**
(indicates future performance)
* (coming soon)
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Project Description
In conjunction with Queens Museum, White Columns Gallery
and Cabinet Magazine, this performance was commissioned
for two of Gordon Matta-Clark’s fifteen unfinished
“Fake Estates” in Queens. A duet performed for
both invited and unexpected audience by drawing chalk outlines
around two small plots of land (#7 and #3) that Matta Clark
had purchased from the city in 1970. The performers also
dragged the heavy chalk shoes to outline the space in between
the two lots, taking the audience on a long, slow procession
through suburban neighborhood. The performance was punctuated
when one of the neighbors ‘shooed’ the performers
off the lot threatening to call the police and claiming
the land was her ‘private property.’ Highlighting
Matta Clark’s own irreverence for property, Hustle
also underscored the need to slow down the fast urban pace
to really ‘see’ one’s surroundings.
Julia Mandle Artist’s Statement
Using specially cast yellow chalk shoes, I outlined and
linked two similar Queens micro-plots, each lying in a driveway
between apartment buildings, behind a chain-link fence.
For the performance, I drew the invited audience from one
suburban site to another in a slow procession across noisy
Roosevelt Avenue. The chalk lines temporarily remained,
to be read as errant traffic-lines directing pedestrian
attention to the duet of spaces.
Drawing a line from myself to Gordon Matta-Clark, I find
common territory where form and society meet. In his interventions,
Matta Clark heightened the sense of place by incorporating
viewers’ bodies into his work. The physical self in
relation to place (including the season, temperature, weather,
time of day) allowed for a certain vividness and theatricality,
often experienced through a sense of one’s own peril.
In these odd lots, Matta-Clark created stages for our gathering,
which become temporarily manifest through the chalk outlines
and their observers.
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