avalanche first recognised the potential of the abandoned piers as a vehicle for a new kind of conceptual and/or performance artist who wanted to break out of the studio and the traditional art system. At Sharp’s bequest, 27 artists (unfortunately all men) created pieces that were documented by the photographic team of Harry Shunk and János (Jean) Kender (aka Shunk4 Kender). According to Sharp, most of the pieces were conceived in a matter of hours, “some were done in just a few 4. Willoughby Sharp discusses the project in Luca Lo Pinto, “A Portrait of a Transcontinental Cultural Catalyst: A Dialogue with Willoughby Sharp,” Nero, no.14 (June/July 2007): 53-55. He mentions inviting 28 artists, but the 1992 Shunk catalogue only lists 27 (perhaps Sharp meant Shunk-Kender to count as number 28). The Pier 18 photographs were originally exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. In 1992, the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice organised an exhibition of the photographs and published a catalogue and interview with Harry Shunk. In the catalogue all of the photographs are attributed solely to Shunk. In fact, there is barely a mention of Kender in the extensive catalogue. It seems that Shunk and Kender were not only professional collaborators but lovers, and when their relationship ended, Shunk simply eradicated him from the history of the project. I mention it here because not only has the role of photography taken a back seat in the understanding of the project, but the fact that a queer couple was instrumental in its success has also been ignored. See Harry Shunk, Projects: Pier 18 (Nice: Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain de Nice, 1992). I would like to thank Arden Sherman, who wrote her master’s thesis on Shunk-Kender and Pier 18, for sharing her thoughts and research on their collaboration.

minutes.” The vast majority of the works took place on the uncovered section of the pier that thrust out into the Hudson River. A piece like William Wegman’s Pier 18 “Bill” Bowling, in which the artist sent instructions from California for the dock to be used like a bowling alley only to have the ball eventually fall into the river, emphasises both the enormity of the dock and its limits. Sharp made no attempt to get official permission to use the pier, which is why no one outside the artists’ immediate circle was invited to witness the events and why it was necessary to document the proceedings with the camera. Both Acconci and Matta-Clark discovered the piers through Sharp’s invitation. Matta-Clark’s Pier 18 piece involved the artist transplanting an evergreen tree onto a pile of debris. He then used a rope to tie one leg to a ceiling rafter and suspend himself upside down over the tree. His pose was borrowed from the hanged man of the Tarot cards, a figure that symbolises rebellion and transition. 5 Like Yves Klein’s famous Leap into the Void (1960, and also ‘documented’ by Shunk-Kender), Matta-Clark hung perilously over the abyss. At 5. For a discussion of Matta-Clark’s evocation of the hanged man, see Tina Kukielski, “In the Spirit of the Vegetable: The Early Works of Gordon Matta-Clark (1969-71),” in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 42. I would also like to acknowledge the importance of Thomas Crow’s writings on Matta-Clark on the genesis of my thinking about Day’s End.

the very inception of his career, the artist deftly manipulated earth, air, light, and water in feats of physical endurance and danger, involving cuts directly into the building that reveal aspects of its structure and the latent potential in its decay and imaginative reconstruction. From the outset, the artists who participated in Pier 18 knew that the process would involve some sort of interaction with photography. Indeed, the most important means of access to the project is through the photographs of Shunk and Kender, who were lovers. Typically in the history of conceptualism and performance art, such photographs are thought of as merely documents—the photographer’s task conceived in terms of creating uninf lected records of what occurred in the various performances. And yet in the case of the Pier 18 projects, it is clear that many of the artists conceived of their pieces as active collaborations with the photographers. For example, Baldessarri used his hands simply to frame New York harbour, in essence simulating the process of the camera composing a scene. Douglas Huebler asked Shunk-Kender to “establish the best ‘aesthetic’ shots of the pier and then mark the spots with an x.” The resulting photographs documented the chalk marks rather than the supposedly beautiful views.

Acconci used the Pier 18 project as an opportunity “to affect, improve, an everyday relationship.” In Security Zone he went to the end of the pier and was blindfolded. He then asked Lee Jaffe, a person Acconci claimed he had an “ambiguous feeling about,” a person he did not trust, to make sure that he did not fall off the pier as he paced closer and closer to the edge. According to the notes for the piece: I’m blindfolded, my hands are tied behind me, my ears are plugged; in my deprived position, I’m forced to have trust—there’s only one person here who can stop me from walking off into the water. The piece measures my trust; more than that, it builds up trust.

Yet if one dispenses with the notes and only looks at the photographs of the performance, the pictures seem to have nothing to do with such issues of self-exploration and trust. Instead, Acconci’s blindfolded and tied state, on the edge of an abandoned pier, evokes associations of torture, kidnapping, and even murder. In this film noir scenario, the artist appears to be blindfolded to maintain the security zone of the criminal’s identity and the location of the hideaway where he does his nefarious work. This aspect of Security Zone, as well as Acconci’s later piece for Pier 17 with its emphasis on

6. Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973 (Milan & New York: Charta, 2006), 248.

confession and blackmail, relate to the waterfront’s history of crime and corruption, most famously depicted in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Although the movie itself was largely filmed on the Hoboken side of the Hudson, it was based on a 1948 exposé in The New York Sun about corruption and violence in the longshoremen’s union in New York City that 7 directly affected the piers below Fourteenth Street. 7. See Malcolm Johnson, On the Waterfront (New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2005).

The bleakness of many of the photographs of the Pier 18 projects seems very different from the atmosphere of erotic exuberance of many of the later photographs of the piers taken at the height of summer in the late 70s and early 80s. Hujar’s photograph of the Morton Street Pier with a man in shorts, legs crossed and napping in the sun, or Hallam’s images of crowds of nude men carousing at the end of Pier 46, suggest why the New York Times in 1980 called the area “Manhattan’s Beaches.” 8 There is a Mardi Gras f lavour to these pictures of men enjoying the Hudson River and the freedom of so much open space that belies the theme of danger and decay that is such a staple of so many of the recollections of the area. Of course, at night, during cold weather it was a different story. We need only think about one particular Saturday, in early spring of 1971, when around midnight, Acconci stood before the entrance of Pier 17, a dilapidated and seemingly abandoned structure that had once been used by ships delivering cargo to the New York Central Railroad. He recalled, “I was afraid to go in. And I thought, is it worth going in? Is it worth going in?” 9 Acconci found himself in this predicament because of a performance piece he had devised and set into motion when he posted the following announcement on a wall in the John Gibson Gallery: 8. E.R. Shipp, “Disused Piers Become Manhattan’s ‘Beaches’”, New York Times 1980, B1, B5. 9. Jonathan Weinberg, Unpublished interview with Vito Acconci. Brooklyn, 19 April 2009.

I will be alone and wait at the far end of the pier for one hour. To anyone coming to meet me, I will attempt to reveal something I would normally keep concealed: censurable occurrences and habits, fears, jealousies—something that has not been exposed before and that would be disturbing for me to make public.

For Acconci the word performance resonates less with traditional concepts of theatre, than with the idea of fulfilling a bargain or that is, performing the terms of a contract: “You say you are going to do something, now you are going to carry it through.” 11 In this case, the artist promised that whoever was brave enough to seek him out on the pier could make “any documentation he wishes, for any purpose; the result should be that he bring [sic] home material whose revelation could work to my disadvantage—material for blackmail.” 12 Some seven or eight years later—we don’t know the exact date—Leonard Fink took a picture of David Wojnarowicz passing in front of Pier 46. Like Acconci, Wojnarowicz also risked wandering the interiors of waterfront warehouses at night, sometimes to make art, like the photographs from his Rimbaud in New York Series, but also to cruise and have sex with other men—that is, to literally commit the kinds of acts 10. Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973: 258. 11. Weinberg, Interview with Vito Acconci. 12. Vito Acconci, “Vito Acconci and His Pier 17 Project”, The Village Voice, 18 May 1971.

that in Acconci’s terms might be “material for blackmail.” Wojnarowicz remembered several of his nocturnal forays in his collection of autobiographical sketches, Close to the Knives: Inside, for as far as the eye could see, there was darkness and waving walls of iron, rusting sounds painful and rampant, crashing sounds of glass from remaining windows, and no sign of people: I realised I was completely alone. The sense of it slightly unnerving in the cavernous space. Street lamps from the Westside highway burn in the windows, throwing shadows behind staircases and burying doors and halls. Walked out on the catwalk and watched the terrific gale and tossing waves of the river from one of the side doors. Huge panoramas of factories and water tanks were silhouetted by green roof lights and cars moving down the highway seen only by the red wink of their taillights.

In 1975, Gordon Matta-Clark was also spending an enormous amount of his time at the waterfront. With the help of a loyal group of assistants, he used chain saws and acetylene torches to make the enormous cuts of Day’s End in the structure of Pier 52, only a few blocks north of Pier 46. More so than the nocturnal trespassing of Acconci and Wojnarowicz, MattaClark’s ‘improvements’ to city-owned property placed him in 13. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 19.

jeopardy of being charged with criminal vandalism. Defending his actions, Matta-Clark wrote that when he found the pier it had “become a veritable muggers’ playground, both for people who go only to enjoy walking there and for a recently popularised sadomasochistic fringe” and that “city-condoned anarchy reigns there.” He continued: ...in the midst of this state of affairs it would seem within the rights of an artist or any other person for that matter to enter such

a premises with a desire to improve the property, to transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascination and value.

Matta-Clark talked about how, in the process of making Day’s End, he was competing for the space with “the teaming [sic] S&M renaissance that cruises the abandoned waterfront” and, as if he were the pier’s rightful owner. Matta-Clark remembered, “I simply appropriated the pier by keeping my crew of henchmen boarding up and barb-wiring all the alternative entrances except the front door for which I 15 substituted my own lock and bolt.” Of course it was MattaClark whose aesthetic vandalism of city-owned property was actually criminal. (Indeed, the police tried to shut down the project and there was even talk that he would be arrested.) No doubt Matta-Clark’s ironic explanation that he was rescuing the piers from gay men wasn’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, and yet it raises several questions that go to the core of this exhibition. How did Day’s End relate to the queer subculture? Was there any kind of equivalence between Matta-Clark’s act of aesthetic vandalism and the sexual deviant behaviour that was being temporarily locked out of the space? Was there an erotic component to Matta-Clark’s 14. As quoted in Gordon Matta-Clark et al., Gordon Matta-Clark (London: Phaidon, 2003), 12. 15. Ibid., 12-15.

hyper-masculine acts of cutting that resonates with what he described as an “S&M renaissance?” In the end, queers were only temporarily shut out of Pier 52 as we can see from several photographs by Baltrop, Fink, and Seccombe. Indeed, Seccombe and Hallam, ended up recording the demolition of Pier 52 and what was left of Day’s End in January of 1979, with the great cut on the west wall still standing for a few more days, roof less and forlorn, a fitting memorial to the artist who had died four months before. That these two photographers knew nothing about MattaClark’s work when they photographed it testifies that, apart from an art world clique, few in the late-70s were aware of Matta-Clark’s supposedly scandalous transgressions. Far more shocking and notorious at the time, were the giant men with engorged penises that Tava (born Gustav von Will) painted on the west façade of Pier 46, in full view of the tourist boats that circled Manhattan. Hallam and Stellar both photographed how brazenly the handsome Tava went about painting his murals in broad daylight, almost challenging the police to arrest him. Day’s End changed not only in relationship to where the sun was in the sky, but also in terms of those who interacted with it, in and outside of the art world. As the artist himself put it, after the building was shut down “a lot of people took it upon 38

themselves to break in and so keep the work in some kind of 16 public domain.” Thinking about the piers encourages us to make connections between artists that are usually kept separate in art history, such as the performance artist Acconci and East-Village 16. Gordon Matta-Clark, Letter to Wolfgang Becker, 8 September 1975. As quoted in Thomas E. Crow, “Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London: Phaidon, 2003), 8.

painters like Wojnarowicz, but also to consider the way resistant subcultures that are typically seen as occupying different spaces and fulfilling different needs actually overlapped. And yet bringing certain artists and queers together in scandalous proximity is not intended to render a comparative judgment on their bodies of work, nor to imply anything about their private sexual proclivities. Certainly Alvin Baltrop and Gordon Matta-Clark made very different kinds of art and lived very different lives. And yet these two artists and their cohorts on the waterfront were attracted to the piers because they appeared to be outside or beyond social control—they were spaces of freedom. Particularly in the dark visions of Baltrop, their ruined state was also an apt symbol of urban decay and the vast economic disparities of socalled ‘late capitalism,’ in which industries and livelihoods are displaced in the process of seeking out ever greater profits and cheaper labour. Hardly ‘abandoned’—a word so often used to describe them—these piers were actually full of all sorts of activities and behaviours in which these artists inserted themselves. However, by juxtaposing the works of such different artists my goal is not to homogenise the strange artistic production along the waterfront, but to rescue that production from the sanitising effect of academic categories and compartmentalising. As Matta-Clark recognised, the aim is to 40

recover the piers as a site of “interest, fascination and value” but also risk and sexual adventure. What were the fates of the pier structures as the waterfront morphed into the bucolic network of green parks and bicycle paths we know today? Of the piers that figure in this exhibition, Pier 17 and 18 were the first to go, not long after Acconci made his project in 1971, buried under the landfill of Battery Park City. In 1979, Piers 51 and 52 were raised, and on into the 1980s, Piers 48, 46 and 45, followed. In the late 80s and 90s, these now open piers in Greenwich Village became a vibrant gathering place for a new generation of queers, and in particular gay, lesbian and transgender youth of colour. However, the concerns and interests of these groups were largely left out of the planning process for the renewal of the area. In 2002 the direct action groups SexPanic! and FIERCE! were joined by the Radical Faeries to protest against the Giuliani administration for “squeezing and regulating” queer spaces at the piers and throughout the city. They organised unsuccessfully to stop the conversion of the area into a traditional waterfront park for the adjoining aff luent 17 neighbourhood.

17. See Benjamin Shepard and Greg Smithsimon, The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York City’s Public Spaces (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2011).

Undoubtedly gay menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use of the area for sexual encounters dissipated even before the final demolition of Pier 45, the last of the sex piers, with the rise of the AIDS epidemic and its devastation to the queer community. Although the importance of the Manhattan waterfront in the life of gay men goes back to the mid-nineteenth century and the time of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, it seems hard to think about the pre-AIDS sexual activity on the piers without seeing in them the role of sexual promiscuity in spreading the disease. For example, After Stonewall, the 1999 documentary about the gay liberation movement, used a photograph of men cruising a pier building interior from the 1970s to illustrate the advent 18 of AIDS, although the disease was first identified in 1981. Similarly, the exhibition AIDS in New York: The First Five Years at the New York Historical Society in 2013 began with a huge image of men sunbathing at the piers as if that was where disease was originally contracted and spread. Equally misleading is the nostalgia that tends to permeate discussions of gay sex during this time. If the nudity and anonymous sex of the pier scene suggests the possibility of a radical rethinking of sexuality and community, it is not because it was somehow exempt from the hierarchies and prejudices of ageism, race, and class that unfortunately are still so prevalent in the queer scene today. For every Samuel 18. See After Stonewall, directed by John Scagliotti, 1999.

Delany who celebrates a Whitmanesque coming together of naked bodies along the waterfront, there are detractors like Arthur Tress, who was rebuffed when he tried to strike up a 19 simple conversation with a fellow cruiser. So much of the expressive power of the photographs of sex on the piers is built on the way the ruined structures literally casts a shadow over the proceedings, as if the gay men, and the artists who depict them, for all their lack of inhibitions, still carried with them a strong sense of bourgeois morality. Indeed, the pleasure and intensity of such sex is bound up with a sense that it is forbidden and dangerous. Yet in the end what makes the pier scene seem so extraordinary is the promise it offered of liberation. Was there really a time like this, not so long ago, when in the very heart of the cultural and financial capital of the United States queer men were seemingly so free? If we could remake the edges of Manhattan into a site of sexual and artistic experimentation, what else might we change? To invoke Matta-Clark once again, we look back at the piers with fascination and nostalgia as the harbinger of the very â&#x20AC;&#x153;citycondoned anarchyâ&#x20AC;? he claimed his own art mitigated, but which, in fact, was one of its most spectacular manifestations. 19. Jonathan Weinberg, Interview with Arthur Tress. Cambria, Calif., 26 December 2002. Notes:

This essay is based on my text for the brochure for the 2012 exhibition The Piers: Art and Sex along the

New York Waterfront, at the Leslie Lohman Museum, New York City. It is part of a larger book long project entitled Pier Groups: Art and Identity along the New York Waterfront 1971-1983 which has been partially funded by a grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation.

Alvin Baltrop Robert F. Reid-Pharr Late in Alvin Baltropâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, strangely energised as he inched toward his death from cancer in 2004, he took a remarkably arresting image of a patient whom he encountered in one of the several medical facilities through which he travelled as he struggled with and within his own disease. An elderly woman slumps fat and cloth draped in an overstuffed wheelchair while presumably awaiting her own imminent demise. She stares directly at the camera. Like many of Baltropâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s works, the conceit of the photograph is that there are multiple viewpoints bound together in a sort of uncomfortable equilibrium of seeing and being seen. As she sits busy living and dying the

woman is uncomfortably present. The dissolution of her body provides undeniable evidence of lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frailty while also representing the profound amounts of spirit, intellect, and bare animality that comprise a single human existence. Alvin Baltrop was a photographer of life. Though he is best known for his images of the decay and ultimate destruction of the piers on the west side of Manhattan, the many images that he took express a stunning hopefulness, even and especially as they chronicle the deaths of his subjects and the spectre of the profound bloodletting attending the AIDS epidemic in New York. Looking at Baltropâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work one begins to gain some understanding of what continues to motivate so many people to struggle through the insult of everyday life in the city. Cost, confusion and difficulty work together to shelter some value that is not immediately apparent on the well manicured avenues of Manhattan or in the lush gardens of Brooklyn. What Baltrop expressed in his work was a desire for the radical democracy promised by urban contact. The photographs represent his willingness to explore not so much marginal as interstitial spaces within the city, to search for the f luidity, openness and conviviality that exist side by side with relentless poverty and ever present danger. Baltrop achieves in his photography something approaching the transformative aesthetic and intellectual protocols imagined by Henri LeFebvre when he wrote that, â&#x20AC;&#x153;A social transformation, to 45

ÂŠ Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (male figure smoking), 1975-1986, Courtesy The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York

be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative 1 capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space.â&#x20AC;? In the case of Alvin Baltrop, this revolutionary transformation of daily life, language and space is understood and represented as less a fantastic explosion of new ideas and images than a process in which Baltrop, his subjects and their audiences are already very much implicated. Baltrop teaches his viewers 1. Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991 [1974]), 54.

to see a beauty that has always been present within so-called urban decay, a beauty that exists cheek by jowl with the most vulgar assaults against public space and the people who inhabit it. It is important to remember that the 1948 Bronx born photographer came of age in the United States during the most violent days of the civil rights struggle. He was fifteen when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, seventeen when Malcolm X was gunned down, twenty when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy fell. He entered the United States Navy in 1969 and served as a medic until 1972, witnessing some of the worst days of bloodletting as the U.S. blundered toward its final defeat in Vietnam. While still away from home he received word from friends that the 1969 Stonewall Riots had taken place, initiating the contemporary phase of the modern gay rights movement. What Baltrop saw, as he repeatedly turned to the crumbling infrastructure of New York City and the often beautiful, if just as often benighted, individuals who inhabit it, was a profoundly intimate connection between the destruction and renewal of urban spaces and the destruction and renewal of human bodies. Baltrop never accepted an absolute line between the ugliness of a dilapidated industrial building on the verge of collapse and the sun drenched beauty of youth gathered by the side of 47

ÂŠ Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (male figure by window), 1975-1986, Courtesy The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York

the river. Underwriting his aesthetics was an increasingly bold articulation of not only homoeroticism, but also an incredible sensitivity toward the codes developed by racial and sexual minorities, transgendered persons and youth inhabiting spaces like the west side piers. How remarkably attractive is Baltropâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photograph of a young man, dressed only in underpants, 48

socks, and sneakers, a cigarette dangling nonchalantly from his lips as, unaware of being watched, he attends to some task with his clothing, his face angled toward a large window through which gorgeous light spreads across his body and onto the thickly textured wall that frames him. Baltrop was a daring photographer adept at challenging received thinking about who and what could be recognised as lovely and appealing. Most of his subjects were black and Latino gay men, individuals often radically marginalised in the cultural life of New York, but nonetheless vibrantly alive and articulate as they negotiated the limited spaces available to them. Baltrop actively participated in the community of activist intellectuals (many of them lesbian and gay people of colour) who vigorously challenged hegemonic aesthetic ‘norms’ in the United States and elsewhere. With the 1982 publication of Zami, A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography, the New York born poet and essayist, Audre Lorde, not only invited black lesbian women to openly name themselves, she also gave her students and followers necessary instruction in how they might manage the complexities of their multiple—and multiplying identities. Keith Haring, ten years Baltrop’s junior, pushed previously ghettoised graffiti art to national and international prominence. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial 1986 show Black Males sparked debates and discussions about the 49

depiction of black men that continue even today. Marlon Riggs’ film, Tongues Untied (1989), demonstrated a vibrant, if largely unacknowledged, black gay male community. Jenny Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990), a documentary treating the black and Latino dominated drag balls of New York, presented breathtakingly lush images of sexual minorities that radically recalibrated received ideas about life and art in American cities. The portion of Baltrop’s career for which he is best known, roughly 1973 until 1988, was a time in New York during which the presumed hedonism of a population freed from 50

the stresses of the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam was met by dogged racial segregation, virulent homophobia, and often stunning poverty. At the same time, many individuals, including Baltrop, were re-conceptualising abandoned and overlooked spaces—and persons—in the city. That the west side piers that Baltrop so regularly and obsessively photographed stood largely disconnected from the rest of Manhattan allowed the area to become a magnet for not only sexual minorities, transgendered persons and homeless youth, but also a community of visionary artists seeking to reimagine the possibilities of derelict spaces. In spite of (or perhaps because of ?) their seediness, the piers became, like Times Square with its many porn theatres and novelty shops, a location at which unexpected forms of inter-racial, intercultural, cross-gender and class mixed investigation was possible. In 1975 Gordon Matta-Clark used Pier 52 as the site for his indoor park, Day’s End. Matta-Clark made openings in the pier’s f loors, walls and ceilings, allowing for the play of light, water and metal inside (and through) the structure. Baltrop was obviously aware of Day’s End. His work was in direct conversation with Matta-Clark and the activist artists who surrounded him. Where Baltrop remained distinct, however, was in his clear interest in demonstrating the already present splendour and pathos of the structures and the people who utilised them versus attempting to bring some new aesthetic conceit onto the scene. 51

Baltrop often slept in a van parked near the piers for days at a time. He developed relationships with some of his subjects and photographed others surreptitiously. Indeed what strikes one when looking at the whole of Baltrop’s oeuvre is not only how beautiful and delicate many of the images are, but also how toughened and unemotional they seem. Part of Baltrop’s genius was that while he necessarily stood apart from his subjects he never produced work that was aloof. The power of 52

his photographs is that even at their most staged there is an undeniable documentary element within them. A brown-skinned boy with a still adolescent face sits on a seat cushion atop fallen beams. His upper body is covered in a long-sleeved shirt, his naked lower body readily visible, legs spread wide revealing half-covered testicles. Great care has been taken to reiterate the artist’s attention to the composition of his images. The pose, dress and the boy’s drowsing posture produce a sort of geometrical elegance. A body seated on a heavy pile of vertical beams is rendered that much more graceful and fragile. What jars the viewer, however, what leaves us sputtering but keeps us looking, is the recognition that Baltrop’s ability to access this image, his luck at stealing this beautiful picture of a drowsing boy, is itself a factor of his subject’s low status. The boy’s person is displayed with all the provocative yet coy modelling of the prostitute at work. This is an image that is only available to us in the excess—and excessive—spaces represented by the piers. Baltrop’s openness to the exploration of negative space, his attraction to the hedonistic possibilities in the interstitial, unmapped zones in the city, cuts in many directions, some easier to look toward than others. The talented and extremely sensitive photographer openly courted vulgarity. Among the most difficult of Baltrop’s 53

ÂŠ Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (Navy), 1969-1972, Courtesy The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York

photographs are a series of works in which he documents the police taking possession of bodies found at the piers and in the Hudson River. In all of these instances the body itself is placed at the centre of the composition. Again, Baltrop is fussy and precise about the lighting. Light reiterates the body as the focal point of these works. Dead bodies splayed out and inert, a decayed cityscape, awkwardly posed police officers looking at and beyond death, disallow any retreat to sentimentality. Yet Baltrop remains ever careful to allow for a sort of refined sobriety in the photographs. The bodies are always carefully framed. One finds beams, posts and entire buildings helping to provide visual borders for the images. 54

In a work that may be one of the most arresting, one of the most disturbing within Baltrop’s oeuvre we see a corpse stretched out on a wooden dock. The head and part of the torso are covered by a wet dirty cloth. Streaks of murky water run down the cadaver’s form, its face turned away from us, only the slope of buttocks plainly visible. Three police officers stand aside with a sort of practiced nonchalance. Spectators have arranged themselves to the left. In spite of their shock they never f linch, never dare take their eyes from the scene as a police boat awaits the retrieval of the body. And perhaps most telling of all, the background of the photograph is dominated by a dilapidated building that seems itself to be sinking into the river, its curved form reiterating the lovely curve of the victim’s torso. In these most debased of images, human bodies fished out of the river like car tires, Baltrop demonstrates not so much new space as new ways of seeing our environments. He draws a direct connection between the life and death of human beings and the life and death of the built structures that surround them. In the process, Baltrop’s photographs take on a mournful quality, a melancholic yearning for the promise of community and conviviality that so many individuals retreated to the west side piers to find, the very community and conviviality that should stand at the heart of every city. We might say then that Alvin Baltrop’s importance for 55

contemporary audiences is that he forces us to consider what is lost within processes that we label with innocuous titles like ‘urban renewal.’ The eventual demolition of the west side piers and the ‘cleaning up’ of the area around Times Square in Manhattan has made these areas much more accessible to tourists and those classes of New Yorkers who would have been unlikely to venture into zones of the city thought to be lawless. At the same time, however, great violence was done to the structures and the individuals who stood in these spaces. Looking at Baltrop’s work today we realise that this process took a great toll on the city, helped to empty it of much of what makes it interesting. What Baltrop’s photographs make patently clear then is that the eventual destruction of the piers—and the many urban spaces that they represent— was first and foremost a violent process of substituting one aesthetic standard for another. For Baltrop there was little distinction between what he experienced when looking at one of the great buildings of the west side piers consumed by f lame and the equally arresting images of a human body sprawled out and decomposing on a dock. Alvin Baltrop was a photographer of life. Throughout his career he remained committed to demonstrating the uneasy intimacy that existed between vibrancy and decay, death and renewal, forcing us to refuse a too easy distinction between the beautiful and the vulgar. Instead Baltrop’s photographs 56

demonstrate with cunning and elegance the stunningly complex ways in which the human animal knows, inhabits, cherishes, consumes, represents and destroys.

ÂŠ Alvin Baltrop, Friend (The Piers), 1977, Courtesy The Alvin Baltrop Trust and Third Streaming, New York

Remembering Gordon Matta-Clark Jessamyn Fiore and Lorenzo Fusi in conversation LF The first time Matta-Clark made work in direct response to the New York piers was during the Pier 18 exhibition in 1971, when he did a performance hanging himself upside down above a tree sprouting from debris. How do you see Gordonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice changed between this initial performance and 1975, when he realised the building cut entitled Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End. JF The exhibition and series of actions as part of the Pier 18 exhibition ref lected the spirit of the times. The idea to invite a group of artists to respond to and intervene in an abandoned area of the city was not an isolated episode, but something that was happening in a number of different places. Gordon,

for instance, was part of 112 Greene Street, an alternative art space that opened in the fall of 1970 where he curated shows as well as exhibited, working with a group of artists to create work in a similar environment to the abandoned piers, that is a raw factory space. In the summer of ‘71 Alanna Heiss put on her first large group exhibition Brooklyn Bridge Event, which was a landmark event. She invited several artists, including some of those who were working in 112 Greene Street, to create site-specific artworks underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. At that time under the Brooklyn Bridge was another derelict site, a number of homeless people were living there and there was a lot of debris, uncollected garbage and bottles and car parts. Many artworks at this moment commented on the state that New York City was in and questioned the role of these urban spaces. For the Brooklyn Bridge Event Gordon created the piece Jacks where he hoisted up an abandoned car body to create a shelter. He followed that with Garbage Wall where he created a basic architectural structure—a wall—out of garbage. These works were inspired by looking at the homeless population; he observed how they lived and what kind of architecture they were creating themselves to survive. Applying his training as an architect, his pieces were a response to how he might meet their needs for a more durable shelter than cardboard boxes. His performance on Pier 18 would have happened around that point in his practice. It demonstrates how artists were 59

ÂŠ Gordon Matta-Clark, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

using the city as their canvas and creating work in sites that were considered abandoned or neglected, embracing their work as a part of this urban environment. The piers played a major role in this context. LF It seems to me that Gordon in 1971 was more directly engaging with performance and time-based work. He was not aiming at physically transforming derelict spaces as such. Rather he was activating themâ&#x20AC;Ś 60

JF I think this is a ref lection of the very experimental context in which he was working. In 1971 he almost created his own mini-residency in 112 Greene Street where he was doing limited interventions in the physical space and working with performers. There was an element of spontaneity and exploration of time-based work. He had not had the experience of creating any of the large-scale architectural cuttings yet. His first series of building cuts in New York were the Bronx Floors which he began working on at the end of 1971 into 1972. Similar to Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End, to create Bronx Floors he illegally entered the abandoned housing projects in the South Bronx and made cuts in the f loor, removing pieces. A number of cuts were right at door thresholds, making movement through the space difficult to further emphasise the buildingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s architectural failure to create habitable units for its previous occupants. These cuts were on a much smaller scale than his later architectural interventions. So it was then that he began to think about intervening with buildings directly. Instead of bringing the viewer to the building where the cuts were made, he took the removed cut pieces back to 112 Greene Street and displayed them there alongside photos of where the cuts were made. He eventually moved away from only displaying the residues of the cuts in a 61

gallery space and instead invited the audience to view the cuts and the architectural intervention in situ, radically changing the experience of viewing this work. In these early years (1970-1973) you see Gordon Matta-Clark experimenting with different mediums and means to express his ideas, culminating with his first large scale ‘cutting’ in the United States titled Splitting (1974). LF How do you see Matta-Clark’s work progressing from Splitting to Day’s End? JF It is interesting to look at Gordon’s works in relation to the buildings that he was given. Often the actual spaces, these architectural entities that he was able to obtain to do his cuttings, were slated to be demolished. The Splitting project, for instance, took place in a house owned by Holly and Horace Solomon (Matta-Clark was later represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery). The building was situated in a suburban area (Englewood, New Jersey) that was undergoing a severe economic crisis. As a consequence of the changing conditions, the house was to be demolished and the Solomons gave it to the artist. This happened time and again with his large-scale cuttings, such as Conical Intersect in Paris. For the creation of that piece Gordon was given two buildings that were slated to be demolished in the creation of the Centre Pompidou. He 62

was granted access to them through the Paris Biennial, though soon after he completed the work they were razed. However, in this context when one considers Day’s End, it is interesting to note that Gordon himself found and chose that specific pier for the location of his work and he created those cuts without permission, illegally. He was quite conscious of wanting to address these abandoned spaces in the city and highlight the city’s failure to address the architectural needs of its people. I 63

think that is something quite conscious, a thread throughout his work, particularly in relationship to New York. There is a very strong critique of the New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s management of its property and the treatment of its architecture but also of its citizens, in that way, a failure of public space, a failure of decent affordable housing, a failure of acknowledging the potential of these abandoned spaces that were at that time deemed to be good for nothing unless a developer did something new and impressive with them. This critique is something that can still be applied today. I think at that time, though the city was a very different city than Bloombergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s New York. It was going bankrupt; there was corruption, high crime rates, and a huge homeless problem. The city was thought to be dying and frustration arose with the local authorities who were not addressing these pressing concerns, yet allowing greedy property developers to take over areas of the city. Splitting is seminal work on many levels. It represents the beginning of this journey Gordon had with his large-scale architectural cuttings. These interventions were always a ref lection of the place and the context as well as the history and the story of the building. I think particularly with Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End and with his other New York City site-specific works, there is also this assertive political critique with a social justice 64

energy behind it, but done in a very thoughtful generous way. This is one of the reasons why I think Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End has remained so significant. It remains in the imagination of someone who views the entirety of his works, particularly someone from New York. The piece moves beyond just an architectural intervention in a space; it is an act of generosity. It is about reclaiming a space for the people of the city without regard to authority, making a statement about our rights as citizens of an urban space. It raises questions about how much control we have over that space and how can we transform it. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s obviously a relationship between all the cuttings but I think Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End is an expression of a larger dialogue he was having with the city of New York throughout his practice. LF The distinction you make between spontaneously reclaiming a building and having the opportunity to use a building because someone is granting you access to it is crucial. I guess there are different motivations behind these two operational modalities. The level of entitlement, or the right to intervene in a context, radically changes the meaning of and intentions behind the work. Reclaiming a space as a citizen, unlike being given a space as an artist, it is not about fulfilling your artistic ego, but it is a political statement.

JF Yes, absolutely. We are lucky in the case of Day’s End as there is a great deal of writing about the piece by Gordon himself. He did not have any kind of official permission to make the cutting in that property. When the authorities did find out (which was not until after he had finished the work as nobody noticed during its construction) it was because the piece got noticed by the press. Only after it was written about in a small article did the city officials realise that it was happening and might not be legal. A detective began to investigate and Gordon went to France to work on Conical Intersect, avoiding arrest. We have this great correspondence between Gordon and his lawyer who advised Gordon to write a statement of intent about Day’s End for the City of New York. In that statement, as well as in his correspondence at the time, the political element of the work is beautifully described; this idea that as an artist he is reclaiming a discarded urban structure and transforming it to create a public space made from the city’s own history. He created a ‘sun and water temple’, a post-industrial public garden, transforming an abandoned, dangerous, dark place that had been left to rot beside the river into a space that the public could feel secure entering and engage with the pier and waterfront in a completely different way.

ÂŠ Mark McNulty, installation view of The Piers From Here, 2013

LF Look at what eventually happened with the Highline. For many years it was a disused area, and now it is an urban gardenâ&#x20AC;Ś The story is very similar. JF Absolutely. I think the Highline is a really positive contemporary example. There is a lot more attention being paid to the waterfront areas of New York City now. I always thought that New York was such a strange city in that Manhattan is an island and all the boroughs are on the water, yet you can live here and not feel like you have any relationship to the water. Traditionally most of the properties that are on the water, or tall enough to have real views of the water, are very exclusive. It requires a lot of money to own a 67

boat here. There are people who have boats and are able to enjoy the water, but for most, unless you are taking a ferry, your relationship with the water is minimal. So this has been a city that, for a long time, the waterfronts have not felt accessible. With the West Side it is also a story of industrial decline, the Highline was an industrial railroad and the piers were all working as a point of commerce coming in and out of the city. The urban landscape had an economic function and it was left to decay when the industry left, as it did with so much of Lower Manhattan, during the 1960s and 1970s. There was no real thought or action by the City government as to what could be done with these spaces or what they could become. A massive waterfront should be a defining aspect of a city, something to be enjoyed by its people. Instead it was basically abandoned to become an area that was dangerous and inaccessible. It was not a place one would feel comfortable making part of your daily life or urban experience. There is a lot more development of accessible and vibrant public areas along the waterfronts in New York City now and I think overall the City has done a good jobâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;particularly when compared to what existed before. With other cities the debate is still openâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;what have they done with their pier spaces? It can go in the other direction, stripping it of any history or in some cases the population being cast out in favour of large corporations and anonymous architecture. You can really see that kind of 68

development in some European cities to the detriment of the local citizens. I think when living in a city, access to its water is vital. In this sense Day’s End brief ly created a beautiful way for people to experience a waterfront otherwise blocked to them. This reminds me of a story about the making of Day’s End. Because Gordon was creating a piece on the river he really wanted to capture the view of what it looked like from the water. He did not have a boat at that time because one needed a lot of money to own or even rent one. But he was determined to get this shot. After thinking about it he got in his pickup truck and went to Central Park where he rented one of the rowboats meant for rowing around the pond in the park. He snuck the boat out and brought it down to the pier where he took it out onto the river. He managed to get his shot from a Central Park rowboat. I think that is a wonderful story, if you want to reclaim the water space that is one way to do it, and the photos remain—beautiful images of the pier from the water. I love thinking about him in that rowboat, trying to get that shot. LF The piece was successful in pointing out that this was the state of affairs at that moment in time. The dilapidation of the piers resulted from the lack of political acknowledgment of that area. In terms of opening up the area to the people and 69

achieving what Gordon was hoping for (creating an urban park for the citizens) maybe the work was not equally successful, since the authorities reclaimed that space shortly after it had opened and shut it down again. Politically speaking, he made a strong statement. But it seems to me that with Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End Gordon opened up possibilities, more than opening the space up directly to the people, as suchâ&#x20AC;Ś JF It is a shame. What happened is that the piece got press. You can see that Gordon was upset about that in his correspondence. His goal was not to get a big article in the newspapers. He was counting on the City to just ignore the pier or to be so bungling that they would not be able to do anything about it. If it had happened that way then Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End would have been accessible to the public for a much longer time. It was that press that thwarted the intention. The opening was organised by Holly Solomon, his gallerist at the time, and she managed to get a lot of people there. There are some great photos of that opening. It was a double-edged sword though because Gordon wanted it to be accessible and experienced by the public but at the same time if you get too much attention then you are on the radar of the authorities. I think his intention was for the pier to go on ignored because it had already been ignored for years. He purposely chose a space that had been forgotten, it was obvious that the owners did not care about it and the City did not care about it. Even 70

ÂŠ Gordon Matta-Clark, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

for the transient groups who were occupying abandoned spaces such as the gay S&M scene that were meeting on the piers, this particular pier was not a ‘main stop.’ For all intents and purposes it was a completely forgotten neglected space and I think Gordon worked on the assumption that it could remain that way. He writes that his intention was for the work on the pier to remain for a year. Obviously with the press attention followed by the authorities’ investigation, it did not. It is interesting those moments in art history when art rubs up against the law, such stories can say a lot about the world during those periods. I think Day’s End would be one of those moments. This is a work that demonstrates the beginning of a considered social practice when it comes to public contemporary artwork. It was not just a sculpture in a nice field of grass or a contained, discrete object within a public space. This piece actually engaged the public space itself, inclusive of its history and population, the artist directly encouraging use and participation. At that moment such a premise was unthinkable to the authorities, it was a kind of art not known or understood. Luckily they did not end up pursuing the warrant put out for Gordon. Mainly their interest faded because Day’s End stopped generating publicity and embarrassing them. Their reaction was to change the locks on the pier, keep people out and ignore the situation. That is a statement in itself. The City was definitely in a crisis then. In the context of looking at the role of the artist in society 72

engaging in public works, what Gordon was doing at that moment was new. LF Thinking of Day’s End and looking more broadly at Gordon’s practice, can you tell us how Matta-Clark operated when he physically intervened in these abandoned places? There’s something unique and very personal in his approach to art making… JF His work was very physical. That is why we are so lucky that he was interested in film. You really see the physicality come across in his films and there is an also a strong notion of performance inherent to each piece as was clearly demonstrated in his early work. In the films documenting the later large-scale architectural interventions, Gordon is often in the shot capturing the incredible performative aspect of the work, the fact that he physically made these pieces often taking great personal bodily risks in the process. When you watch Gordon creating Day’s End, he is sitting on a kind of swing suspended at the end of the pier, being held up by just a rope attached to a hook and tackle, high in the air with a blowtorch cutting into the a building. There is an amazing reaction when people look at the scale of the work and then see how he managed to make them with just an assistant. They are such large-scale ambitious pieces; it seems like the kind of work you would need a whole crew to 73

execute. This adds to part of the thrill of his piece. There is something about the overall narrative of Gordon’s life that is an adventure story; his fearless approach to these artworks, deep thinking alongside amazing aesthetic choices. This physical involvement, this physical risk, he was really putting blood, sweat and tears into transforming these spaces. In the film of Conical Intersect, for example, you see Gordon actually knocking with a sledgehammer at those walls—it is a very dusty, dirty process because those buildings were hundreds of years old. There is this moment in the film when Gordon and his assistants finally push the last chunk out of the major circular cut. They stand in the cut and do a can-can dance 74

in celebration for the camera. He called it ‘sweat equity.’ He put sweat equity into these pieces and I think that was part of his commentary on architecture or rather ‘anarchitecture.’ With each piece of course he comes up with the idea and design but he is there working too, physically manipulating these buildings, transforming the material of the space. That rawness, that intimacy with the guts of a structure, is very much ref lected in the final product—the ‘raw edge’ of the cut. His documentation of the process carries through to the beautiful ways he then expresses these pieces through film and photo-collage; that sense of intimacy with the building really shines through in his photographic work. LF As we are preparing this exhibition for a photography gallery, I think it is important to look back at the way Gordon was thinking of and using photography within his practice. The physical component in his work that you were describing (be it performative or sculptural or, in fact, architectural) lived very much in the moment. We can think about Gordon’s work almost as a time-based practice. He was concerned about and interested in how to keep his pieces alive not only in the memory of the people who had experienced them first hand, and how to make them survive the moment. How do you think he related to film, photography and documentation? Ultimately, that seems to be the dimension where he thought the work would eventually survive. 75

JF Obviously he could not predict his own untimely demise. I think he always thought he would be able to do an architectural cutting that would be able to stay. That being said, what I think is really amazing, and maybe what has allowed his work to survive, is how he used photography. He did not just documentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if you look at his photographs, particularly the cibachromes and collages, you can see the work is more than documentation. I think what makes him remarkable as a photographer for this time period was his unique approach to photography as a medium. He physically engaged with the material of photography as he did with the material of architecture. He cut and taped the negatives which at the time photographers would have never done, the negative was considered sacred never to be touched. Gordon instead saw them as a material he could physically interact with and by doing so he created collages that matched up the lines, light and shadow of his cuttings. This in itself generated images that were interesting both physically and aesthetically, but furthermore they pointed to the kind of spatial disorientation or reorientation that would occur when an individual was physically standing within one of these cut buildings. He chose to create a kind of time-lapse in some pieces. In Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End for example, he consciously included time in his images by showing the various stages of the cut being made capturing different perspectives. How the light changed the space was of course essential to the understanding of the artwork. In 76

ÂŠ Gordon Matta-Clark, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

Conical Intersect, which he made right after Daysâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; End, he incorporated bits of moving image film negative alongside still negative in some prints so that the passage of time is emphasised as a valuable element to the whole piece that related so much to evaluating history and looking through time. His photographic works preserved the overall intention of the architectural interventions on a number of levels by 77

capturing how they were physically created and how the ideas embodied space, pulling in the elements of time, light, air, history, and context. The photographs capture that, as the works are incredibly unique. I see Gordon in a lot of ways as a conceptual artist; at the core of each piece is an idea. That idea was expressed through a physical intervention. It was expressed through photography, collages and interpretations of what that physical intervention was. It was expressed through his films, performance and writing, parts of his practice that have been underestimated. When you look at his films as a whole, there is an element of documentation of course but they are also quite thoughtful. They show not just the work but the passage of time, the attitude, the moment, the humour. He made a lot of films that were artworks in themselves. Playing with the medium of film and the physical materiality of film, City Slivers is a great example of such a film. You can easily see the relationship between this film work and his photographic collages as well as his architectural interventions. They are all expressions of a similar inventive journey. With all of his works there is an idea, a core notion, that every work is moving towards and perhaps nothing actually reaches it. When you look at the progression of how he designed his cuts and the process he went through in creating these works they included fails and changes. For example with Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s End he 78

spent time in the pier watching how the sun moved through the space, making a cut and then watching how the light moved through that cut across space, having one idea and then changing it… allowing spontaneity and responding to the conditions of the space, to the physicality of the work, to everything. In that way he allowed each of these pieces and the work surrounding them to express this core idea in some way, it is not closed. There is not an end to it. It is not a finite in the sense of “I’ve created this and this is what it is,” there is always an opening to think further, to take the notion to the next step. That is a part of what makes Gordon so inf luential 79

still, there is a generosity in every piece. It is like he is giving his view, his work, his idea, but allows there to be room for you to respond. This is what has allowed him to stay vital and interesting, worth revisiting to continue the conversation. LF We were talking about art as a public and social practiceâ&#x20AC;Ś With Gordon (and other artists of his generation) the role of the artist radically changed. The way in which these artists directly addressed and integrated the public realm by means of their work encouraged different readings of the socio-political context and proposed alternative economic scenarios. Their practice ultimately helped in the articulation of the idea that Art could act as a catalyst for social change and emancipation, taking the lead in the process of urban regeneration. We did not discuss instead one of the possible outcomes of this process, that is the passage from regeneration to gentrification, which to my eyes simply represents a further form of oppression and exclusion from established economical and political systems of large strata of the society. This happens when a certain area, once it has been reclaimed by means of Art, it becomes yet again inaccessible for other reasons. Do you think that Gordon was conscious and aware of the possible consequences that this process entangled? JF When discussing the areas of New York City in which he workedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;SoHo for exampleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the consequences in terms of 80

gentrification were beginning at the time of his death in 1978 but not nearly as pronounced as they would become. So I do not know to what level he was conscious of this being some kind of result from the artistic activity of his generation. What I do find very interesting about the artwork in the last few years of his career is the desire to move beyond what he considered the middle space of our urban lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the building, physical architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and expanding our urban environment down into the underground and up into the sky. He wanted to expand the conversation about urban spaces. In general the space that we are given, that we are allowed to say is ours, is often a closed-box apartment with perhaps access to the occasional public park. He wanted to demonstrate that in addition there is a whole vast underground that has potential for use and there is also the sky. His proposals for sky architecture are beautiful; they present constructions which are a mix of a public and private space. A drawing series titled Sky Hook/Balloon Housing (1978) present his initial ideas for this sky architecture suspended by a large balloon type inf latable and constructed from mainly rope that ties together a series of ladders and platforms. These proposed constructions would be open to the elements and even engineered so that they move, f loat from the top of one building to another. They would function as a quasi indoor/ outdoor space that allowed regular access to a part of urban life not normally experienced: the sky, the air and the view. 81

It is not a direct response to your question but I think it was his way of trying to look further than just the given architecture of the street level. Trying to see the city as a whole. Who knows what he would have created if able to go further in that exploration. Perhaps another clue as to how Gordon would have responded to the unforeseen consequences of gentrification can be found in another unrealised project at the end of his life. He was intent on creating a kind of informal community centre to work with young people from the Lower East Side that were in a bad economic situation and teach them how to renovate buildingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;basically how to do what he and his friends had done with the lofts in SoHo where they converted dilapidated factory spaces into living spaces. That was how so many artists at the time made a living, being electricians or plumbers, developing these disused properties. He saw these practical skills as the key to being able to engage with your physical space and transform it. So it was about more than just teaching the skills in order for the young people to make a livingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;though it had that benefitâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but to really reclaim these spaces as their own. It was something he began but never could never fully realise because of his death. I do not know if that counts as a response to gentrification necessarily, but this project was, at its core, based around the idea of 82

empowerment. Empowering the young people of these areas by giving them the tools, the skills and the knowledge to take back their spaces, either to live in or to sell, and ultimately be a part of the game rather than excluded and pushed out of their area. LF You’ve been talking about several aspects of MattaClark’s practice; we have touched on sculpture, performance, architecture, film and photography. We haven’t really spoken much about his writing, which I think played a crucial and fundamental role in his work... 83

JF I think his writing is underestimated, perhaps because Gordon did not publish texts in his lifetime. In that way he was a very different artist from Robert Smithson or others in that era who actively wrote pieces for publication. Gordon wrote a lot, though I would not say prolifically. Some of his writing is beautifully short like a kind of strange poetry, incredible writing. They are fascinating to look at because they are personal, notes to self. He has a series of note cards on which he would write various phrases, for example “shortterm eternity” or “moment to moment space.” Another is “eat your way home from the moon.” He would take these cards with him when he moved from place to place and in that way we know they were an important part of his practice. Whether they were personal references, ideas or some kind of trigger, I do not know. They definitely had an intention; they are not just scribbles. He also kept notebooks that are wonderful too. In many of them he would do small cuttings. Another way to see the importance of text and language in Gordon’s work is to look at the titles of his pieces. Gordon was the son of Roberto Matta, a Surrealist painter, and grew up in relationship to a great many other Surrealist artists. In the Surrealist movement the power of language is emphasised, particularly through playing with words. In the titles of both Gordon’s and his father’s works there are often double meanings. In Gordon’s personal correspondence it is evident 84

he enjoys playing with language and inventing his own words and spellings. There is a joyfulness in his writing as well as humour. His writing is also expressive of his ideas, intents and passion. It is not done in the typical voice of an art writer, it very much his own voice. This unique voice is also present in his interviews, the writing voice and the speaking voice very much related to each other. It has energy, an excitement— often not concise but rather running through ten ideas to land on a certain point and then take off again. When you read his writings and interviews together you find through lines—repeated images and power words. In that way I think the writings can really add another dimension to the understanding of his practice, particularly going back to Day’s End. Within these writings is a political and social frustration that relate very strongly to Day’s End, a work that is really him reclaiming a forgotten space in the city and transforming it. LF I seem to remember a beautiful drawing by Gordon, who was also a wonderful draftsman, a fact that is probably under acknowledged by many contemporary readers of his work… The drawing was an exquisite coloured sketch of a f loating island, and I think Robert Smithson had exactly the same idea at the same time. Can you tell us more about this strange coincidence? 85

JF They were neighbours and close friends and discussed ideas so this was probably one of the ideas they were playing with. Matta-Clarkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s proposal Floating Islands on the Hudson was to take barges and turn them into parks and f loat them around the island of Manhattan. For Gordon, between 197071, he was very much focused on organic architecture, making many drawings about trees; the architecture of trees and the energy of trees. At the same time he also became interested in public space and community gardens. He never was able to create a community garden but was certainly very interested in the idea and proposed creating guerrilla community gardens. This would consist of building a beautiful garden in an empty lot in the middle of the night and then disappearing so when people there woke up the next morning they would be greeted by a surprise beautiful garden. In 1971 in the basement of 112 Greene Street he dug a hole and planted a cherry tree. He planted grass on the mound of dirt from the hole and used grow lights for both the tree and the grass. So in a dank basement in SoHo, in the middle of winter, one could find a beautiful spring scene. The Floating Islands on the Hudson proposal was from this same period when Gordon was exploring possible ways to create a garden/nature space in the urban environment.

LF Every time I think about Gordon’s work, I simply cannot avoid thinking about the current Health and Safety legislation, Risk Assessments and normative behaviour… JF That is one of the really inspiring things about Days’ End: he wanted to make this piece so he just went ahead and he did it. A lot of people can argue that you could not do that nowadays, but I am sure you could also have made that argument at the time as well because it was illegal. At the end of the day he went and he did it knowing that there could be consequences. He just wanted to make this work. 87

LF Later on in his career, however he was invited to take part in major art events; in these cases, his risk-taking could not have happened without some risk-sharing from the part of ‘the institution’, the institutionalised art system I mean. I remember reading some of the correspondence. There were often serious concerns from the side of the institution, but the institution was still willing to take the risk and explore the realm of possibilities opened up by Gordon’s practice. I’m not entirely sure this would be the case nowadays. JF I think that is probably true, particularly with the Documenta piece, Jacob’s Ladder (1977). When you consider the physical risks Gordon took in creating his various large works, this piece stands out. It was a giant rope ladder he personally hung from the top of an incredibly tall smokestack. He climbed up there and hung it himself. He had wanted this piece to be, again like many of his works, one that included public participation. He wanted the audience to climb up the ladder and hang out there in this sky space. Of course everyone was too terrified to actually do that. I have no idea what Documenta thought in regard to the safety ultimately of that piece but they did of course allow it to happen. I do wonder if that would be the case today. LF In the case of the Documenta piece it is also about liability and defining who is ultimately responsible for the safety of the 88

maker as well as that of the audiences… I find it fascinating to look back at the way the institution responded at that moment in time to the stimuli and challenges that Gordon was confronting it with. I think Gordon made the institution think about itself, its role and its limits. He also invited the institution to push its boundaries. It was not only about Gordon making art and realising his projects… It was the entire environment and ecology around him that was put under stress by his vision. JF Around the same time of Jacob’s Ladder, Gordon was corresponding with MoMA in New York City regarding the possibility of a project. They could never agree on anything as they were interested in a discrete cutting whereas Gordon really wanted to pursue the sky architecture idea. It would have been really interesting to see what would have happened down the line because there was a growing desire of Gordon’s to have an architectural intervention that would not be destroyed. What would that involve though? Going into a space, cutting it, manipulating it and have it last—how would that work function in an institution? That question was posed after Gordon’s death when the only surviving cut building work was Office Baroque in Antwerp. There was a huge campaign by my mother, Jane Crawford, and Gordon’s friends to save that building. It was a shipping office that went broke and they let Gordon do this cutting piece there using 89

ÂŠ Gordon Matta-Clark, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

the entire building. It was still standing at the time of his death and they wanted to buy it to use as the basis for a new contemporary art museum in Antwerp. Unfortunately, it did not happen despite the group having raised a lot of money and donated artworks. They got to the point whereby they thought they had saved the building and then the owner changed his 90

mind and it was demolished. All of the money raised and the artworks did go towards founding MUCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp). In that way Matta-Clark played an instrumental role in giving birth to a new institution. It would have been fascinating if that building had survived and evolved into the basis of an institution. LF One of the main theoretical pinpoints of the Earth and Land Art movements was the notion of entropy, the idea of continuous transformation. Gordon was not necessarily part of those movements, but he surely was well acquainted with the ideas and arguments originating in those experiences. His physical architectural interventions haven’t survived. In a way it is fitting with the initial premise, the idea that nothing is forever (the no-monument, the anti-monument) and also positions Gordon’s work in relation to Conceptualism; what stays is the idea, the intention and the proposition… not the art-object. JF I think that is very true, though I’m not sure I would classify his work with the pure entropic notion, in the same way as Smithson. It was not the sense that he would make these cuttings and then the building would be destroyed but the piece was still there. The pieces did live on conceptually though not physically, going back to the initial premise of his work-generosity. Art as an act of generosity that puts forth 91

an idea or a question for you to take and continue. That was an intention that occurred throughout his work, he states it in his writing. In the early part of his practice so much of the experimentation that was about the relationship to the audience, to the public. Particularly when you look what culminated in FOOD restaurant and began with the exhibition underneath the Brooklyn Bridge where he roasted a pig—he invited people to eat with him, cook and share a meal as part of the artwork. Those simple acts transformed the relationship between artist and audience allowing participation but also enabling equalisation; an act of generosity to bring you in, to include you, to engage you. 92

Gordon took this generous and participatory interest and subsumed it within his overall idea of art practice—a novel notion at the time. Even with the architectural interventions there was always an emphasis on transformation— transforming space. It was not about destruction, it was transformation and evolution. It was about physically letting light and air into a space in way that had not existed before but also conceptually allowing new ideas to evolve, new notions of space, place and identity. This is an evolution that can continue, not residing in what was once the work’s physical location (entropy), but rather through what resides in the individual that engages with this work. LF I guess more than entropy, going back to the idea of alchemy. JF Yes. Gordon had a major interest in alchemy. He read a lot of books about alchemy and his earliest works contain a cauldron in the middle of his studio, throwing everything in and letting it transform. Urban alchemy is one way to describe it. LF I’d like to conclude this interview with Photo-Fry—how beautiful it is to think about an artist whose work will be presented in a photography gallery who actually started out his career by deep-frying photos! 93

JF That is a wonderful piece that was created for one of his very first exhibitions, a group exhibition titled Documentations with Jon Gibson in 1969. Gordon fried his photographs on a little cook stove in the gallery at the opening of the exhibition. What I love about this work is it demonstrates his interest in the materiality of photography combined then with the ritual of cooking. When you think of the smell that must have createdâ&#x20AC;Ś(laughs) Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great. That is what I love about his early pieces, they can stand alone as distinct moments and yet one can draw such a clear line between those early expressions of his relationship different materials, ideas and the audience and how those notions played out in his practice years later. LF Sure, and such playfulness JF Playfulness, yes. Playfulness is a massive part of it. A playfulness, a generosity, a humour but a kind of positivity too. That is a really important element of his work. He is addressing very serious issues and concerns, failures and frustrations. Going back to the idea of transformation and evolution, there is always a sense of possibility and it is a positive possibility. What we have in front of us is enough if we look at it in a different way. We have the space, we have the tools; the potential is there we just have to seize it, claim it, and do it. 94

Alvin Baltrop Biography Photographer Alvin Baltrop was born in 1948 in the Bronx, New York, and died of cancer in 2004. His earliest known photograph, entitled The Cloisters, dates from 1965, and his last photograph was taken in 2003 while he was in the hospital. After a career of almost forty years, he leaves behind him thousands of prints, negatives and contact sheets. Already as a teenager, Baltrop travelled around Manhattan with his camera. From 1969 to 1972 Baltrop served as a medic in the U.S. Navy and recorded the life on board the naval vessel. The resulting photographs reveal the homo-societal environment in which he was evolving, as well as his own sexual desire for men. Yet, the series of photographs he is most well known for is certainly those taken at the abandoned West Side Piers along the Hudson River in New York. It is during his period at the New York School of Visual Arts from 1973 to 1975 that he started to be fascinated with the piersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; activity. For over a decade, he then photographed the abandoned warehouses along the piers, where he encountered gays cruising, prostitutes, artists, runaways and criminals. He took thousands of pictures at the piers, and some of them include in the backdrop Gordon Matta-Clarkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s architectural interventions.

Gordon Matta-Clark Biography Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York in 1943 and died of cancer in 1978. He is considered to be one of the most inf luential artists of the 1970s. He realised many architectural and environmental art projects (all sitespecific) as he was inspired in those years by Land artists, especially Robert Smithson, whom he met while studying architecture at Cornell University. He participated to the Earth Art exhibition at Cornell in 1969. His formal studies in architecture made him realise he did not wish to become a ‘formal’ architect after he graduated in 1968. Instead, he wished to engage with experimental and radical architectural strategies: he wished to radically subvert urban architecture. He is best known for works in which he dissected existing buildings, slicing them open, such as Splitting (1974) for which he sliced a suburban house in two. Matta-Clark’s practice can be defined ‘anarchitecture’ — a combination of anarchy and architecture — and in 1973 he founded the Anarchitecure Group with a group of friends and peers. His interventions were temporary and were created by removing sections of buildings, such as Day’s End (1975) which consisted of making a series of cut into the façade and f loor and ceiling of Pier 52 in New York. Matta-Clark’s artistic practice ranges from photography, film, and performance, to drawing, photo-collage and sculpture.

Jonathan Weinberg Biography Jonathan Weinberg is an American painter and art historian based in New Heaven, Connecticut. In 1978, he received a BA from Yale University and in 1990, a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught at Brown University, Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2009, he was appointed Critic at Yale School of Art. Weinberg is the author of Male Desire: the Homoerotic in American Art; Ambition and Love in Modern American Art; and Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and the First-American Avant-Garde. As a painter, he has done artist residencies at the Getty Research Center and the Addison Gallery of American Art. Moreover, he received many fellowships including a 2002 Guggenheim, and most recently, a 2009 grant from Creative Capital to write the book Pier Groups: Art Along the New York City Waterfront in the 1970s and 80s.

Jessamyn Fiore Biography Jessamyn Fiore (born in 1980) is a curator, writer and artist currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the daughter of Jane Crawford, MattaClarkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s widow, with whom she helps manage the Matta-Clark Estate as codirector. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College (NY) in 2002, she moved to Ireland to run her own theatre company. Five years later, in 2007, she became the director of Thisisnotashop, an independent art gallery dedicated to supporting emerging artists based in Dublin. She curated several exhibitions at the gallery such as Gordon Matta-Clark FOOD (2007) and Fluxus with Larry Miller (2009). Two of the shows she curated for Thisisnotashop for No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents were presented in New York (X-Initiative, 2009) and London (Tate Modern, 2010). While in Dublin, she also founded, in 2007, The Writing Workshop with Jessica Foley. This collaborative forum brought together artists and writers working with text. In 2009, she received a Masters in Contemporary art theory, practice and philosophy from the National College of Art and Design (Dublin). In 2010, she moved back to New York City where she curated several shows, including 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (19701974) at the David Zwirner Gallery.

Robert F. Reid-Pharr Biography Robert F. Reid-Pharr is a critical essayist and Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. His research and publications mainly focus on issues of race, gender, sexuality and American culture and he specialises in literature from the twentieth century. He has published numerous essays and books, including Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (2007); Black Gay Man (2001) â&#x20AC;&#x201D; for which he won the 2002 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award for best gay nonfiction â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and Conjugal Union: The Body, the House and the Black American (1999). He has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Bibliography Books Lynne Cooke, et al., Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2010) Lorenzo Fusi, et al., Gordon Matta-Clark (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2008) Valerie Cassel Oliver, Alvin Baltrop: Dreams into Glass (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012)

Websites Jonathan Weinberg, About. www.jonathanweinberg.com/top/ [Accessed February 2014] Jessamyn Fiore, About: Curator, Writer, Artist. www.jessamynfiore. com/?page_id=2 [Accessed February 2014]

100

Published 8 February 2014 Open Eye Gallery Publishing