Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbican Art Gallery

A retrospective recalls the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s

by Sarah KentMonday, 21 March 2011

Walking on walls with Trisha Brown

I can still remember the excitement of pounding the pavements of SoHo in the early 1970s. Nowadays, this part of downtown Manhattan is awash with expensive restaurants, boutiques and smart galleries, but then it was a scruffy industrial area of warehouses and sweatshops. The factories were closing and the container trucks leaving, though, and artists were gradually infiltrating and turning the huge empty spaces into studios where they often lived illicitly.

I wandered into The Kitchen, a venue that sprang up to show performance art and film, and discovered Laurie Anderson. I was utterly seduced

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