All living creatures are timekeepers. Like clocks, we measure time through the bodies we inhabit. The human heart beats inexorably like a clock until at some point it stops, and then our time is up.  The passage of time, as we perceive it, is caused by the rotation of the earth and the light of the sun. The human eye’s receptivity to the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted from the sun allows us to register the passage of time.

Sunflowers also appear to register time passing. While they are still growing, sunflowers follow the sun. They start off the day facing east, and then gradually turn to track the sun’s path in the sky. At night, young sunflowers will return to their eastwards position in preparation for the day ahead. When sunflowers are fully grown, they no longer turn. Rather they remain facing east throughout the day. This orientation causes the flower to heat up more quickly and the heat attracts more pollinators. Sunflowers are receptive and generous creatures, assiduously soaking up the sun’s energy and generously providing food.

Young sunflowers and other plants that turn towards the sun during the day are called heliotropes. Helio is the word for sun in Ancient Greek, and tropos means to turn. In Ancient Greek the word for heliotrope (hēliotropion) also means sundial. Sunflowers, while not the most precise of clocks, are able to tell us if it is morning, noon, or night and thus, could be said to exhibit an awareness of time.

In Latin, the word for sun is sol. Sol survives in the Romance languages: sole in Italian, soleil in French and sol in Spanish. In Spanish the sunflower has two names: girasol and mirasol. Gira means to turn, so girasol is literally to turn towards the sun. Mira means to look or watch, so mirasol literally translates as sun-watcher.

Sunflowers and humans both have “eyes”. The sunflower’s circular dark center looks like a human pupil, and its radiating bright yellow petals look like eyelashes. Eyes open is commonly taken as a sign of being awake, and being awake is one of the few generally agreed upon conditions necessary for consciousness. Another generally agreed upon condition is an awareness of time. Since the sun’s light is what makes it possible for humans to perceive time, one could say that consciousness is connected to the sun.

Sunflowers and people aren’t the only ones with eyes, buildings can have them too. The Pantheon in Rome has an oculus at the center of its vaulted dome. The Pantheon’s eye casts a beam of circular sunlight that slowly and silently moves around the rotunda. Classical philosophers, including Plato, believed in the emission theory of vision. They thought that the eye emits a ray of light that illuminates objects. It is possible that the builders of the Pantheon saw the oculus as analogous to the human eye transmitting a ray of light.

In 1975, almost two thousand years after the Pantheon was built, another temple with an eye was created in New York City.  Artist Gordon Matta-Clark made what he called a “sun and water temple.”  The art historian Pamela Lee in her book on the artist, described the temple as “a kind of late capitalist pantheon.” 1

Working in an abandoned building in July and August of 1975, without permission from the authorities, Matta-Clark used his blow torch and hacksaw to remove large portions of the façade and the pier. Matta-Clark made an oculus of his own. Cutting away a circular shape that he called a “cat’s eye” out of the corrugated tin wall. His openings let sun and water into the dark and empty building. Built in the 1870s, the steel truss building was 375 feet long and 50 feet high. At approximately 18,750 square feet, it was monumental in scale. To give a sense of the vastness, the Pantheon’s circular interior has a diameter of approximately 142 feet, and roughly 15,876 square feet. The two pantheons were similar in scale.

There is a good chance Gordon Matta-Clark did have the Pantheon in mind when he was creating his temple. Matta-Clark had gone to architecture school at Cornell University and graduated in 1968. He no doubt would have been familiar with the work of the architect Louis I. Kahn. In the late 60s and 70s Kahn had a cult following among architecture students. He gave legendary talks to packed halls propounding his mystical ideas about light and darkness in his notoriously squeaky voice. Kahn designed several places of worship and used large circular openings in many of his designs. He won the Rome Prize in 1950-51 at a formative time in his career and was profoundly influenced by ancient architecture. Lou’s temple-like buildings may have influenced Matta-Clark.

Though trained as an architect, Matta-Clark rejected architecture in favor of what he called anarchitecture, a hybrid of anarchy and architecture. Architecture in reverse. Rather than build from scratch, Matta-Clark found existing spaces in states of dereliction and re-made them from the inside. In his own words, anarchitecture is “A RESPONSE TO COSMETIC DESIGN, COMPLETION THROUGH REMOVAL, COMPLETION THROUGH COLLAPSE, COMPLETION IN EMPTINESS.” 2 Rather than build a new temple, Matta-Clark saw the fertility in the decay of 1970’s New York City.

Matta-Clark embraced decay in all forms. Along with the aging materiality of the built environment, he studied the rotting process of ingestible substances. According to Elizabeth Sussman, Whitney Museum curator, “He mixed concoctions of substances with agar, a seaweed extract, and allowed them to age, weather/dry and or naturally attract microbes and any other living or inanimate substances.” 3 From his research of decaying matter, Matta-Clark concluded that what humanity needed was “To grow and live within a more fertile environment, a richer set of ingredients and activity, to maintain some sort of communication with a more natural process.” 4

Humans could take a lesson from plants. When plants die, plant matter is broken down by microbes such as bacteria and fungi. The plant’s decomposition adds minerals and nutrients to the soil, making it more fertile for new life.

Matta-Clark had two names for his project on Pier 52: Day’s Passing and Day’s End. Day’s End is the title that has stuck. It captures the multiple meanings of the project. The pier faced west, and the sun set directly across the river. At the end of the day, the sun aligned with the oculus, having the farthest reach into the space, and reaching its peak.

Sadly, Day’s End was never fully realized. Matta-Clark had hoped to create a public space, but the city authorities got wind of it, and right after the opening, they shut down the pier. Initially the City of New York tried to sue Matta-Clark, but he went to Europe, giving things time to simmer down, and eventually the lawsuit was dropped. The building on Pier 52 was demolished two years later in 1977. Tragically Gordon Matta-Clark died in 1978 of cancer at a young age.

Gordon Matta Clark and Betty Susler worked together to make a film documenting the process of anarchitecture in Day’s End. 5 The film was shot on Super 8 and runs for 23 minutes and 10 seconds. One wonders why the film was not 24 minutes, shy by just 50 seconds. Perhaps that was intentional. In the film, Matta-Clark is swashbuckling. Shirtless, he hangs precariously on a plank suspended by pulleys, with no harness, swinging around the cavernous space, blowtorch in hand. The film quality is grainy, either underexposed or overexposed. The footage is dark and shadowy in the interior of the building until the camera shifts its focus on the openings in the wall, then it’s a white-out. The reversals from dark to light are reminiscent of the Flicker films from the 1960s. Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer comes to mind. 6 Kubelka’s film oscillates from black to white frames in a rhythmic mesmerizing sequence. It is likely Matta Clark was familiar with Peter Kubelka’s film through his downtown proximity to Jonas Mekas. Both Matta-Clark and Mekas created public spaces a block apart from each other in Soho. Matta Clark had a restaurant called FOOD on 127 Prince Street from 1971-1973 and Mekas opened the Anthology Film Archives on 80 Wooster Street in 1974. Peter Kubelka was one of the Archive’s founders.

In 1996 I lived on Hester Street in Little Italy, half a mile from Prince and Wooster Streets and two miles from Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End. 20 years later, I was living in the last act of the analogue age. I took a polaroid photo from my apartment window just as the sun was setting, illuminating a wispy pink cloud. A needle reached into the sky searching for signals. A little plane with little people in it was going somewhere. I was watching the sun.

The sunflower is in the Asteraceae family, the same family as the daisy. The word Asteraceae comes from aster, which means star in Greek. The origin of the name Hester is aster, so Hester means star. The artist Sol Le Witt lived two blocks away from me on Hester Street, though he had moved out many years before I moved in. In 1977-78, the year Matta-Clark died, Sol Le Witt made the piece, The Area of Manhattan Between the Places Where Sol LeWitt Has Lived! 115 E 34th St., 185 Ave.C, 42 Montogomery St., and 117 Hester St. 7 Le Witt’s cut-out of the vicinity of the island where he lived has an anarchitectural feel to it.

I wonder if Sol knew that his name meant sun and that he lived on a street named star? I find that interesting, but I would. From 2020-2023, I had an art studio on Daisy Ave in Pasadena California. After working in my Daisy Ave studio for a few years, mixing plant oils into my paints, as I do, the street name sparked my curiosity. It seemed like an interesting coincidence that I worked with plant oils on a street named after a plant. I did a word search and discovered the etymology of the word daisy. In Old English the plant was called “day’s eye,” and the word shortened to daisy over time. This discovery planted a seed in me and led to Daisy Consciousness, an essay published in The Philosophical Salon, March 20, 2023 (coincidently the day of the spring equinox). In early 2024, I moved to another studio, this one in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. After I signed my lease and paid my deposit, I wondered, did this street name have any meaning? So again, I did a word search. The street name was Mirasol.

 

Notes

  1. Pamela M. Lee, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press, 2000 pg. 127
  2. Gordon Matta-Clark: You are the Measure, edited by Elizabeth Sussman, (New York and New Haven: Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press, 2007) pg. 21
  3. Ibid. pg 14
  4. Ibid. pg 16
  5. Gordon Matta Clark, Day’s End, 1975, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiZxZs4VUo8
  6. Peter Kubelka, Arnulf Rainer, 1960, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfy1cdRrAFU
  7. Sol Le Witt, The Area of Manhattan Between the Places Where Sol LeWitt Has Lived! 115 E 34th St., 185 Ave.C, 42 Montogomery St., and 117 Hester St. 1977-78, cut gelatin silver print on mount.  https://risdmuseum.org/art-design/collection/area-manhattan-between-places-where-sol-lewitt-has-lived-115-e-34th-st-185

 

Image: Elise Adibi, Hester Street circa 1996, Polaroid photo