The defining fact about the new Gordon Matta-Clark exhibition at the Whitney exists in a sound rather than an item of visual art. That sound is the whirr of 8mm celluloid passing through the mechanical guts of a projector, as it casts onto the walls of the gallery a silent, shaky, washed-out loop of long-vanished performance pieces.

Its rattling undertone is received and consumed by certain sectors of the art world as nothing less than the soundtrack of the early and mid-1970s, when most of works on view were created and when a radicalized conceptualism was all the rage. The technology is lousy, of course. Even the early black-andwhite essays in video that can also be seen in the show have better image quality, not to mention adequate sound. And surely neither can compete with the cheapest camcorder on the market today.

But none of this matters. That rattle, like some pop song of yesteryear, inspires an unconquerable nostalgia. It recalls a time when artists were free to carry out subversive acts such as taking a chain saw to a building and splitting it down the middle, as Matta-Clark did on numerous occasions. Things were different then, or so it seems in retrospect: Back then you didn’t have to deal with that cultural-industrial complex into which the gallery world would evolve by the later 1980s or the fully regimented art press or the constrictive professionalism of museums and academia.

For those who yield to this nostalgic revisionism, Matta-Clark (1943–78) is something of a patron saint. Not the first cultural figure to reap the career benefits of dying young, he had a rebellious attitude, long hair, and a trace of stubble that, on a good day, made him look a bit like Ernesto Che Guevara, which also never hurt anyone in his line of work.

All of these considerations are, of course, extraneous to the matter at hand: the art on view. But I have dwelt on them to this extent because there is not much more to this show, or to the ironic art that it so unironically sets forth. Rather than finite artifacts such as drawings or sculptures, most of the works at the Whitney are the documentation and adventitious debris that survive from Matta-Clark’s many performance pieces.

Matta-Clark, raised mostly in New York City, was the son of Roberto Matta, the Chilean-born surrealist and abstract artist whose work exhibited an all-over patterning and a spontaneity that inspired Pollock and others of the New York School. His father remarried and moved away, and his relationship with his son was always somewhat strained. Young Gordon claimed to have little use for two dimensions in general, whether in the form of paintings or walls, and his father on at least one occasion returned the compliment by spitting on a work that his son had shown him. Such antagonism, however, did not stop the father from offering, or the son from accepting, the invitation to make use of the former’s extensive connections in the art world. Nor did it stop the son, in some of his earlier work, from turning out some pleasantly cartoonish drawings that show the unmistakable influence of his father’s art.

Matta-Clark went on to spend six years at Cornell, from which he graduated with a degree in architecture. And it is this connection to architecture, more than to painting, sculpture, or performance, that gives his works an air of relevance. It is true that some of the Dada-Fluxus-Situationist inspired performances documented at the Whitney have little or no connection to architecture: dancing figures suspended in a tree at Vassar College; an artist-run restaurant, Food, in SoHo; a piece called “Fresh Air” in which oxygen is administered to random pedestrians.

But the bulk of what you will find at the Whitney is informed by a vague nihilism that takes delight in tearing apart the walls and floors of buildings, many of which, let it be said, were slated for demolition anyway. In addition to houses being split down the middle, floors were pierced or chopped up into their component parts. More than one corner of a house or length of floor winds up at the Whitney. It is the incongruity of seeing such things in a museum that represents the sum total of their limited force.

Beyond that, Matta-Clark found happiness boring holes in walls, as he did most famously in a building beside the Centre Pompidou while it was under construction in 1975. On one occasion, he even shot out the windows at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Resources with a BB gun, an act that inspired the architect Peter Eisenman to try to get him arrested or expelled. The point of all this was, in his own words: “working with buildings without building within the structure/between the walls/decapitated roof-tops, scored and extracted infrastructures/ emphasizing internal structures through extraction.”

Perhaps the most telling illustration of this aesthetic credo will be found, not in the galleries of the Whitney, but at the David Zwirner Gallery. Re-creating a piece called “Open House,” from 1972, a dumpster has been retrofitted to form a maze of scarred and discolored doors that lead only into other doors. On a recent visit, a makeshift meal was also being prepared, in evocation, apparently, of the “Food” project mentioned above.

Some viewers, of course, will find more point and purpose in these efforts than others will. Yet it is difficult to escape the impression that, beyond the modish nihilism and abjection of his art, Matta-Clark’s main appeal — and his main claim to cultural relevance — is that he was among the first artists to find poetry and charm in the rotting infrastructure of dying cities. This is a thoroughly contemporary attitude and it is, one suspects, the main reason that this retrospective was mounted in the first place.

Whitney until June 3 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3676);

Zwirner until May 5 (519 W. 19th St. at Tenth Avenue, 212-727-2070).