1. INTRODUCTION City Slivers (1976; running time: 14 minutes 20 seconds) is American architect/artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s (1943-1978) experimental film that has relatively been paid little attention compared to his other well-known projects—such as Splitting (1974), Fresh Kill (1972), Conical Intersect (1975), Substrait (1976), Sous-sols de Paris (1976), and Oice Baroque (1977)— but offers an opportunity to explore the complex modes of relationship with the city. While a number of Matta-Clark’s work highlight straightforward critiques against the growing metropolitan life, I propose to read City Slivers as an attempt to engage or make relationships with the banal fabrics of everyday life, although cynically and indiferently. Among twenty ilms that Matt-Clark produced in his life, all of which were mostly produced between 1971 and 1977, City Slivers illustrates modes of engagement and disengagement, or skepticism and receptiveness in subtle ways (Papapetros, 2008, 630). The most notable aspect of City Slivers, which runs for around 14 minutes, can be understood by the phrase “building cuts”; it indicates Matta-Clark’s radical—but poetic—practice of deconstructing houses and oice buildings, as well as dissecting images of cityscape, by cutting through and making holes on walls, rootops, and ceilings of those buildings in order to open up new modes of encountering them in unexpected ways. 1 City Slivers , although different from his other works in terms of artistic medium, visually cuts across instances of cityscape and rearranges them in order to pursue his own practices that intervene existing urban systems and create new rhythms and atmospheres. In this sense, one needs to consider City Slivers not just as a documentation project but rather a claim of urbanism inflected by the artist’s engagements and disengagements with the city. Matta-Clark experienced the transformative time period of Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s, in which he was attentive to ways that everyday life is gradually reified and institutionalized by agents of power in varying scales, from which to generate his resistant and oppositional praxis. 2 By putting City Slivers into dialogue with the rich scholarship of Matt-Clark, as well as with other domains of cultural studies, Reading Matta-Clark Indifferently: Analyzing Gordon Matta-Clark’s City Slivers (1976) through the Notions of Engagement and Indifference Seunghan Paek Researcher at the Institute of Humanities, Yonsei University, South Korea https://doi.org/10.5659/AIKAR.2018.20.2.35 Abstract his article explores the complex modes of experiencing the modern city that are engaging and disengaging by nature, which thus negates any simple ways of understanding what it means by ‘the urban’ in a Manichean comparison. What follows is an in-depth case study of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 film titled City Slivers. Influenced by the countercultural practices prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, Matta-Clark produced a number of works roughly grouped together under the rubric of “building cuts.” Among many others, City Slivers is distinctive among Matta-Clark’s extensive cutting projects, in the sense that he actively utilizes ilm as a primary expressive medium and poetically reassembles fragmentary images of cityscape in order to bring forth an alternative urban scenario where the tension between institution-bound urbanization and dispersed daily urban practices is highlighted. Instead of simply being critical against the changing urban conditions of Manhattan in the 1970s, Matta-Clark aims to actively grasp ambivalent instances of urban life that are at once attractive and alienating, thereby excavating the subconscious terrain of contemporary urbanism that is prevalent but oten dismissed over glamorous urban projects. Keywords: Gordon Matta-Clark, City Slivers, New York, Modernity, Engagement, Indiference ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH, Vol. 20, No. 2(June 2018). pp. 35-43 pISSN 1229-6163 eISSN 2383-5575 Corresponding Author: Seunghan Paek, Ph.D. Researcher at the Institute of Humanities, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: seunghan.paek@gmail.com ©Copyright 2018 Architectural Institute of Korea. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.