The Split

Gordon Matta-Clark: Splitting: 1974

A while ago I posted on the tear and its implications, the split is very similar in terms of visual language but there are subtle differences. I first came across the split as an idea in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. He had made a series of works he called “cuttings,” in which he opened up buildings by slicing shapes into their walls and floors. In Splitting (1974), he bisected a building and laid it open. The building used, like Rachael Whiteread's 'House', was about to be demolished and he took a slice from the centre of it, undermined its foundations and removed the four corners of the eaves. His approach was methodical and deliberate, it feels as if the house has been cut by a huge knife into two parts.

Fall III by John Stezaker, 1993-94

John Stezaker has made numerous collages based on the formal idea of the split. His images are literally split in two. In the case above he has been able to comment on the male / female split, recombining the two into a new form. His work echoes an ancient idea of splitting and a desire for recombination.

Creation is itself often understood as a type of splitting. According to the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic, the Goddess Tiamat was destroyed in battle by the god Marduk, who then split her body in half “like a dried fish.” He placed one part above to become the heavens, the other half below to become the earth. Marduk used tremendous power to pull apart the Goddesses body, not that dissimilar perhaps to the energy released when we split an atom, an energy release that reminds us of the initial 'Big Bang', an event that supposedly initiated the creation of everything. But humans are mainly focused on another form of creation, one that relies on close coupling and because of this another set of creation myths were born, ones that also rely on the idea of the split. In Greek myth, one day Hermaphrodite the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite, bathed in the lake of Carie, the watery home of the naiad Salmacis. Salmacis is inflamed by his beauty and takes advantage of his bathing in her spring, dragging him down to the bottom of the water, and vowing to never release him. She then prays to the gods not to separate them and mystical powers are used to fuse their bodies together into one that is now both man and woman. This is a tale told most vividly in Ovid's poetic epic, The Metamorphoses. Hermaphrodite, after the for him traumatic event, demanding his parents signify what had happened by making sure all others entering the lake of Carie in future will, as he puts it, 'lose half their sex'.
“Deities whose name I bear, you authors of my days, grant me the grace I implore! that all who come after me to bathe in these waters may lose half their sex!” (Metamorphoses IV, 310)

Plato in the Symposium reminds us of an even older Greek myth based on an idea of splitting, humans were he states, 'originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves'. This description fits the 1550 image of androgyny below.

Northern School, ca. 1550 Androgyny

The painting above by an anonymous 16th century artist from Northern Europe, can be linked to certain old Bible commentaries. Samuel ben Nahman was a rabbi who lived in the land that is now Israel during the 3rd century. Ben Nahman was renowned for his commentaries on what Christians now call the Old Testament but which are in fact a slightly different collection of Jewish texts called the Tanakh. This is what he had to say about the creation of humans. “When the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first Adam, He created him with two faces, then split him and made him two backs – a back for each side.” (Genesis Rabbah 8:1) The Northern School image could well be an illustration of this "primal androgyne". A similar description can be found in Leviticus Rabbah 14:1 where it is stated: “When man was created, he was created with two body-fronts, and He [God] sawed him in two, so that two backs resulted, one back for the male and another for the female.”
The myth of the primal androgen was well-known in Jewish and Christian Platonic circles in the Middle Ages. This is explained in the book 'Carnal Israel' by Daniel Boyarin, a book that rethinks the unequal distribution of power that characterised relations between the sexes in most post-Christian societies. Boyarin argues that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body, as has often been previously stated. Without ignoring accounts of sexual domination that can be found in Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, is very different to that of Hellenistic Judaism and Pauline Christianity and he offers possible alternative readings, ones that are derived from ben Nahman's description of the splitting of Adam into two, whereby the two halves are not only equal in value, but that they are always seeking to recombine as a new whole.

The split as an idea, is often accompanied by the opposite idea of a possible fusion between differences. For instance in the Jasper Johns 'Painting with two balls', two real balls prise his painting apart, but it is visually fused together by his handling of the paint in such a way that the image can be read as a coherent whole.

Jasper Johns: 'Painting with two balls'

Jasper Johns: Drawing: 'Painting with two balls'

The drawing of the painting is a hybrid form. The balls in the original painting reveal the fact that the canvas is stretched over a wooden frame, one that can easily be warped or bent. These are material issues essential to a painter's craft and ones many young painters have had to deal with, as stretchers often warp and distort because of poor quality wood or a damp studio. Johns makes a positive out of what for many painters is usually a negative. The drawing has a visual split but not a physical one. The charcoal surface is also a representation, the image fading out at the bottom edge but becoming a tightly controlled illusion when it comes to depicting the two balls and the split. The split in this case also being one between drawing as representation and drawing as non figurative markmaking. (Also perhaps a sort of split from the then, very controlling ideas of Greenberg). As always there is another interpretation, one that reminds us of the ballsy nature of much abstract expressionist work. The macho culture surrounding an art form that was all about emotive expression, was something a young gay artist like Jasper Johns, would have loved to poke fun at. Yes, his painting has balls too. 

The split can also be a metaphor for how we do things. We can divide a log in two different ways, we can cut it with a saw or split it with an axe. When we cut it with a saw we cut across and through the wood grain, but when we split it with an axe we go with the wood grain, using its very nature to help split it apart.

Against the grain

With the grain

You could argue that 'A painting with two balls' is a split that works with the grain, a warped or bent stretcher frame being not something unfamiliar in an artist's studio, and it being a natural consequence of the way wood is. Whilst the drawing 'Painting with two balls' works against the grain, it begins with a lie in its title, it should be called 'Drawing of a painting with two balls'. Semantic nitpicking I know, but words are words and they shape thoughts.

Barnett Newman's work was often split into two by a line. But this line was one that was seen as a spatial split and to emphasise this it was often referred to as a 'zip'. 

Barnett Newman: Onement, I 1948

Onement was a painting where for the first time the artist used a vertical band to define the spatial structure of his work. This line of paint or band, later dubbed a "zip," became Newman's signature mark. He had applied the light orange line on top of a strip of masking tape with a palette knife and as soon as he stepped back to look at the effect, he realised that this thick, irregular band laid through the smooth field of Brownish Indian Red, simultaneously split into two and united his composition.

Barnett Newman

The zip opens into space

The thing about a zip is that it can be easily opened to reveal what lies beneath. Newman's work was at one time theorised as belonging to 'The Abstract Sublime' and it was argued that the 'zip' could be opened to a space that was cosmic in effect. 

This is what the critic Robert Rosenblum wrote in In the February 1961 issue of ARTnews

Originating with Longinus, the Sublime was fervently explored in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and recurs constantly in the aesthetics of such writers as Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot and Delacroix. For them and for their contemporaries, the Sublime provided a flexible semantic container for the murky Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness and divinity that began to rupture the decorous confines of earlier aesthetic systems. As imprecise and irrational as the feelings it tried to name, the Sublime could be extended to art as well as nature. One of its major expressions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes.

Clyfford Still: 1956-D

A case in point is the dwarfing intensity of Gordale Scar, a natural wonder of Yorkshire and a goal of many Romantic tourists. Re-created on canvas between 1811 and 1815 by the British painter James Ward (1769–1855), Gordale Scar is meant to stun the spectator into an experience of the Sublime that went unparalleled in painting until a work like Clyfford Still's 1956-D. In the words of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was the most influential analysis of such feelings, “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the Sublime.” Indeed, in both the Ward and the Still, the spectator is first awed by the sheer magnitude of the sight before him. (Ward’s canvas is 131 by 166 inches; Still’s, 144-1/2 by 160 inches.) At the same time, his breath is held by the dizzy drop to the pit of an abyss; and then, shuddering like Moore at the bottom of Niagra, he can only look up with what senses are left him and gasp before something akin to divinity.

Gordale Scar: James Ward

Rosenblum has this to say about Newman: Newman bravely abandons the securities of familiar pictorial geometries in favour of the risks of untested pictorial intuitions; and like them, he produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval moment of creation. His very titles (Onement, The Beginning, Pagan Void, Death of Euclid, Adam, Day One) attest to this sublime intention. Indeed, a quartet of the largest canvases by Newman, Still, Rothko and Pollock might well be interpreted as a post-World-War-II myth of Genesis. During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone. What used to be pantheism has now become a kind of “paint-theism.”

Gordale Scar is indeed another 'split', this time a geological one and one that reminds us of cosmic splits; cracks in the fabric of spacetime that we are told still exist; old remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang, when an older, high-energy state was left over as newer cooling regions met and didn't perfectly fit together. 

The crack in cosmic space-time as it appeared in Doctor Who

The 'split' in the Abstract Sublime goes cosmic. It is always fascinating to see where ideas go; you can of course develop a sort of word flow of an idea simply by going to a thesaurus, which in this case gives us the split, the crack, the fault-line, breach, gap, chasm, crack, division, fissure, rift, rupture, slash, cleft... all various lines of disjuncture, but where we have a division we can also have a repairing or joining, a closing or the forming of junctures and as you put an image together using a visual split, you could equally be opening or closing an idea. 

Spatial Concept, Waiting: Lucio Fontana 1960

The cut above was made with a single gesture using a sharp blade, and the canvas was then backed with strong black gauze in order to give the appearance of a void behind. It is a slit rather than a split. What Fontana alludes to is the cosmic significance of a slit in the fabric of the universe, something that he metaphorically acts out within the controlled arena of a taut canvas. The slitting of the canvas being a type of rehearsal for life, one that gives us a glimpse of what might lie behind the curtain. 

The split may of course refer to ourselves, a split personality suggests that at times we are not who we think we are. I will return to the split and its more psychological implications at another time, perhaps bringing into the debate one of my occasional guest bloggers who has more expertise in these things.

Splitting the shadow

See also:

The Tear: a line of disjuncture

The zig-zag More on cracks in the fabric of reality

The dotted line

Where stains and traces meet The wound as art

On not knowing and paying attention: Tim Ingold: Differences between intention and attention