Featuring Trisha Brown’s live performances/choreographies, rare video documentation of Gordon Matta-Clark’s dissected buildings series, sculptures, photography as well as Laurie Anderson’s most popular audio pieces, like The Handphone Table, 1978, this exhibition is a great opportunity to experience the interconnections between these three key figures of the informal ‘downtown movement’ of 60s-70s New York; discover moments of cross-fertilizations of ideas and art forms, all coming together to form the vibrant artistic community we nowadays call Soho.
The exhibition is curated in such a way as to not only do justice to individual works but also to shed some light into how and why ‘New York city in the early 70s was Paris in the 20s’. Imagine a city on the verge of bankruptcy, followed by the disappearance of major industries, leading to many artists, musicians, film-makers and performers taking over its derelict industrial lofts, turning them into live/work studios, using them as galleries/art spaces. Thus giving life to a new kind of experimentation period, where the formalism of white cube minimalism and Warhol’s infamous socialité parties, were now replaced by a mood for more ephemeral urban interventions that were in dialogue with everyday life, like Gordon-Matta Clark’s Open House, Greene Street, 1972 or their culinary communion Food, 127 Prince Street, New York, 1971, moving towards a different kind of political art, and eventually opening the space for subsequent generations of contemporary artists and performers.
Questions of the body, the phenomenological impact of sound, spatial relationships, socialized architectures, and movements in between, are all very pertinent here, together with beautifully orchestrated moments when the performative becomes architectural and vice versa. Coming out of the exhibition one can’t help but wander what is the relationship of the body to its environment today? How can we use urban spaces as places for public interaction, play and art?
“I am walking on a tight rope.
Backwards and Forwards.
Backwards and Forwards.
All my family is around me.
If I fall I will crash them [...]
A very thin line.
A line that is made by my blood”
Says Anderson through her Talking Pillow,1978 directly to the visitor’s ear 30 years later.
I wanna to make her pillow home...
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