Englewood, NJ, Splitting, and the Limits of Expression
“Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much more a challenging medium? […] A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components […] There is a kind of complexity that comes from taking an otherwise completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous situation and redefining it, retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present. Each building generates its own unique situation.” – Gordon Matta-Clark, interview in Antwerp, 1977.48
To make these connections about the limits of language and community, I want to turn to an artist for whom these issues are of central importance. Gordon Matta-Clark was an artist interested in bringing people together to share in a common experience and perspective. The majority of his works are built around the idea of involving others in his vision, in making visible a space, a situation, or a problem and addressing it in
cooperation with others. That Matta-Clark invited individuals to physically occupy and traverse his transformed spaces or “building cuts” and participate in his projects reveals the relational and performative dimensions of his work. Matta-Clark contributed works that transformed current architectural structures and thereby expanded aesthetic practice.
48 Thomas Crow, Corinne Diserens, Christian Kravagna, and Judith Russi Kirschner. Gordon Matta-Clark.
Phaidon Press, 2003., p. 19.
In this way, we can see that Matta-Clark utilized both the additive and queer models of the expansion of expression. Building cuts are “sculptural transformations of abandoned buildings produced by cutting and dismantling a given architectural site.”49 In this section, I argue that Matta-Clark’s art interrupts the degradation of community life occurring across the United States in the 1970s by bringing people together and building new relationships through aesthetic experience. The separation of persons caused by the exclusions of gentrification and eviction spurred Matta-Clark to foster community through participation in art. By doing so, Matta-Clark transformed current aesthetic practice and contributed new works that expanded the artworld.
The relation of persons and space, particularly space reorganized or reimagined through building cuts, presented an opportunity to revise or reorient views on place and community. New possibilities for meaning and living emerged as people experienced and moved through Matta-Clark’s building cuts. The ingenious use of buildings marked for demolition allowed Matta-Clark to reclaim spaces and create transitory beauty in the face of impending destruction. As Corinne Diserens notes, “With his ‘extractions,’
Matta-Clark, saw in hand and with a never ending energy, altered places, piercing edifice foundations, cutting into ceilings, walls, and floors. He restored seemingly doomed situations, reorganizing them into new, alternative forms of expression.”50 Matta-Clark reimagined the possibilities of expression and literally opened up space for new meaning through his activities. In this section of argument, I investigate the expansion of
community and the transformation of meaning presented in Matta-Clark’s work. When examining Wittgenstein’s question, “how many houses or streets does it take before a
49Pamela Lee. Object to be Destroyed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000., xii.
50 Crow, p. 6.
town begins to be a town?,”51 we must ask ourselves what would happen if those houses really tested the boundaries of city and community. What if Wittgenstein’s new
boroughs were occupied by Matta-Clark’s building cuts? What if Matta-Clark’s building cuts became part of the city center?
The focal point for answering this question is Matta-Clark’s 1974 work, Splitting.
After performing building cuts in Genoa, Italy the year prior, Matta-Clark wanted to continue and to refine his practice in the United States.52 He acquired permission to alter the house used for the Splitting project from Holly and Horace Solomon, his art dealers and the owners of the property. The house, located in Englewood, NJ, “a banal thing in a decrepit neighborhood,”53 would become more than the home from which its former tenants had been evicted,54 and more than the value of its soon to be vacant lot. In between residence and land speculation, 322 Humphrey Street would become a work of art that raised questions about home and community life. It is important to note that the house offered by the Solomons was not in an upscale area:
The property was a suburban one, but not an instance of the comfortable affluence that the word normally conveys. New York, like many major cities abuts a ring of decaying, lower-density jurisdictions, whose residents once served more prosperous commuters or worked in light industries fleeing congested urban confines. The forlorn dwelling at 322 Humphrey Street in Englewood, which the Solomons planned to demolish later, lay squarely within such a precinct.55 While we might not consider this location to be a new borough, it is nonetheless on the outskirts of New York City rather than part of the city proper. In this case, the
marginality of the Humphrey Street property took on a different meaning. By all
51Wittgenstein, §18.
52Matta-Clark’s Genoa works include A W-Hole House: Atrium Roof and A W-Hole House: Datum Cuts.
53 Lee, p. 11.
54Crow, p. 74.
55Ibid., p. 74.
accounts, the house was by turns banal, pathetic, ill-maintained, or in gross disrepair.
Such descriptions paint a picture of a neighborhood or community that is falling apart – or being forced apart, as the eviction of the residents in this case shows. The specter of gentrification looms in the background here, as might be inferred from the Solomons’s intent to destroy the house in order to take advantage of property values after Matta- Clark’s project had run its course.
Matta-Clark recognized the competing notions of community that were at stake in gentrification projects. Areas with low-income housing that cities or states want to
“clean up,” improve, rehabilitate, and make safe are sites that are often selected for the re-imagination of community. This ultimately means, however, that the new community is purely imaginary, and often does not include the current residents. Thus, such projects reveal underlying racist and classist motivations because “improvement” is achieved by displacing current residents for other, more acceptable, ones. Gentrification often promotes one community and its interests over those of a disenfranchised or
underprivileged group of people. Such projects do more to reinforce differences and to drive people of different backgrounds apart than to bring them together.
Through the controlled destruction and manipulation of the architecture of the house in Splitting, Matta-Clark made this split physical. Matta-Clark began the project by moving the former occupants’ remaining possessions and cast-offs into the basement without going through what he called the “fragmented biographical garbage heap.”56 “He then cut two parallel, vertical lines through the middle of the building with a chainsaw […] With the assistance and knowledge of Manfred Hecht [his partner on the project]
56 Ibid., p. 18. The quote is from an interview between Gordon Matta-Clark and Liza Bear in Avalanche.
[…] Matta-Clark set to tipping the house back on its foundations.”57 Using beveling tools and building jacks, Matta-Clark eventually lowered the building, finishing its bisection in a dramatic fashion.58 Thomas Crow recounts the details of the process as follows:
Keeping one end of the balloon-frame superstructure propped up on jacks, Matta- Clark and his helpers beveled down the cinderblock foundation at a 5 percent grade from the point of the split to the rear of the house, where the base was lowered by a full foot. Then, gingerly lowering the jacks, they were able to make one half of the house rock gently back to rest on the descending incline (‘like a perfect dance partner’) and the narrow split at the center widened into a wedge open to the sky.59
The movement of the building, or what Matta-Clark referred to as “the realization of motion in a static structure,” and the movement of people through the work, were both required for Splitting to be fully actualized.
For this reason, Holly Solomon organized a bus tour from New York so that people could see, experience, and participate in the work in person.60 Sculptor Alice Aycock recalls: “Starting at the bottom of the stairs where the crack was small, you’d go up, and as you’d go further up, you’d have to keep crossing the crack. It kept widening as you made your way up to the top, the crack was one or two feet wide. You really had to jump it. You sensed the abyss in a kinesthetic and psychological way.”61 In order to experience the work fully, the audience must be present to witness the sun as it changes position throughout the day and to see how it illuminates the space differently.
According to Richard Nonas, “Gordon’s work…needed, in fact, to be inhabited […]
57 Ibid., p. 18.
58Ibid., p. 21.
59Crow, p. 77. The quote is from an interview between Gordon Matta-Clark and Liza Bear in Avalanche.
60 Ibid., p. 77.
61 Lee, p. 29.
needed to be populated, to be lived in, walked through, experienced and not just seen or understood.”62 The performative dimension of Matta-Clark’s work indicates the need for active participation in his art.
One might recast the notion of participation in Gordon Matta-Clark’s work by combining it with ideas of play and use: “That Matta-Clark referred to his principle activity as ‘unbuilding’ points to the ways in which he was confronting the logic of artistic as well as architectural production. In contrast to an artistic ‘work’ he offered instead a kind of artistic play – an idea of art as practice or use.”63 This formulation has particularly Wittgensteinian resonance in that Matta-Clark helped renegotiate the meaning of buildings and spaces through reimagining their use. Again, this shows that Matta-Clark altered aesthetic expression by transforming or queering existing structures.
Put another way, Matta-Clark took buildings that had fallen out of use and gave them new purpose. He transformed condemned or abandoned structures into works of art, restoring the buildings by giving them “purposiveness without a purpose,” to borrow a Kantian phrase. Both of these formulations allow us to consider how reimagined and reconfigured structures can serve as the focal point for gathering and the establishment of community. As Pamela Lee writes, “the artist posed a larger sense of community against the alienation of modern housing his work assailed. For Matta-Clark, the participation, social, and inclusive ritual of art making was understood as a democratic solution to the
‘state of isolationism’ engendered by urban and suburban space.”64 Bringing people together in order to experience space and place in a new way, through re-imagining the
62 Crow, p. 134.
63Lee, p. xiii.
64 Lee, p. 164.
limits of a structure and how persons relate to it, builds community and participation.
Through such projects, Matta-Clark established new meaning through use.
But the demand for participation and movement in deconstructed spaces was sometimes a dangerous dance for audience and collaborators alike, as Horace Solomon recalls: “After it had been cut I felt nervous being in the house, I thought it would collapse at any minute. I really didn’t enjoy being in it, though I loved the way it looked from outside, and liked standing back and looking at it.”65 Matta-Clark’s partner on the Splitting project, Manfred Hecht, felt the tension of the work, but had a different reaction to it: “It was always exciting working with Gordon – there was always a good chance of getting killed. That’s what I liked.”66 Or as Holly Solomon commented about 1975’s Day’s End, “I remember when I saw the piece for the first time, it reminded me of the first moments of seeing a Michelangelo, of being in a cathedral with flying buttresses and light-stained glass. Yet I was also afraid. I was afraid to cross the cut he made in the floor; I’m afraid of heights. He made a small handrope for me and other people who were fearful.”67
Some interpretations of Matta-Clark’s work bear out these concerns of
endangerment by viewing the cuts as acts of violence. Because the object of this cut was a house – a dwelling, a home – Splitting was harshly criticized, particularly by feminists.
Some accused Matta-Clark of a “misogynistic […] violent attack against the domestic order gendered as feminine” and of “out and out rape” on the house.68 But Matta-Clark wanted persons to participate in this space, to walk through it and experience it before its
65 Crow, p. 140.
66Crow, p. 77.
67Lee, p. 130.
68Ibid., p. 21.
destruction, which contradicts this violent reading of Splitting. He wanted to draw attention to the disintegration of community that occurs along with the eviction of persons and to simultaneously bring community together around and through this issue.
As Les Levine points out, “The metapsychology of Gordon’s art was to embrace the abandoned. He worked in old buildings, neighborhoods in a state of rejection. He would nurture a building that had lost its soul.”69 Through reclaiming forgotten spaces, Matta- Clark cared for and reawakened them. By making such sites visible and vital again, Matta-Clark sought to enliven community. As Lee notes, “the dissipation of
communities and the demolition of site served as the generating principles of much of Matta-Clark’s work, and were its objects of critique.”70 In nurturing abandoned buildings marked for demolition, and making visionary cuts, Matta-Clark opposed the violent destruction of spaces and opened the possibility for reinterpreting them as vital and meaningful once again.
As I have argued, Gordon Matta-Clark showed us a way to understand the possibilities of transforming and expanding meaning and use through reclaiming abandoned or condemned spaces located at the margins of the city. Through his ingenious building cuts, he exposed forgotten or forlorn spaces and made them visible again. Works such as Splitting forced individuals to reexamine the conditions of their communities. Space and place were made visible through Matta-Clark’s transitory beautification projects, often with demolition crews waiting in the wings to swing the wrecking ball. In particular, because some of the buildings he altered were emptied because of evictions, Matta-Clark’s projects made visible the displacement of persons
69 Ibid., p. 58.
70Ibid., p. 162.
and the attendant disintegration of communities. Such problems were given new attention in Matta-Clark’s work. He transformed everyday or commonplace decaying structures that wouldn’t cause a second thought or a second look into extraordinary spaces that generated awareness and community through the innovative reorganization of space and the movement of persons through it. In Chapter Five, I explore the particular type of community that Matta-Clark garnered with his work. In the next two sections of this chapter, I examine the work of David Lynch and Andy Warhol. Each artist explores the boundaries of meaning and use through their innovative and exemplary art. As a result of their investigation of limits and borders, these artists have transformed and expanded aesthetic expression.