55. (Gansevoort Peninsula)

Invited to visit a newly built museum before it opens to the public, an artist is more taken with the view of the nearby Hudson River than with the museum itself. As he is gazing out at the water someone mentions to him that the museum overlooks the former site of a pier where a famous guerrilla artwork was created some 40 years earlier. A little while later he mails the museum without any explanation a small pencil sketch showing the armature of a large building suspended over the water where the pier once stood. The museum decides to help the artist turn his drawing into an actual structure and seven years later a giant skeletal framework with the same outline, location and dimensions (52 by 325 by 65 feet) of the long-vanished pier is erected as a permanent piece of public art. Ever a partisan of radical economy, the 77-year-old artist reuses the title of the original 1975 work, Day’s End.

(David Hammons, Gordon Matta-Clark)