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Much in the same way that Dean’s subversive remake of Hollywood stardom during the mid-1950s drew on his deepest psychological conflicts, two decades later Matta-Clark cut through derelict buildings with chainsaws to reveal their long-hidden interiors. He likewise saw the spray-painted graffiti that were appearing all over New York City not as vandalism but as a means for common people to reclaim their civic identity, and his arresting super-long photos of “tagged” subway cars presented them as a new kind of kinetic pop sculpture. This interest anticipated by several years the emergence of artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who began as outlaw taggers but became stars of the 1980s art scene after being discovered by savvy dealers, as well as Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film Wild Style, the first cinematic treatment of the downtown graffiti and hip-hop culture. In all, Matta-Clark sought to expose the failures of a rich but misdirected society that during the Vietnam War let its public responsibilities erode, which gave his seemingly destructive approach a sharply political edge.
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Never was Matta-Clark’s genius more dramatically demonstrated than in Day’s End (1975), his unsanctioned appropriation of Manhattan’s abandoned Pier 52 on the Hudson River, which he stealthily turned into what he called a “sun-and-water temple.” This he accomplished by burn-cutting through the corrugated metal walls of the vast, disused maritime cargo terminal to create a series of painstakingly plotted, curved openings through which sunlight would stream to form veritable sculptures that had a cosmic aura that, doubtless, would have impressed the druids of Stonehenge.
The exhibition’s close proximity to the sites of some of the artist’s most important deconstructions in the South Bronx, epicenter of the urban squalor that accompanied the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis, adds particular immediacy to this survey. One highlight is Bronx Floors (1972–1973), a nearly four-foot-square chunk of wood, linoleum, and patterned dark-blue wallpaper preserved from one of his apartment-house demolition derbies, and later given to the Museum of Modern Art by the former husband of Matta-Clark’s first dealer, the risk-taking SoHo gallerist Holly Solomon.
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