Gordon Matta-Clark

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DAVID ZWIRNER

One piece in the recent show of Gordon Matta-Clark's work, tilted Blast from the Past, 1972-73, consists of a vitrine containing a photographic fragment of a small pile of trash measured by a ruler, a reconstruction of the floor sweepings on the neutral white bottom of the display case, and these handwritten instructions: "Puzzle kit... contains all the parts necessary to recreate this compelling scene from history of my floor ... Just use this simple diagram to put everything in its proper place." The disjunction at the center of this work, the impossibility of following the instructions "to put everything in its proper place" if that means re-creating the specificity of that pile of trash, on …