Viewing page 25 of 50

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]
Ree Morton, Souvenir Piece (detail), 1973, m/m. 

lying, leaning, supported, supporting; a lot of little objects rather plaintively lost in space and then found again echoed in drays on wall or floor or remembered in similar shapes on the other side of the room - the most precarious aspect of Morton's work, dangerously close at times to fussiness, but usually conquered by associations and alienations clear enough to be provocative, not coy.)

Until recently, Morton's work has lined up against at least one wall, providing an almost Surrealist space by which the sculptural elements elude illusion, but bar entrance. Now some of the pieces lead from the dotted paths of pictorial space into real roads around and into the sculpture. The roofs, shelters, paths, gates, and yards imply architectural plans and an ambiguous area between interior and exterior space. In the multipartite piece shown recently at Artist's Space, based on materials and memories from a summer in Newfoundland, a Magrittean contrast between careful arrangement and natural materials, outdoor and indoors, was intensified by the diffused, artificial "daylight" and the black shuttered windows that pushed one back into the room. In the last two years the "places" have become more schematic, a necessity as they move ambitiously expand and fragment. The ritual quality is also heightened in newer works. The Newfoundland piece was all green and gray and white and natural wood and stone - clean and fresh and peaceful with an almost "homey" intimacy laid over the ominous clarity of a dream. Morton seems to be topographically mapping her own exposed zones, making Japanese gardens of her fantasies, within the limitations of her own loft and house life. The influence of memory is very strong (the stones on wooden pedestals ranged on a "table" in the Newfoundland piece look a bit like souvenirs in a gift shop). 

All of Morton's pieces exist in that very controlled, but still dispersed and uncaptured space which hovers between the pictorial and the sculptural (not necessarily in respective relation to the drawn and three-dimensional elements). The space in both her sculpture and her drawings recalls that of the American Indian or of other so-called naive artists. At the same time, my reference may be to the highly sophisticated use of multiple viewpoint found in ancient Chinese and other Eastern landscapes. And there is also an openness that is rooted in repetition and "uniformity," the slight awkwardness or confrontational innocence that is an attribute of so much of the best American art. The spaces are compact but welcoming, like little shelters for the expanding imagination, the legendary door in the wall. 

*The title is taken from T.S. Eliot; the following quotation has hung above Morton's desk for several years: 

At the still point of the turning 
world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still 
point, there the dance is, 
But neither arrest nor movement. And 
do not call it fixity, 
Where past and future are gathered.

This essay is a revised and expanded version of a text first published in the catalogue for "Made in Philadelphia" at the Institute of Contemporary Act, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March-April, 1973. 


[[right margin]] cut off by xeroxor [[/right margin]]