Light Industry’s summer fundraising campaign is on. Steal: Donate over $100, and get a years’ worth of free admission to their (stellar) weekly screening series ($7 at the door, $4 Brooklyn Lagers not included!) Donate via paypal or credit card here.
Also, coming up on Friday, August 20, 2010 at 7:30pm for the aforementioned $7 ticket price:
Day’s End, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1975, 23 mins
Pier Groups, Arch Brown, 1979, 57 mins
Both films will be introduced by Douglas Crimp. (Expect anecdotes, likely illicit in nature—those who have heard Crimp speak know that he is equal parts oral and art historian. And we’re talking about Pier 52 here, so … )
From Crimp’s introduction, on Light Industry’s site:
In 1975 Gordon Matta-Clark created a monument—or an anti-monument—to New York’s industrial history with Day’s End, his transformation of the dilapidated Pier 52, which stood at the end of Gansevoort Street. He cut a channel in the pier’s floor and another in the roof above, so that when the sun reached its high point at noon, it shown down into the water. And he cut cat’s-eye-shaped holes in the tin walls, one at the side of the channel, another at the pier’s west end so that the sun came streaming in as it set over New Jersey. He called the work an “indoor water park,” where he hoped the “peaceful enclosure” would “create a joyous situation.” His film made with Besty Susler is one of the few records we have of both this great work and of the abandoned Hudson River piers before they were torn down—but not the only one. In 1979, Arch Brown released a gay porn film called Pier Groups. In it, two neighbors head for the piers, one for some fun on a day off, the other because he has an assignment to prepare for his demolition company to put in a bid for the piers’ destruction—“No one uses them,” says his boss. The engineer, played by Johnny Kovacs, wanders through the piers checking out their architecture and again and again happens upon guys—including his neighbor, played by Keith Anthoni—getting it on. He stops, watches, moves on, checks out another part of building, stumbles upon more sex play. Straight-acting, wearing his hard hat, he might be the hottest guy in the film…
