It happened all the time / It didn’t happen at all.

Either way, I wanted my mother to leave him.

In a darkened room my art professor showed us slides of a house halved with a power saw. A slit of light shone through the exterior wall. It reminded me of something, I didn’t know what. A split. A gap. A gasp.

“Is it construction or deconstruction?” she asked. The slit a hub around which nothing but light worked.

Guitars hung from their necks on the wall, the weight offset by the pull of the strings.

I craned my neck to see the resonant chamber inside the sound hole.

My first stepfather was beloved by me. Caught me in his arms. Wrote epic notes in looping script and tucked them in my lunchbox. Spun me until I couldn’t walk straight. Made up songs for me on his guitar. Leapt over me on park benches. Roller-skated backward while singing, the baby in his arms. Taught me to run without making a sound.

Another man, another marriage.

For the artist, my professor tells us, the hardest part of the project was getting to know the house. It seemed to take cutting through it with a chain saw, a heavy slow process performed on the surface.

Another structure. Another slide: since the arc is a slit across the sun’s declination, the sun’s angle over the course of a year, the noonday light hit the opening one man left for another.

When I called home, my sister explained, “I’m not keeping what he does to mom from you. I’m keeping it from the role you play rescuing mom.”

He put his hands around hers.

Or, that’s how it appeared when viewed from another angle.

I saw a narrative I could hold and cut segments [from the memory].

In essence, what the cutting does is to make the [memory] more articulated and to produce unexpected views and an aspect of stratification: the thin edge, the severed surface reveals the autobiographical process of its making, overlapping readings of conditions past and present.

Some [memories] are a tremendous void with very little surface.

In another abandoned space the artist made a majestic cut, a hole, an aperture, an oculus, an “eye” through which light shifts.

Our house, too, was no longer a fixed entity, but a mutable space. On the first floor our mother removed the interior walls: vertical beams, salvaged from a collapsed barn, demarcated the rooms. 

My sister and I were always hanging out the windows of the house.

Even the wall beneath the stairwell our mother cut away, revealing the red brick of the exterior.

A bit of light shone through, which had been invisibly at play between the walls.

NOTES

Hence, the “structure was cored, walls and doors, roof and ceiling were united by a centralized opening,” and the office was “no longer a building to separate owners from workers but a hub around which nothing but light worked.” Gordon Matta-Clarke, typed notes, c. late 1974-1975. Rpt. Object to be Destroyed, Pamala M. Lee.

“Matta-Clark’s site-specific, abstract geometric cut-aways evoke (and subvert) much 20th century art historical discourse […] This is most obvious in the majestic cut he made at New York City’s Pier 52 in 1975, called ‘Days End’ […].” “40 Years After His Death Gordon Matta Clark Takes on New Relevance” from Hyperallergic, Joseph Nechvatal, September 4, 2018.

“The act of cutting through from one space to another produces a certain complexity involving depth perception. Aspects of stratification probably interest me more than the unexpected views which are generated by the removals—not the surface, but the thin edge, the severed surface that reveals the autobiographical process of its making. There is a kind of complexity which 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 Mata-Clarke’s Building Dissections,” an interview by Donald Wall from Arts Magazine, May 1976. Rpt. Gordon Matta-Clarke, ed. Corine Diserens.

“I was always looking for some way to incorporate the whole space. And since it was a tremendous void with very little surface in it, except for the outside surface and the pier, I kept on thinking of ways to correlate parts. That is, how to make an opening in one section work with other openings. It was really a matter of trying different intersects together.” “Gordon Matta-Clarke: Dilemmas,” a radio interview by Liza Bear, WBAI-FM, New York, March 1976. Rpt. Gordon Matta-Clarke, ed. Corine Diserens.

“Well, in every case, yeah [my] intrusion has to do with [an existing] structural interpretation. And so originally the idea came from watching the sun as it passed across the floor. Of course it defined an arc. And so the segments of arc which were cut at first in the roof, directly above the canal or moat in the center, was a shape that was generated by a series of points—three centers, basically—three arcs intersecting and forming that shape, what we call a spherical section, in a stylization of a spherical surface. And which came, of course, from associations and references to the sun and earth surface relationship.” Ibid.

“My earliest contacts with other people were not in the street, but from one window sill to another, in that typical Italian way of hanging out your window. […] Sill pals. That’s the way I made contact with a lot of people. There was even an older couple who remained friends of the family for years—they became friends because we—my twin brother and I—were always hanging out the windows and they were afraid. It’s interesting, the space I remember most is not so much floors and shelter as openings into other spaces and other people’s realms… A window-punctured world, right?” “Gordon Matta-Clarke: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building,” an interview by Liza Bear from Avalanche, December 1974. Rpt. in Gordon Matta-Clarke, ed. Corine Diserens.

“After I made the ceiling cut, I studied it. At first it had a very different shape—I changed the shape over the [course] of two weeks— [to see] how it went across the floor. And I wanted to make that opening work over the span of a year so that it was, in fact, related to a floor cut. So the floor cut then was going to be an arc that would follow the progress of that beam of light across the floor, over a period of months. But the only way to do that was by making a slit. So the slit is in fact a zenith point, the zenith intersect of the floor and roof hole. And of course since it’s a slit across the sun’s [declination], the sun’s angle over the course of a year, the noonday or zenith light will hit that opening and it will hit the water from one end of the year to the next, so it’s very precise. Also it cuts the space I designated for the piece—the open space of the pier—in half. So it it’s the center.” “Gordon Matta-Clarke: Dilemmas,” a radio interview by Liza Bear, WBAI-FM, New York, March 1976. Rpt. Gordon Matta-Clarke, ed. Corine Diserens.

“The hardest part of the whole project was getting to know the building. It seemed to take cutting through it with a chain saw to get to know it. Once that heavy slow process was performed on the surfaces, then the other ideas were simple.”“Gordon Matta-Clarke: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building,” an interview by Liza Bear from Avalanche, December 1974. Rpt. in Gordon Matta-Clarke, ed. Corine Diserens.

“A W-Hole House was the beginning of an idea which was developed over a year with Splitting and Bingo X Ninths [Bingo]. These projects took most of their energy from the object-like treatment of the suburban home. Buildings are fixed entities in the minds of most people. The notion of mutable space is taboo especially in one’s own house. People live in their space with a temerity that is frightening. Home owners generally do little more than maintain their property. Once an institution like the home is objectified in such a way, it does understandably raise a moral issue. These issues are not ones that I’m involved in but continue to inspire criticism from defenders of home and property.” “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clarke, Antwerp, September, 1977” from the catalogue Gordon Matta-Clarke, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, Antwerp, 1977. Rpt, in Gordon Matta-Clarke, ed. Corine Diserens.

“What is invisibly at play behind a wall of floor, once exposed, becomes an active participant in a spatial drawing of the building’s inner life.” Ibid.