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New York in the ’70s: the pioneers head downtown.

A Fortnightly Review of

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark
Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s
3 March 2011 – 22 May 2011
Barbican Art Gallery
London.

By Michelene Wandor.

High art above SoHo. (Click for BBC slideshow.)

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1970 I spent a couple of weeks in New York. I was staying with friends somewhere up on Riverside Drive. (I broke a bowl in their flat, for which I feel I never apologised enough; such is a bit of the stuff of which memories are made.) I spent a lot of time wandering round Manhattan, discovering the excitement of Greenwich Village, and venturing into the old/new milieu of SoHo. This was the (not-so) former industrial area, just south of Houston Street, where deserted and dilapidated buildings – warehouses, factories – were being taken over by young urbanites. I hung around in what were called lofts – now a familiar real-estate word – which were bigger, creakier, dirtier and more chaotic than the London squats in which some of my friends then lived.

Here there were performances, poetry readings, art. Some of these events resembled the free-form post-censorship theatre of London, the ‘Happenings’ of Jim Haynes’ Arts Lab, and the genuinely open poetry readings, where Bob Cobbing’s concrete poetry and music events were cheek by jowl with the post-Ginsberg ramblings of younger British poets.

Visiting New York showed how much the British radical arts ‘scene’ owed to its American pioneers. In New York, there were fewer clashes between the agitprop politicos and the aesthetes just seeking to radicalise ‘art’. Here, SoHo had the feel of integrated locations for a new way of combining artistic/political activity.

THREE PEOPLE FROM THIS community figure in an exciting exhibition at the Barbican centre. Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown and Gordon Matta-Clark lived and worked in downtown, recession-driven New York. All three engaged with their environment in fierce, political ways, integrating their separate artistic disciplines architecture, visual art, music, sound, dance, structural engineering.

In the pleasing and fluid exhibition space at the Barbican, these activities are recorded in framed images, occasional objects (a battered pair of dance shoes used by Trisha Brown), and in performances, recreated at intervals throughout the day. Matta-Clark took urban dereliction as a starting point for what became three-dimensional, site-specific (as we would now say) art works, tearing up floorboards, exposing wiring, juxtaposing photographs of sections of the building which play havoc with the viewer’s sense of perspective. He turns buildings inside out – just as, decades later, Rachel Whiteread has turned buildings outside in.

Wall walker. (Click for audio slideshow.)

Still within architecture, space and perspective, Trisha Brown’s city-dances and improvisations are visible in videos. Wearing red, she stretches and moves against the grimy greys of New York slums. In exciting contrast, one of the performances on the day I visited consisted of a group of dancers, all in black, re-enacting ‘Walking on the Wall’ (1971). Wearing harnesses and suspended from high girders, they do, literally, walk along two walls, meeting and overlapping at right angles. This means the dancers are suspended sideways, but walking normally, as if they are standing the right way up. It is peaceful, serene, and very, very clean: black and white, all a long way from urban decay.

LAURIE ANDERSON IS REPRESENTED here by sound sculptures – ‘The Handphone Table’ invites the spectator to sit at a table, place elbows in small declivities, hands over ears, to listen to the vibrations activated by the contact with the table. We are reminded, in framed photographs, of her busking in the streets with her violin.

The exhibition also has a number of examples of the graphic work of all three. Matta-Clark’s diagram of ‘Tree with ropes’ recalls his grounding in architectural drafting. Anderson’s sound pictures are meticulously drawn, using blank sheets and musical staves. Brown’s choreography is precise and beautiful on the page. The anarchically radical and free-flowing work represented here comes from traditional artistic and graphic trainings.

From the very beginning there is a stark contrast between materials, form and content: the process which makes art history is ironically very visible. Videos and sound, recreation, give a flavour of the original chaos and vigour, out of which a genuinely new ‘found’ and ‘made’ series of artistic experiments developed. The rest is beautifully framed: pages from notebooks put behind glass, in something of the same way in which pages from illuminated medieval manuscripts are ripped from context. Memory and the importance of history take their toll and change contexts. At least here, much of the original is still available.

Michelene Wandor’s two most recent poetry books are published by Arc Publications: Musica Transalpina (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), and The Music of the Prophets. She writes about the arts for The Fortnightly Review.

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