Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark at The Barbican

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark at The Barbican

02 March, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys is captivated by the Barbican's celebration of the early 1970s New York art scene.

I always wince when projects looking to the past feel the need to root themselves in the present. The notion of 'relevance' is an oft-overstated (and misunderstood) one. But when it comes to Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark at the Barbican it's kind of unavoidable. The parallels between the environment evoked in this new exhibition – subtitled 'Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s' – and our own are fairly unavoidable.

Of course it's dangerous to make generalisations about something as heterogeneous as a city's art 'scene' but there are certain things going on in London right now that are hard to avoid. Shoreditch is basically over (Boxpark will make sure of that); the 2012 Olympics look set to crush Hackney Wick too; instead, vibrant art scenes have popped up across south London – in Peckham, Deptford and New Cross. Today it's less about shock tactics and the artist-as-brand, as it was in the YBA New Labour years; now it's about interaction, collaboration, social consciousness and a sense of community – both in terms of artists working together and in terms of art as a force for communally-minded resistance against the developers' bulldozers and endless 'exciting' retail/leisure/commercial hub transformations.

And this is exactly what was going on in New York in the early 1970s. As curator Lydia Yee makes clear throughout the show, these are artists working very much within and against their (decaying, urban) environment. This is art rooted in its time. Gordon Matta-Clark was buying up 15 lots of 'gutter space',  making art out of abandoned cars, setting up communal artist-run restaurants, cutting holes in buildings. Trisha Brown was holding dance classes and walking down the sides of buildings. Laurie Anderson was drifting off to sleep in public places.

Packed with video, drawing, sculpture, installation, photography and archival documentation, this is rather a slow-burner of an exhibition. It does in places feel like just a lot of half-thought-through hipster nonsense. But it rewards quiet, considered engagement, and gradually it becomes clear that this is a brilliant appraisal of three peculiar, nuanced, articulate and, now, extremely influential artists. Many of the works – particularly on the ground floor – are recent reconstructions of pieces from the early 1970s. Initially this feels cheap – reconstructions certainly undermine the supposed grandeur of the Royal Academy's execrable Modern British Sculpture – but actually I think it works.

There's something about the ephemeral nature of many of the works that to exhibit them solely in the traditional manner – archival footage, artefacts, old documents etc – would make the whole thing seem stale, like a museum display. But it isn't. Of course this is helped by dynamic re-enactments of Trisha Brown performances – there's people walking round the walls and climbing through clothes on an elaborately roped construction. But there's also works like Laurie Anderson's The Electric Chair, here reinterpreted by contemporary artist Tom Foulsham in collaboration with Anderson itself. A weird contraption that incorporates flickering neon strip-lights, a keyboard with clamped down keys, microphones, gaffa tape, endless precarious wires, and an office chair brought to life; it fizzes with dynamically unpredictable energy.

What the exhibition does so elegantly is to reappraise the physical environment in a manner that echoes that of the artists themselves. So you can listen to one of Anderson's sound works through your elbows, or by resting your head on a pillow, or by reclining on a pair of enormous cushions in a calmingly darkened room. Likewise, there's a reconstruction of the skip from Matta-Clark's 1972 intervention/performance, which visitors can explore inside. Alongside his colourful wish-fulfilling drawings of plants and flowers aboard barges on the Hudson River, his hieroglyphics that look like buildings, and projects such as the brilliant Window Blow Out, this work establishes Matta-Clark as something more than the romantic young rebel of art and architecture history.

His work presents a complex and ambiguous response not only to the period's architecture and town-planning fashions, but also, of course, to the city of New York itself. The exhibition does a brilliant job of showcasing this complexity, and I suppose, given the Barbican's own ugly grandeur, this is the perfect place for such explorations to happen, and to happen now.

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark is at the Barbican until 22nd May 2011.

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Image credit: Pioneers, Caroline Goodden Walking on the Wall, © Carol Goodden.

Tom Jeffreys