In the 1974 silent color film that documents his brief antics atop the Clocktower Building in Lower Manhattan, Gordon Matta-Clark, wearing a black raincoat, black tights and white gloves, like a modern-day Charlie Chaplin, shaves, brushes his teeth and showers with a garden hose while balancing on the edge of the clock face. Then he reclines in a harness, covered in shaving cream, before casually spinning the arms of the giant clock. The camera pans at the end to show the panorama from Broadway, where Matta-Clark is a speck high on the skyline, nearly invisible.

He looks so blissful up there in the soot and sunshine, having what was clearly a great time, reminding us of that less regulated New York City wherein a cheeky young man, if so inclined, might dangle from the outside of a tall building for a while and not attract undue attention. If there’s a metaphor for what the downtown art world was, but no longer is, that’s it.

The much anticipated, excellent Matta-Clark retrospective that just opened at the Whitney recalls this charismatic Pied Piper of experimentalism from the frontier days of what came to be called SoHo, which he helped establish as a lively art community. Thanks partly to him, we got the groundbreaking exhibition space at 112 Greene Street that evolved into White Columns, where he grew mushrooms in the basement and melted bottles into gorgeous colored bricks. He also cooked up the idea for the fabled Food, an artist-run, community-spirited restaurant-as-be-in on the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets, catering to hungry neighborhood artists and pioneering hippie-ish taste for global cuisine, fresh produce and sushi in the days when exotic seasoning in New York still meant salsa and soy sauce.

There’s a photograph of Matta-Clark, long-haired and shockingly boyish, in too-short jeans, with his partner Carol Goodden (who, not surprisingly, nearly lost her inheritance bankrolling Food), outside the failed Puerto Rican bodega that Food was to occupy. Elisabeth Sussman, the Whitney’s curator, writes in the show’s catalog that the place represented “the best picture of an artists’ utopia, in all its extraordinary ordinariness, that Matta-Clark imagined.”