Garbage Wall, first made by Gordon Matta-Clark in 1970, reflected a bankrupt New York, its dereliction and its human costs — the homelessness and marginal existence of so many.
A proposal for a new architecture, formed from the city’s detritus — just rubbish, chicken wire and cement — it was an almost utopian gesture. Matta-Clark hoped others would take it up and improve it. The work has been reconstructed several times, as it is here, but it was meant for the streets; its radicality translates poorly in a Mayfair gallery.
More evocative are works which hammer home Matta-Clark’s identity as an “urban archaeologist”. Hand-coloured photographs of New York graffiti extol the artistic virtues of tagging long before Basquiat and Haring. Most of Matta-Clark’s most famous endeavours, the “building cuts”, where he sliced into the fabric of abandoned structures, no longer exist.
But the films and photographic collages relating to works such as Splitting (1974), where he cleaved a derelict 1930s New Jersey home in two, and Office Baroque (1977), a more elaborate series of cuts in an Antwerp building, are far more than mere documentation. They evoke the projects’ playfulness, an engagement with abstract sculptural shape and spatial structures but also a sense that, as the artist put it, “the shadows of the persons who had lived there were still pretty warm”.
Until Dec 20 (020 3538 3165, davidzwirner.com)
