ALVIN BALTROP AND GORDON MATTA-CLARK
2013-12-09The exhibition focuses on the area of the Piers in New York City during the mid 1970s, and speaks of the state of abandonment and dilapidation these underwent as a consequence of the oil crisis that reconfigured the geography of the city as well as the international market and trading system.
The New York piers act as a mirror or counterpart of the Liverpool’s docklands. Historically linked via the transatlantic route that since Colonial times, connected Europe to the Americas, the Piers in New York and the docks in Liverpool experienced a similar process of transformation. Being unproductive and deserted, these were gradually reclaimed by an invisible population who used them for a variety of activities, spanning from gay cruising, drug-dealing and smuggling to prostitution, but also bringing together an underground community of visual artists, musicians, film-makers, performers and photographers.
Whilst Gordon Matta-Clark was pursuing the idea that art could act as a catalyst for urban regeneration and land re-appropriation, Baltrop investigated the life at the margins, mapping hedonistic displays of flesh, occasional sexual intercourse, corpses that could be mistaken for sleeping squatters (and vice versa) and other traces of humanity hidden amongst the interstices of society, notwithstanding the sense of freedom and liberation originating in the sexual revolution.
Exhibition runs through to February 9th, 2014
Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
Liverpool Waterfront
Liverpool
L3 1BP
