Unhousing the Familiar: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974)

Splitting. AI image

 

Cutting the House: The Gesture of Splitting

When Gordon Matta-Clark received permission in 1974 to work on a condemned suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey, he did not decorate, preserve, or restore it—he cut it in half. The resulting work, Splitting, transformed an ordinary dwelling into an open wound. The gesture was simple yet profound: by slicing through the center and slightly lowering one section, Matta-Clark revealed the invisible scaffolding that sustained the structure. What had been the image of stability became a vision of fragility, a space simultaneously opened and undone.

Born from the architectural debris of post-industrial America, Splitting occupies the uncertain ground between art and demolition. The house—typical, middle-class, anonymous—was already destined for destruction. Matta-Clark intervened before its erasure, turning loss into revelation. He shaved the foundation, sawed a vertical line through the entire building, and allowed light to flood the interior. Photographs and film record a chasm of brightness where walls once met. Sculpture, here, is no longer an object added to space, but space made perceptible through subtraction.

Deconstruction Made Tangible: Derrida’s Inside and Outside

In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida writes that “the relationship between the outside and the inside is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority.”¹ Matta-Clark’s incision performs that insight in wood and plaster. The interior—traditionally the domain of privacy—becomes exterior, exposed to daylight and to the passer-by. The conceptual wall separating shelter from exposure collapses, echoing Derrida’s insistence that every boundary is haunted by what it excludes. Splitting thus enacts deconstruction as a physical act: the home’s meaning depends on its opening to what lies beyond, just as a text depends on its margins for sense.

Derrida’s notion of the parergon further illuminates the gesture. The parergon—literally “beside the work”—refers to frames, ornaments, and supplements that seem external but are essential to what they enclose.² A house, too, relies on its supplements: furniture, traces of inhabitation, the pulse of daily life. Matta-Clark removed all of these, leaving only structure and void. Once emptied, the building no longer reads as “home”; its meaning collapses without its parergonal frame. By exposing beams and joists, he reveals the dependence of the familiar upon what appears secondary. The cut becomes philosophical critique, an architecture stripped to the grammar of its construction.

The Unhomely Home: Freud and the Return of the Familiar

If Derrida reveals the instability of form, Freud discloses the instability of feeling. In “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud traces the German heimlich—“homely,” “familiar”—to its secret twin: “concealed,” “hidden.” Its negation, unheimlich, does not name what is alien but what was once known and now returns as strange.³ The home, the emblem of comfort, harbors the potential for disquiet. Matta-Clark’s act literalizes that paradox. The bisected house becomes unheimlich—un-homely. Its symmetry is broken; its private interior lies exposed. What once promised safety now evokes unease. The cut opens the psychic seam between belonging and estrangement, suggesting that domestic security depends on repression, on the exclusion of the outside that Splitting violently reinstates.

The Architecture of Loss: Home, Ground, and Origin

The work also raises a deeper question: how does a place become home at all? The ground on which a house stands existed long before habitation; the dwelling makes that indifferent land intimate. We fill rooms with objects and memory until they reflect our sense of belonging. Yet that familiarity is a construction, not a given. Matta-Clark’s empty, light-sliced shell reveals the absence beneath the illusion of permanence. The void he exposes is not merely structural, it is the gap between habitation and existence, between the desire for rootedness and the transience of the built world.

In Splitting, the supposed origin of security—the house itself—turns into its opposite: a monument to impermanence. Derrida reminds us that “the origin is always already derived,”⁴ and Matta-Clark’s divided dwelling enacts that derivation in matter. The home’s authority as foundation collapses once the ground shifts. What remains is a memory of stability, a trace of occupation lingering in the air like dust.

Unhousing the Familiar

To witness Splitting—through photographs or Matta-Clark’s film—is to sense a double awareness: the precision of a trained architect’s geometry and the tenderness of an elegy. The incision is both surgical and mournful. It discloses not only the skeleton of a house but the precariousness of the idea of “home” itself. The work invites reflection on how easily our most intimate spaces can be unsettled, how the architecture of safety rests on lines that can be severed with a single cut.

Matta-Clark once called his practice “anarchitecture”—a refusal of architecture’s promise of permanence. Splitting embodies that refusal while offering a meditation on exposure. In revealing what sustains the visible, he renders the invisible palpable: the tension between containment and openness, memory and erasure. The house becomes a text written in light and void, where meaning arises through absence.

The cut, finally, is not destruction but insight. By unhousing the familiar, Matta-Clark shows that every structure—physical or psychic—rests upon instability. Splitting stands as a concrete philosophy of impermanence, a reminder that the spaces we inhabit, and the selves they shelter, are held together only by the traces of what they exclude.

Footnotes

¹ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 35.

² Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 54.

³ Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 224–25.

⁴ Derrida, Of Grammatology, 141.

 Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” 1919. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
Matta-Clark, Gordon. Splitting (film, 1974). 112 Greene Street Archive, New York.