This event of cutting a dwelling house straight through began with a telephone call from Gordon Matta-Clark to Holly Solomon with the simple statement, “Holly, I need a house!” (Solomon 2001).36 When exactly the phone call was made remains unclear, but Matta-Clark spent the first month on site in March 1974 waiting for the local authorities to give permission for the work to begin. The situation was “kind of suspense-packed up to the last minute,” as he phrased it when in late May of the same year reflecting on the project in an interview made by Liza Bear – friend and film photographer on
Splitting (1974: 36). The desire to address a whole house had developed from the early projects only
engaging with built structures in parts. As Matta-Clark explained:
When I was living at 4th Street a few years ago I was already thinking in terms of dealing with a whole building. At first, what the nature of the activity would be seemed unclear, but gradually there was a logical progression through various kinds of local references to the whole building system. (34)37
Not knowing whether it would be possible to commence the work, Matta-Clark spent the time waiting by considering how to address this “whole building system.” If how to cut a whole house was the question, the lines of thinking about the task appear to have been rather straightforward when he said:
Originally what I wanted to do was just to take a cut out of it, cut through the whole thing, but there was very little that would have been shown by just cutting. And it seemed that once you’d cut, something should be made of each half. (36)
The gesture of cutting through the whole house had to expose something; cutting, in itself, was not enough. Matta-Clark therefore decided to cut the house straight through, twice, along two lines set an inch apart and open up the cleavage by tilting one half of the house down. In order to make this movement possible, the foundation below one half of the house had to be altered, and the house was then lowered to allow the central gap to open up. It is this process of carefully cutting and cleaving the house that the film Splitting faithfully documents, and the following passage describes the event as it unfolds within the film’s narrative. The indented sections in capital letters correspond to the text boards with which Matta-Clark divided the film into shorter segments. In between these are my own reflections in square brackets on the visual content of the film.
36
In an interview made shortly before her death, Holly Solomon gives a brief account of the circumstances surrounding Matta-Clark’s acquisition of the house in Englewood (Solomon 2001). The owner of the house, Horace Solomon, Holly’s developer-husband, gave the house already set for demolition to the project. Redevelopment of the area in which it was located was underway and tracing the site of 22 Humphrey Street, Englewood, New Jersey, on Google Earth shows that the site of the house indeed sits within an industrial area today [accessed 23 Jan 2011].
37
SPLITTING
[Zooming in on the front door left open, a sign attached next to the door warns, DO NOT OCCUPY. Zooming out from this restricted entrance, a full end wall of the house is framed by the camera.]
FIRST OF THE TWO PROJECTS DONE IN 1973, SPLITTING USED A TYPICAL ONE-FAMILY HUOSE IN ENGLEWOOD, N.J., A NEW YORK CITY BEDROOM SUBURB38
[Entering the house is Matta-Clark’s first challenge. The camera pans horizontally along the
whitewashed clapboard façade until it encounters a ladder leaning against the wall. The camera zooms out and frames the whole house.]
BEGINNING AT THE CENTER OF THE HOUSE TWO PARALLEL LINES WERE CUT THROUGH ALL THE STRUCTURAL SURFACES
[Splitting the house requires tools: in the grass lies a Sawzall chainsaw and cables, the chainsaw blade already pointing towards the foundation of the house, hands are preparing the work. The
artist/architect will climb up the ladder and cut, once – soon inside, then outside – and then twice. Sunlight shines through the house, while the non-existing shadow of the gap is cast on the grass with the rest of the house.]
THE ABANDONED HOME WAS FILLED BY A SLIVER OF SUNLIGHT THAT PASSED THE DAY THROUGHOUT THE ROOMS
[Sunlight blinds the interior of the house. The orientation of the cut is no longer clear. While the camera follows its line of light, another house is drawn across floors and open windows. The foundation is challenged by this drawing.]
BEVELING DOWN FORTY LINEAR FEET OF MASONARY, 322 HUMPHRY ST. WAS GENTLY TIPPED BACK ON ITS FOUNDATION
[The split is over now, all over the house, with only the last stone holding it together. The foundation, slightly lowered towards one end, has allowed half of the house to sit down. Inside, a woman moves around and crosses the gap created by the cut. The four top corners have been removed as well.]
THE FINISHED WORK LASTED THREE MONTHS BEFORE BEING DEMOLISHED FOR URBAN “RENEWAL”
It is of interest to note that the medium of film, well suited for complex temporal narratives, is used by Matta-Clark with a straightforward timeline accounting for the act of cutting from first to last stroke. When describing the work in later interviews, this chronological sequence of events will often be
38
repeated in line with the film’s straightforward documentation.39 The matter-of-factness of these accounts contrasts the possibilities of processing and editing that film and photographic material otherwise allow. Matta-Clark explored such temporal and spatial possibilities in the collaged work created on the basis of photographic documentation of the cut house, which through the cut and paste practice repeated the initial gesture of cutting the house. Eventually, after the work had split into its various configurations, what seemed to hold everything together in one piece, one work, after all, was the line of the cut drawn around the house by Matta-Clark and his chainsaw.40 Once the house was cleaved open, this central void appeared to prevent it from collapse – conceptually if not actually – and the irreversible gesture of Matta-Clark’s un-building was a process challenging the structure of a house to this point breakdown. Ultimately, the cut was a gesture that made the house stand back as another kind of structure – as a work of art – by adding something else. Matta-Clark’s notion of un-building is therefore not a straightforward reversal of conventional building processes when un-building one house while building another – un-building, in this sense, becomes a process of adding by subtracting.41