Recently, I visited the Carriage Trade gallery, in New York’s Chinatown, whose latest exhibition, “Cutting Through the Suburbs,” looks back at art that emerged from the suburban sprawl of the early nineteen-seventies. The show—a mixed-media collection that includes models, photographs, video, and drawings—features work by four artists: Gordon Matta-Clark, Bill Owens, James Wines/SITE Architects, and Howard Silver. Peter Scott, the show’s curator, joined me in the gallery’s screening room to watch Matta-Clark’s film “Splitting,” from 1974, which shows the artist cutting a house in two. Matta-Clark, shirtless and sweating, swings a hammer while the house comes apart; bricks and mortar quiver until we can see through the new gap to the trees in the back yard.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Owens’s black-and-white images of middle-class families give a sense of the political climate of the time. A TV set flickers with Nixon’s image; in a kitchen, a woman with curlers in her hair holds a baby; the caption under the photograph reads, “How can I worry about the damned dishes when there are children dying in Vietnam.” “Best Showrooms,” a James Wines/SITE Architects project, takes up most of the gallery. Wines, who is an architect and an artist, remodelled the façades of nine branches of Best, a chain of catalogue showroom retail stores. He treated the exterior of the Houston, Texas, location to look as though it were crumbling and decrepit; in Richmond, Virginia, the brick wall appears to peel off the building. There are photographs, drawings, and architectural models of the project, and the filmmaker Howard Silver made the project the subject of a series of films, which are also on view.
The art in “Cutting Through the Suburbs” was made in response to consumerist tensions and the housing crisis of the nineteen-seventies. Though much of the exhibition is earnest in tone, there’s also humor in the work. The videos in particular have a looseness that buoys their provocative ambitions, a renegade spirit that still feels bracing, forty years on.
“Cutting Through the Suburbs” is at Carriage Trade gallery until May 25th. All images courtesy Carriage Trade.