Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

by Fiona Anderson

successes was, Foote wrote, the Rooms show in June 1976, a “remarkable spur-of-the-moment exhibition” in which around eighty artists participated. Artists such as Robert Ryman, Joseph Kosuth, and Acconci “hacked, gouged, stripped, dug, poured and picked away” at the building’s “rotting hulk.”33 Matta-Clark produced a cutting work that extended through all three floors of the once-derelict building. The spaces themselves seemed to demand this kind of revolutionary approach. A “crummy” space, Foote wrote, “can be brutalized, destroyed, completely restructured; it can be ‘amended’ subtly by small additions that comment on its nature and adapt their posture to its own; it can serve as medium, directly or indirectly, also as subject.” A place “ravaged by time and use,” she argued, “offers a far richer lode from which to mine ideas than any clean, well-lighted place.”34