(Crow 2003)Īrt historian Pamela Lee has a different approach to the work. ![]() While another bundle of prints lay on the floor as an object analogue, the cascade descending from the ceiling points to growing readiness the manipulate the photographic document in the direction of suggestion and secondary illusion. registered a gritty streetscape while simultaneously conjuring some other, imagined space closer to reverie and dream. With the delicacy of watercolour or Japanese prints, he subjected cropped and enlarged segments of his photographs to a newly free manipulation of colour and tone. He hung strips of paper printed with close-up photographs of peeling and crumbling walls from derelict buildings in the Bronx and Lower East Side. Crow implies that the piece produces a new means of representing dilapidated architecture, quite distinct from traditions of socially-concerned documentary photography in New York City: For art historian Thomas Crow, the crucial significance of the work is the way in which the photographs distort the images of derelict housing, and therefore conjure a space of reverie. ![]() Wallspaper was one of the first works in which Matta-Clark’s interests in photography come together with his explorations of the built environment. However, it is not necessary to include this stack in order to present the piece. All of these presentations may or may not be accompanied by a stack of newspapers, derived from the seventy-two sheets, for viewers to take away. A third way is to make copies of the sheets, print them on long strips of newspaper and then hang them from ceiling to floor to replicate the 1972 installation. A second way is to make copies of the seventy-two sheets and pin these copies to the wall in a grid. One is to pin all of the seventy-two original sheets from 1972 to the wall in a grid. There are several different ways to display the work. The work now consists of seventy-two individual sheets that had originally been in the bundles of newspapers placed in front of the wall. Matta-Clark only presented Wallspaper once during his lifetime, and the long strips of newspaper hanging from the wall were destroyed some time after the Greene Street show. In 1973 Matta-Clark published an artist’s book entitled Wallspaper (Tate L03017) in which he reproduced the coloured prints that he had made from the original black and white photographs. A number of the original black and white photographs from which the installation derived also survive (see Walls 1972, Tate L03014–L03016). These booklets were made of individual sheets of newspaper, each presenting one photograph of the Bronx walls. The installation also included a stack of newspaper booklets which viewers were able to take away. The wall consequently looked as if it were ‘wallpapered’ with images derived from walls in another part of New York City. Next he printed the photographs on long strips of newspaper and hung these strips on a large wall from ceiling to floor. First he heightened the colours of the photographs to abstract the images of the derelict houses. Matta-Clark used the photographs to create his installation. Some of these walls were covered in paint that was flaking away other walls were covered in wallpaper. ![]() As only the facades of the buildings had been taken down, the photographs reveal the interior walls of the houses. Earlier that year, he took various black and white photographs of derelict and semi-demolished project houses in the Bronx and the Lower East Side of New York City. ![]() Wallspaper is a multi-part installation comprising photographs and newsprint, which Gordon Matta-Clark presented at the artist-run space 112 Greene Street in New York in 1972.
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