Splitting.

Splitting is the second of Gordon Matta-Clark's three artists' books. It documents one of his most famous works: the vertical bisection of an abandoned house in Englewood, New Jersey, owned by his dealers Holly and Horace Solomon and scheduled for demolition. The book consists of short descriptive texts, photographs, and photo collages which show the transformation of the building. Using a hand-held reciprocating saw Matta-Clark cuts two parallel lines one inch apart through all structural surfaces, then bevels down the cinder blocks at the base of the building and gently tips half of the structure back on its foundation. The final image is a three-panel folding plate depicting a composite cross-section of the house. The finished work stood for three months before the scheduled demolition.

'Although it may appear modest and somewhat offhand, Splitting plays an important role in Matta-Clark's attempts to shape the complex activities of which it is part. As the scholar Anne M. Wagner has observed, the work's title can be understood to refer not just to the physical act of cutting the house in half but also to the strategic accumulation and dispersal of the project as a whole, its "splitting" into its various parts: action, photographs, a suite of collages, an artist's book. "This collection of artifacts," writes Wagner,"' should not be seen as merely indexing the artist's actions. On the contrary, each registers, defines, understands, revises, argues, and amplifies an emergent and fluctuating set of claims. What this means is that Splitting immediately split into a work that its maker recognized as something to be mediated in order to be explained and known... Each medium tells its separate tale"'(Artists Who Make Books, 182).

Artists' book, oblong 4to (178 x 286 mm, 7 x 11¼ in); black-and-white photographs and photocollages printed in offset, photographic plate printed in offset (398 x 267 mm, 15¾ x 10½ in) machine-folded twice and mounted to inside rear cover as issued; white wrappers printed in black, saddle-stapled and pasted into covers at spine, very minor toning at spine, a close to fine copy; [32]pp.

Lailach, Printed Matter: Die Sammlung Marzona in der Kunstbibliothek / The Marzona Collection at the Kunstbibliothek (2005), 140; Moeglin-Delcroix, Esthétique du livre d'artiste 1960/1980 (2012), 288-9; Roth/Aarons, Artists Who Make Books (2017), 182-183, (92).