EXT.

HUNTS POINT DISTRIBUTION MARKET

A handheld shot of a loading bay with a jumble of discarded

crates and broken fruit.

EXT. STREET MARKET - LATE AFTERNOON

DAN GRAHAM is scavenging for apples amongst the discarded

produce at a street market. He picks through a pile of
damaged and rotten apples and places what he finds in a used
plastic bag he has brought with him. Close-up on the plastic
bag as it gradually fills with apples.

DAN GRAHAM (V.O.)

One of the first things I did,
Homes for America, an article with
photographs, was also what Judd and
Lewitt couldn’t do, weren’t doing,
and hadn’t done. But it was
parallel to their concerns. The
subject of the article was suburban
house structures just outside New
York that I thought had some
relation to the art and that was
just emerging in many complex and
different ways.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A facsimile reproduction of Homes for America in a monograph

on Dan Graham is photocopied.

EXT. BUSHWICK/GRANDE MEMORIALS - LATE AFTERNOON

Seen through the glass corner of GRANDE MEMORIALS storefront,

DAN GRAHAM peers into the shop window.

MAN ON THE STREET (O.S.)

(Mark Thomson)
When you published Homes for
America in 1966, you were one of
the first persons to focus on
suburban spaces, on the invisible,
discarded non-places. What did you
have in mind at that time and what
do you think of it now in
hindsight?
 2.

DAN GRAHAM
I grew up in New Jersey and I have
always been interested in serial
settlements. When I was at the John
Daniels Gallery, I was one of the
first to organize an exhibition of
Sol LeWitt's works and I realized
that Sol was remaking New York's
orthogonal grid.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A page of a book with a young Dan Graham at a gallery opening

at the John Daniels Gallery.

EXT. BUSHWICK/GRANDE MEMORIALS - LATE AFTERNOON

A MEDIUM-SHOT OF DAN GRAHAM THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE SHOP.

DAN GRAHAM
At that time he used to work for
I.M. Pei and so he stressed the
modern architect's notion of
geometry in art. During that same
period, I happened to read in Arts
Magazine an article by Donald Judd
about the urban structure of Kansas
City, which was based on a plan of
the 19th century.

INT. BUSHWICK/GRAHAM’S STUDIO - EVENING

DAN GRAHAM unfolds a large map of New York and New Jersey and
pins it to the empty wall of the studio. He pushes a pin into
the first location.

DAN GRAHAM (V.O.)

Then Judd moved to New Jersey and I
realized that he too used the
material of the suburban facades as
well as procedures drawn from urban
analysis. So I said why not
photograph all of this, the
suburbia, the real original
material.
 3.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A second page of the reproduction of Homes for America in a

monograph on Dan Graham is photocopied.

EXT. BUSHWICK/GRANDE MEMORIALS - LATE AFTERNOON/EARLY EVENING

A MEDIUM CLOSE-UP THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE SHOP.

DAN GRAHAM
All of this was much more
interesting than the white cube
used in galleries and I realized
that I could establish a relation
between art and town and suburban
planning. Here lies the secret of
Minimalist art, the secret that is
never told and that was suppressed
by its very authors: the city grid.

The light is fading, and the neon signs in the window flicker
on.

A MEDIUM-SHOT FROM BEHIND DAN GRAHAM AS THE SIGN MONUMENTS IN

BRIGHT RED NEON LIGHTS UP OVER HIS HEAD.

EXT. MIDTOWN - DAY

A SHOT OF CLUSTERS OF MIDTOWN BUILDINGS, STACKED LIKE

MASSIFIED MOUNTAIN RANGES.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY - DAY

A page of a Smithson monograph photocopied, a picture of him

and Nancy Holt surveying the site of Spiral Jetty to the left
and the large title Interview with Robert Smithson (1973) to
the right.

INT. MIDTOWN ART STORAGE

In the half-light ROBERT SMITHSON’s prone body can just be

made out tucked in behind stacks of paintings and boxes. A
layer of dust has settled on the body giving it the
appearance of a stone figure.

CLOSE-UP on ROBERT SMITHSON’s face. The sound of art handlers

working in the background.
 4.

The commotion stirs ROBERT SMITHSON into consciousness, some

stilted words emanate from his mouth.

ROBERT SMITHSON
What you are really confronted with
in a non-site is the absence of the
site. It is a contraction rather
than an expansion of scale. One is
confronted with a very ponderous,
weighty absence.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY - DAY

A monograph on the work of Robert Smithson is pressed down

onto the glass of a photocopier. The light of the copier
scans across the page. On one side of the page is a photo of
Smithson posed at the back of his car loaded with rocks from
a site in New Jersey.

INT. MIDTOWN OFFICE BUILDING/BASEMENT STORAGE - DAY

ROBERT SMITHSON
What I did was to go out to the
fringes, pick a point in the
fringes and collect some raw
material. The making of the piece
really involves collecting. The
container is the limit that exists
within the room after I return from
the outer fringe.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

Another page is pressed down onto the copier, a photo of the

rocks arranged in metal crates in a gallery.

INT. MIDTOWN OFFICE BUILDING/BASEMENT STORAGE - DAY

ROBERT SMITHSON
There is this dialectic between
inner and outer, closed and open,
center and peripheral. It just goes
on constantly permuting itself into
this endless doubling, so that you
have the non-site functioning as a
mirror and the site functioning as
a reflection.
 5.

INT. MIDTOWN/IBM ATRIUM - DAY

ROBERT SMITHSON is sitting at one of the tables in the atrium

amongst the assortment of lunching office workers, tourists
and the homeless.

ROBERT SMITHSON
As one becomes aware of discrete
usages, the syntax of esthetic
communications discloses the
relevant features of both
‘building’ and ‘language’. Both are
the raw materials of communication
and are based on chance – not
historical preconceptions.

INT. DAN GRAHAM’S STUDIO - EVENING

DAN GRAHAM empties the bag of apples into a bowl, and places
a couple that would not fit on the table next to it. The
apples could be to eat or to paint. A pair of broken reading
glasses stuck together with tape sit on the table next to the
bowl. He picks them up and fiddles with the tape.

DAN GRAHAM (V.O.)

Matta-Clark came to the position
that work must function directly in
the actual urban environment.
‘Nature’ was an escape, political
and cultural contradictions were
not to be denied. By making his
removals public, similar to the
chance spectacle of a demolition
for casual pedestrians, the work
could function as a kind of urban
agitprop. He saw his ‘cuts’ as
probes, opening up socially hidden
information beneath the surface.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A page of a monograph on Gordon Matta-Clark is placed onto

the copier. Photographs show Gordon Matta-Clark working on
‘Splitting’.

INT. DAN GRAHAM’S STUDIO - EVENING

DAN GRAHAM puts more pins into the map at the sites of their
work.
 6.

DAN GRAHAM (V.O.)

All of us are ‘living in a city
whose whole fabric is
architectural...where property is
so all-pervasive,’ wrote Matta-
Clark. He wanted his work to expose
this ‘containerization of the
environment in the interests of
capitalism.’ To achieve this, Matta-
Clark proposed attacking the cycle
of production and consumption that
was at the expense of the
remembered history of the city.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A page of a Matta-Clark monograph is photocopied. Photographs

of Gordon Matta-Clark making a piece from rubbish under the
Manhattan Bridge.

CLOSE-UP ON A PORTHOLE AT THE FRONT OF DAN GRAHAM’S STUDIO,

THE WREATH OF CHRISTMAS BALLS GLINTS AND SHIMMERS IN THE
SUNLIGHT.

EXT. JERSEY CITY/UNDER THE PULASKI BRIDGE - DAY

An old van covered in dirt and bird-shit so that it’s windows

are completely blocked out sits abandoned under the Pulaski
Skyway Bridge in an informal dumping ground for cars.

INT. JERSEY CITY/TRUCK-CABIN - DAY

Inside the darkened cabin, GORDON MATTA-CLARK’s prone body is

laid-out, rigid and covered in a fine layer of dust like a
stone figure. The movement of the truck as it is prepared to
be towed away induces a faint trickle of dry speech.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
I am experimenting with alternative
uses of space that are most
familiar. I like to think of these
works as by-passing questions of
imaginative design by suggesting
ways of rethinking what is already
there.
 7.

EXT. JERSEY CITY/TRUCK REAR DOORS - DAY

GORDON MATTA-CLARK falls from the back of the truck as it is

hoisted onto the pick-up to be towed away.

EXT. JERSEY CITY/RIVERBANK - DAY

GORDON MATTA-CLARK sits on a pile of broken concrete at the

river’s edge. The wind blows the dust off his clothes to
reveal a faded check shirt and worn jeans. His speech is
staggered and hollow as if the words are playing out of an
old gramophone.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
While my preoccupations involve
deep metamorphic incisions into
space/place, I do not want to
create a totally new supportive
field of vision, of cognition. I
want to reuse the old one, the
existing framework of thought and
sight. More than a call for
preservation, this work reacts
against a hygienic obsession in the
name of redevelopment which sweeps
away what little there is of an
American past, to be cleansed by
pavement and parking.

INT/EXT. JERSEY CITY/JOURNAL SQUARE/PATH TRAIN - DAY

A shot out of the window of the Path Train as it travels from

Journal Square to Penn Station, Newark. The shot lasts the
length of the journey running parallel to the Pulaski Skyway
Bridge.

ROBERT SMITHSON (V.O.)

The route to the site is very
indeterminate. It’s important
because it’s an abyss between the
abstraction and the site; a kind of
oblivion. You could go there on a
highway, but a highway to the site
is really an abstraction because
you don’t really have contact with
the earth.

A trail is more of a physical

thing.
(MORE)
 8.

ROBERT SMITHSON (V.O.) (CONT'D)

These are all variables,
indeterminate elements which will
attempt to determine the route from
the museum to the mine.

I/E. BELL LABS/SUBLEVEL PARKING LOT - DAY

They go in search of the future. The artists are walking

through a dark, empty sublevel parking lot. Some daylight
from a distance illuminates their bodies. DAN GRAHAM guides
the other two, who are liable to get distracted and wander
off-course.

EXT. BELL LABS/RAMP AND GLASS FACE

SHOT OF THE EMPTY PARKING LOTS.

They emerge up the ramp from the parking lot in front of the
epic glass curtain wall of BELL LABS in Holmdel, NJ.

ROBERT SMITHSON
It seems that no matter how far out
you go, you are always thrown back
on your point of origin. You are
confronted with an extending
horizon; it can extend onward and
onward, but then you suddenly find
the horizon is closing in all
around you, so that you have this
kind of dilating effect.

In contrast to its hypermodern facade, the site has an air of

dilapidation and neglect. There is no one around, except for
the sound of geese clacking and the wind. The parking lots
are empty, the landscaping overgrown.

DAN GRAHAM takes out a map to determine their location. This

is surely a NJ monument of some-kind, but not the site of
their work.

DAN GRAHAM
I have shifted my view as I see
larger shifts in the art world. I
never thought of the museum as an
interior and basically art-
oriented, a salon, or in modernist
terms, emblematic of the
Establishment and to be struggled
against. That loses sight of the
relation of art to the city. The
museum and the city are the same.
(MORE)
 9.

DAN GRAHAM (CONT'D)

My work has always been about the
relation of the city and the
suburb.

DOWNWARDS SHOT OF THE THREE ARTISTS’ FEET, A DEAD BIRD AND

OVERGROWN GRASS BURNT BY THE SUN.

While DAN GRAHAM is looking at the map, the other two wander
off.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A page of an architectural journal from the 1960’s is

photocopied. It contains images of Bell Labs in its heyday.
Of happy scientists arriving at work.

EXT. BELL LABS/ENTRANCE TO ATRIUM - DAY

GORDON MATTA-CLARK walks up steps to one of the entrances

into the building.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Work with abandoned buildings began
with my concern for the life of the
city of which a major side effect
is the metabolization of old
buildings.

He looks through heavy glass doors into the empty atrium.

CLOSE-UP OF GORDON MATTA-CLARK PULLING ON THE DOORS.

Overgrown foliage presses up against the glass enclosure. The

grand, futuristic lobby is glimpsed through reflections.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK (CONT’D)

Here as in many urban centers the
availability of empty and neglected
structures was a prime textural
reminder of the ongoing fallacy of
renewal through modernization. The
omnipresence of emptiness, of
abandoned housing and imminent
demolition.

The camera continues turning to the right as GORDON MATTA-

CLARK walks back down the steps.
 10.

EXT. BELL LABS/EAST STEPS - DAY

ROBERT SMITHSON walks across the East steps of the building

and is drawn to the mirrored wall glinting in the sun.

Medium-shot of foliage in the foreground with the reflection

of ROBERT SMITHSON looking up at the facade.

ROBERT SMITHSON
What you are really confronted with
in a non-site is the absence of the
site. It is a contraction rather
than an expansion of scale. As long
as art is thought of as creation,
it will be the same old story. Here
we go again, creating objects,
creating systems, building a better
tomorrow. I posit that there is no
tomorrow, nothing but a gap, a
yawning gap.

EXT. BELL LABS/CORNER OF BUILDING - MIDDAY

DAN GRAHAM walks around the building in search of ROBERT

SMITHSON and GORDON MATTA-CLARK.

EXT. BELL LABS/EAST STEPS

DAN GRAHAM walks into frame. He has found ROBERT SMITHSON and
drags him away from the mirrored wall.

The camera turns to the left as they walk away and out of
frame.

EXT. BELL LABS/TERRACE - DAY

GORDON MATTA-CLARK walks along the terrace and comes to a

stop by the camera looking intently at his reflection in the
mirrored wall.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
What I do to buildings is what some
do with languages and others with
groups of people: I organize them
in order to explain and defend the
need for change.
(MORE)
 11.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK (CONT'D)

However, unlike other artists, I
feel the need to become directly
involved in a context that is
physically, politically and
socially structured, in short, to
leave the studio and go out on the
streets. To leave the studio to
relate to those buildings that have
been abandoned by a system that
doesn’t look after them, that
imposes the use and fate of
property only as an end in itself.

DAN GRAHAM with ROBERT SMITHSON enter the frame next to

GORDON MATTA-CLARK, behind the camera but reflected in the
mirrored wall.

There is apparently no way into this giant mirrored cube,

‘the world’s biggest microchip’, as it was once called. It is
as if they have come up against a natural obstacle that they
cannot pass. The sound of geese is joined by the sound of the
glass panels and the metal frame of the building creaking in
the wind.

At DAN GRAHAM’s prompting the group turns and walks out of

frame.

EXT. BELL LABS/PARK BENCH

From an overhead shot DAN GRAHAM sits down on the bench and
the other two bump onto it next to him.

DAN GRAHAM has taken out his map again to try and locate
their position.

ROBERT SMITHSON
Exterior space gives way to the
total vacuity of time. Time as a
concrete aspect of mind mixed with
things is attenuated into ever
greater distances, that leave one
fixed in a certain spot. An
effacement of the country and city
abolishes space, but establishes
enormous mental distances.

A security guard walks up to them.

SECURITY GUARD
What about limits in art?
 12.

ROBERT SMITHSON
All legitimate art deals with
limits. Fraudulent art feels that
it has no limits. The trick is to
locate those elusive limits, but
somehow they never show themselves.
That’s why I say measure and
dimension seem to break down at a
certain point.

The SECURITY GUARD clears them off the bench.

EXT. BELL LABS/REAR FACE/LAKE - DAY

The group walk around the edge of the lake at the rear face
of the building the SECURITY GUARD in pursuit. The garden
around the lake is landscaped in a quasi-Japanese style.
Overgrown red bushes, a lily pond and weeping willows sit
against the backdrop of the impossibly long curtain wall.

EXT. BELL LABS/JAPANESE GARDEN/BUSHES - DAY

The SECURITY GUARD still in pursuit, the artists enter a

thick hedge, he stops out of breath and at the edge of his
jurisdiction, and turns back.

Untended, the bushes have almost grown into trees.

TRACKING SHOT OF THE CANOPY OF LEAVES OVERHEAD WITH THE SOUND

OF THE ARTISTS WALKING THROUGH THE UNDERGROWTH BENEATH.

EXT. UPPER MONTCLAIR/CLIFFTOP PATH - DAY

The artists emerge from the bushes into a bright sun-drenched

day on the cliffs at the UPPER MONTCLAIR QUARRY, now a small
national park. Below them at the foot of the cliff is a
manicured suburban lawn. From the cliffs a broad plain of
tree specked suburbs spreads out to the Manhattan skyline in
the distance.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A page from a Smithson monograph of him collecting rocks on a

hillside is photocopied.

EXT. UPPER MONTCLAIR/CLIFFTOP - DAY

They take seats on the rocks.

 13.

ROBERT SMITHSON
Upper Montclair Quarry, also known
as Osborne and Marsellis quarry or
McDowell’s quarry, is situated on
Edgecliff Road, Upper Montclair,
and was worked from about 1890 to
1918. From the top of the quarry
cliffs, one could see the New
Jersey suburbs bordered by the New
York skyline. The terrain is flat
and loaded with ‘middle-income’
housing developments with names
like Royal Garden Estates, Rolling
Knolls Farm, Valley View Acres - on
and on they go, forming tiny
boxlike arrangements.

A WOMAN WALKING HER DOG, stops to chat with them.

ROBERT SMITHSON (CONT’D)

Once you get out into these areas
there is always no trespassing
…taboo, totem, taboo…. Once again
you can even conceive of this like
a taboo territory, this is very
primitive in a sense. If we get
into primitive structural set-ups,
non-site is…

WOMAN WALKING HER DOG

(Dennis Wheeler)
Totemic.

ROBERT SMITHSON
Any book on anthropology discusses
the bush and the town site, so that
you have these two things, and they
are conscious of both of them and
this sets up a kind of fantasy
situation where people are making
all kinds of weird masks and
things.

WOMAN WALKING HER DOG

(Dennis Wheeler)
When you talk about scale you
aren’t talking about a traditional
sense of scale?

ROBERT SMITHSON
Not bigness, bigness isn’t scale.
 14.

WOMAN WALKING HER DOG

(Dennis Wheeler)
Scale is not measurable in this
sense, then?

Making reference to DAN GRAHAM’s cobbled-together map of New

Jersey that Smithson is holding.

CLOSE-UP ON THE MAP AS HE POINTS TO NEW YORK.

ROBERT SMITHSON
Yeah, that gets back to the surd
situation. Although you are
conscious of the scale, it’s how
your consciousness focuses. This
island might appear big, but in
fact it’s very tiny, so that you
have this telescoping back and
forth from both ends of the
telescope; you can conceive of it
as a very large work, like one
particle on the island might be
conceived as being a gigantic
tumulus…The particle on the island
takes on an enormity. Whereas the
island itself is just a dot.

SHOT OF THE CLIFFS FROM BELOW, THE WOMAN WALKING HER DOG
LEADS THE ARTISTS OUT OF THE PARK.

EXT. UPPER MONTCLAIR/STEPS - DAY

The WOMAN WALKING HER DOG shows them the way down a flight of
steps. She waits at the top of the steps until they are out
of sight.

WIDE SHOT OF A DILAPIDATED TENNIS COURT IN THE CHANGING

LIGHT.

EXT. ENGLEWOOD - DAY

The artists walk along a grassy verge beside industrial

buildings.

CLOSE-UP ON THE STREET SIGN FOR HUMPHREY STREET.

 15.

EXT. ENGLEWOOD/DISTRIBUTION FACILITY/PARKING LOT

MEDIUM SHOT OF TREES REFLECTED IN THE HIGH WINDOWS AT THE

BACK OF THE BUILDING.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK walks into frame with the mirrored window

behind him.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Splitting was done in 1973 at 322
Humphrey Street in Englewood, New
Jersey. It was in a predominantly
black neighborhood that was being
demolished for an urban renewal
project that was never completed.
When I took over the house, it was
strewn with personal debris left by
its abruptly evicted tenants. The
work began by cutting a one-inch
slice through all the structural
surfaces dividing the building in
half.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

A photocopy of a monograph on Gordon Matta-Clark with images

of the exterior of ‘Splitting’.

A couple of skaters are doing tricks in the empty parking

lot. One of them slips and cuts his leg.

MEDIUM-SHOT OF MATTA-CLARK BENDING DOWN TO LOOK AT THE

SKATER’S CUT.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Some of the first pieces that
actually dealt with impingements on
buildings as a structural fabric
were very small extractions. At
that point I was thinking about
surface as something which is too
easily accepted as a limit. And I
was also becoming very interested
in how breaking through the surface
creates repercussions in terms of
what else is imposed upon by a cut.
That’s a very simple idea, and it
comes out of some line drawings
that I’d been doing.
 16.

SKATER
(Liza Bear)
A cut is a simple thing if you see
it in graphic terms only. What
struck me about the Humphrey Street
piece was how much information the
cut seemed to reveal.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Yes, a cut is very analytical. It’s
the probe! The essential probe. The
scaffold of sharp-eyed inspectors.
Initially I also wanted to go
beyond visual things. Of course,
there are visual consequences to
cutting, certainly to removal, but
it was kind of the thin edge of
what was being seen that interested
me as much, if not more than, the
views that were being created.

SKATER
(Liza Bear)
What do you mean exactly?

GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Well, for example the layering, the
strata, the different things being
severed. Revealing how a uniform
surface is established. The
simplest way to create complexity
was one of the formal concerns
here, without having to make or
build anything.

The skaters point them in a direction. As RS, GMC and DG pass

a building, the camera pans right to pick them up in its
mirrored windows.

EXT. BAYONNE/NEWARK BAY/CONDO - DAY

MEDIUM SHOT OF THE EMPTY SPACE BETWEEN BUILDINGS IN A CONDO

ON THE BAYONNE SHORE OF NEWARK BAY.

EXT. BAYONNE, NJ/5TH ST. CONNECTION

The camera turns to follow the three artists as they cross an

embankment dividing a field of gas tanks from a street of
houses in Bayonne.
 17.

EXT. BAYONNE/NEW ROW HOUSE - DAY

Shot of an oversize newly built two-family house on the

corner of a street.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY – DAY

Photocopy of a page of a monograph on Dan Graham with a

facsimile of Homes for America.

EXT/INT. BAYONNE/NEW ROW HOUSE/GARAGE - DAY

DAN GRAHAM
‘Although there is perhaps some
aesthetic precedence in the row
houses which are indigenous to many
older cities along the east coast,
housing developments as an
architectural phenomenon seem
peculiarly gratuitous. They exist
apart from prior standards of
‘good’ architecture. They were not
built to satisfy individual needs
or tastes. The owner is completely
tangential to the product’s
completion. His home isn’t really
possessable in the old sense; it
wasn’t designed to ‘last for
generations’.’

Inside the garage as a family pack their belongings to move.

DAN GRAHAM approaches.

HUSBAND
(Ludger Gerdes)
With your more recent works you
have this kind of double meaning,
like the more contemporary
pavilions, you can see them, on one
hand, as an object coming out of a
highly modernist or minimalist
morphology..
 18.

WIFE
(Ludger Gerdes)
..and on the other hand, you can
experience them as a tool of, let’s
say, social interaction, between
people hidden, people looking at
other people, people being
interrupted by boundaries coming
together across boundaries and all
these things.

DAN GRAHAM
I think they mimic these different
conditions. They mimic these
structures in the world, true, and
they also maybe mimic the minimal
object taken outdoors or become
almost functional as an
architectural lobby or pavilion.
The ultimate meaning, a lot of the
meaning, comes from the particular
use context.

The HUSBAND shows them a way out through a sliding porch door
into a narrow garden. ROBERT SMITHSON and GORDON MATTA-CLARK
who had been out of frame follow DAN GRAHAM through.

EXT. BAYONNE/PATH - LATE AFTERNOON

They walk down a dirt path that leads to a peninsula. The

site of Robert Smithson’s work ‘Line of Wreckage, Bayonne’.
Through the tall reeds that hedge the path, the wharf of a
marina is visible.

EXT. BAYONNE/PENINSULA - LATE AFTERNOON

The artists rest in a clearing where the reeds give way to

the shoreline. In the middle of the bay is a large
permanently moored tanker that is being used as a chemical
factory. A container ship moves slowly past through the
channel.

DAN GRAHAM signals with a white handkerchief he pulls from

his jacket to a boat idling off shore.

I/E. BOAT/NEWARK BAY-PASSAIC RIVER - LATE AFTERNOON

A travelling shot from a boat going under the Bayonne Bridge

and across Newark Bay past the loading cranes of Port
Elizabeth.
 19.

MEDIUM SHOT OF A MOCK VENETIAN FOUNTAIN IN THE FORECOURT OF A

WEDDING FACILITY ALONG THE PASSAIC RIVER.

MEDIUM SHOT OF A TEAR IN THE FENCE ALONG A STEEP STRETCH OF

THE RIVERBANK.

EXT. PASSAIC RIVER/SQUATTER CAMP - DUSK

At a bend in the river some SQUATTERS have set up camp and

are building a fire. The artists join them. In the background
there is the sound of the occasional car passing, geese in
the woods and the water lapping at the shore.

DAN GRAHAM
There was an enormous flood of new
commodities which seemed to destroy
any possibility of artists’ own
composition or creating new value,
and seemed to devalue value. But
this devaluation was the result of
an economy of less work and more
time for consumption and possibly
meant that the receiver, the person
who bought all these things, might
be made creative and liberated in
his use of time. Life might become
an aestheticized form of play. The
art receiver could be a creative
participant in art; art’s task was
to help make this aestheticized
play available to everybody.

SQUATTER
So then it was these old-fashioned
modern ideas that the artist would
disappear?

DAN GRAHAM
In a certain way the artist
disappeared. He just set in motion
different structures. The artist as
a hero disappeared, that was part
of the idea of composition
disappearing at the time.

MEDIUM SHOT OF A RED SUNSHADE GLINTING BRIGHTLY IN THE SUN.

 20.

EXT. NEWARK/BROAD ST. - DAWN

The artists walk up the road alongside a long stone wall, a

remnant of the foundations of a 19th century factory.

INT. PUBLIC LIBRARY - DAY

Photocopies of articles on the Newark uprising.

EXT. NEWARK/BROAD ST./DEMOLISHED FACTORY - DAWN

The artists walk by the mounds of rubble of a demolished

factory.

A SHOT OF THEIR FEET IN THE DIRT OF THE CONSTRUCTION SITE.

As DAN GRAHAM talks, the other two wander out of frame.

DAN GRAHAM
In both American and European
cultures the immediate past is
always chopped off because
consumerism demands the ever-new
detached from the just-past. I
therefore came to the conclusion
that the just-past is the issue. It
is a question of keeping alive the
richness which is actually in
historical memory.

A CLOSE-UP OF A FILE OF PHOTOCOPIES, INCLUDING THE IMAGES

THAT WE’VE SEEN THROUGHOUT THE FILM, SLIPPING OUT OF
SOMEONE’S HANDS AND SCATTERING ACROSS A WET NEW YORK STREET.

EXT. JERSEY CITY/EASTSIDE - MORNING

A SHOT OF A ROAD WITH A SECTION OF ELEVATED TURNPIKE ABOVE

IT, SURROUNDED BY NEWLY BUILT HOUSES THAT OWE THE MOST TO
PRISON ARCHITECTURE.

EXT. JERSEY CITY/EASTSIDE - MORNING

Sitting under a tree on a tiny triangle of grass, small birds

peck at crumbs scattered around GORDON MATTA-CLARK’S feet.
 21.

GORDON MATTA-CLARK (O.S.)

Now, what I want to do here is to
join your group effort and achieve
an artistic expression that
represents a symbolic gesture of
self-determination, as a flag or a
poster that represents our
intentions. What I propose is to
transform one of these industrial
constructions in a liberated way.
To alter a structure that still
exists as a bad memory until it is
transformed into something that
gives way to hope and fantasy. I’ll
do this by resuming my early works,
opening breaches in walls to give
an idea of a free passage. A wide
passage that is neither a door nor
a monumental arch, but a sort of
unlimited stage on which we are the
actors.

EXT. NEWARK/WASTELAND - MORNING

In a derelict space behind some building, a group of young

children are building a series of trenches and mounds in the
sand and debris.

ROBERT SMITHSON (O.S.)

To reconstruct what the eyes see in
words, in an ‘ideal language’ is a
vain exploit. Why not reconstruct
one’s inability to see? Let us give
passing shape to the unconsolidated
views that surround a work of art,
and develop a type of ‘anti-vision’
or negative seeing. The river
shored up clay, loess, and similar
matter, that shored up the slope,
that shored up the mirrors. The
mind shored up thoughts and
memories, that shored up points of
view, that shored up the swaying
glances of eyes.