In Walls
(1972), Matta-Clark created a series of photographs in the Bronx capturing
the interior spaces left exposed through demolition on the exterior of the adjacent
architecture. Flattening the perspective of these surfaces of exposed brick and
peeling paint, the artist abstracted the forms of the city, revealing a visual
rhythm and poetry while simultaneously exposing the neglect of these
neighborhoods. The close-up images show the tender intimacy of his work in and
on interiors, while the wide shots reveal the artist's layered and splitting
vision of the city that would continue to reveal itself even more expressly in
his later work. In a successive exhibition at 112 Greene Street, the downtown
artist space Matta-Clark co-founded, the artist printed Walls images on sheets
of newspaper and hung them on the gallery walls, transforming the photographs
of crumbling walls into an abstracted pattern in bright primary and secondary
colors and titling the strips Wallspaper Sheets (1972). He
simultaneously created an artist book, recoloring the black and white source
photographs in yellow, green, blue, red, purple, and orange inks, and printing
the images on thin pages split down the middle, so the viewer continuously
rearranges which segments of walls go together, mixing and matching the
fragments. The cover provides a wider view of the source photographs: four
images from a contact sheet, "cut" in the camera, revealing the
serial sectioning of the housing blocks.