Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting, 1974

In Matta-Clark’s Splitting, the artist carefully slices, nearly in half, a suburban home, in Englewood, New Jersey. Part sculpture, part-video, part-architecture, the ambitious project is typical of Matta-Clark’s body of work that uses abandoned buildings as sites for intervention, offering a critique of urban renewal, creating sculptures and altered buildings as symbols of, what art historian Tom Folland calls, “a city on the verge of collapse.”

Splitting is beautiful in its ruin-ness, in its destruction. Like a picturesque landscape painting dotted with ruins of a past civilization, the work weepingly echoes a hauntingly broken nostalgia.