In 1971, I came to New York to have my first solo art exhibition at the Reese Palley Gallery in SoHo. The neighborhood seemed to me—an L.A. boy—a war zone, its gritty streets only recently colonized by a few galleries and artists, many of whom were living on the edge. I was fascinated by a communal artists’ restaurant called Food that was about to open near the gallery, though I knew nothing then of the subversive proprietor behind it, Gordon Matta-Clark.

That was only a year after Matta-Clark had made his first Garbage Wall—trash embedded in concrete as a cheap and handy guerilla building material, and just a year before he’d begin working— as an “anarchitect”—in the desolate borough of the Bronx, rife with condemned buildings.