Goodbye Old Masters, Hello Matta-Clark
October 2nd, 2009Tomorrow is the last day for the Old Masters exhibition – which means the works of art we’ve been living with for about a year will be heading home. This also means that next week we begin the installation for Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark. As has been well-documented here in the past, install is my favorite blogging time of year. And with these works, I know we’ll have lots to talk about.
New exhibition season really kicked off today with the Citygarden’s newest installation on their video wall, featuring two works chosen by our Senior Curator, Francesca Herndon-Consagra, for their relation to the exhibition. The videos are shown in tandem, and in both, the abandoned and the discarded are transformed into art. First is Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 film Conical Intersect in which you see him literally carving out circles in an abandoned Parisian house. This film will also be on view in our exhibition, after it opens on October 30th. The second is called The Way Things Go by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss and features a 100-foot long chain reaction they created out of discarded and common items inside a warehouse. You can also see more of their works on view right now in the Contemporary’s current exhibition.
We took a field trip down to Citygarden this morning to check it out:
A few young kids were sitting close-by, completely wrapped up in the action of Conical Intersect. As Gordon took the first chunk out of the wall one of them squealed in excitement, “He’s cutting through the building!”. Stay tuned kids, it only gets better from there.
