This is the wrap-up session, huh?
We’ll get a chance to summarize
exactly what, uh-
what this all amounts to.
All this dust, dirt, depravity, and
spatial complexity.
David Hammons’ Day's End
is based on a piece by Gordon Matta-Clark
that was made in 1975, which was also called, Day’s End.
It is literally built on the footings
of the original Day’s End
that was torn down 40 years ago.
And it is the exact, precise dimensions, to the inches,
of what that original building was.
Gordon Matta-Clark was this remarkable artist
who was making work in the 1970s.
A really internationally-recognized figure
known for ambitious interventions.
He started, though, with things
that would be embedded in the street
that could come across very similar
to how Hammons started some of his earlier works.
There’s sort of this shared sensibility between them
of understanding the very social structure
is what was worthy of being mined
and explored and intervened in.
He had this word for it, “nonument”
Like a non-monument. “Nonument.”
See, that’s like typical Gordon.
This is a sculpture made out of
large found material, a piece of architecture
and an engagement with that
and the intervention in that space.
And I see that also happening
with David Hammons’ Day’s End.
Its whole reality is based on
this found material of this past.
The area below 14th Street,
that goes all the way down to where
the World Trade Center buildings used to be.
Was part of the world's largest port,
from the beginning of the 20th century
to the middle of the 20th century.
It fascinates me that something that was
so indicative of modernity
and of globalization, if you will,
and of technology in the 20th century
could become obsolete and really turn into ruins.
Several amazing artists made art in these spaces
because they were open and available,
including of course, Gordon Matta-Clark at Pier 52,
which was also a particular place
where lots of gay people would hang out on the piers
and sunbathe and have sex,
and it could be a kind of communal place.
We often think of piers
as these, kind of, flat open spaces,
but, in fact, this was a built pier
because it had a role to play
in the manufacturing and shipping scene of New York City.
Gordon went into this site and began to cut into it.
Gordon made five cuts.
Some were actually in the floor.
So you would see the rippling in the water underneath.
There were cuts where you could see the sky
and there were cuts out across towards the river.
By the time I got there,
Gordon had already, like, cut the eye or the front,
and dropped that down.
Then, literally, for two and a half months, every day,
chainsaws, oxy-acetylene torches.
You know, the noise, you couldn’t believe.
It was like total anarchy.
It was totally illegal, right?
No, we didn’t have a permit. We took it over.
You feel the mass of the emptiness.
Like the same way that you would feel
a mass in the structure,
Gordon was always talking about how
architects contained space,
divvy it up and contain it.
And he basically was interested in
opening up space, total opposite.
Revealing it.
I mean, that’s what he was doing.
He was carving architecture, which is a fantastic idea.
I never was in Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End,
but from the photographs,
I always flashback on the
great rosette window in Chartres Cathedral.
And you’re sitting in this dark cathedral space
and you look up and there is the light,
big and round above you.
To go into this relic,
this thing to be cast away or forgotten,
and reimagine it,
I feel like Hammons shares that sense entirely.
Of course, we mourn Gordon Matta-Clark
who died as a young man of cancer in ’78,
and Day’s End was torn down in 1979.
It was a very personal project,
a very, kind of, unimaginable project.
Gordon was always about that.
You know, really trying to get joy,
the maximum amount of joy out of anything.