Robert Morris
Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, London, UK
'Morning Star Evening Star' installation shot (2008). Courtesy of the artist and Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers.
Today’s memorials are not heroes on horseback but Minimalist forms, inviting viewers to fill their blank, stark spaces with personalized meaning. So it’s curious that Robert Morris, a Minimalist-gone-figurative, chooses to take on the memorial genre for his latest project. In ‘Morning Star Evening Star’ at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Morris presents a series of wall-mounted reliefs – four cenotaphs memorializing victims of America’s recent wars. Begun in 1981, the first of the Reagan years, the series was finally completed this year, bearing the strong mark of today’s political climate.
The centrepiece of the exhibit, Standard Terror (1981-1987-2008), features an American flag constructed from heavy black felt, over which a modified version of the Nazi Reichadler presides. In profile, the eagle’s outstretched wings and hooked beak are identical to the Nazi emblem, but instead of grasping a wreath of oak leaves surrounding a swastika, the eagle grips a circle emblazoned with the words ‘Standard Terror’. The message is clear. However, just as the label ‘Nazi’ is deployed in political smears, conveniently assigned to one’s opponents, Morris’s visual rhetoric is affecting but also easy.
The flag’s corners are framed by fibreglass casts, each revealing fragments of machinery and human remains, like snapshots of an exhumed mass grave. Two buckets rest on the lower casts, flanking the flag. Morris maintains symmetry by balancing the eagle above with a bench below the wall relief. The bench and buckets refer to waterboarding, a form of torture that involves strapping a subject to an inclined board and forcing water into his breathing passages to simulate drowning. Symbolic of the dubiously-legal methods the CIA used to interrogate terrorism suspects, these torture implements further implicate the ‘Nazi-like’ American regime.
But is the suggested equivalence of America’s war on terror and Nazism, an ideology now synonymous with the darkest shade of evil, cogent? Neither original nor nuanced, the comparison smacks of oversimplification and hyperbole. The work’s mass grave imagery and foreboding, all-black presentation only add to its didactic visual vocabulary. The other three reliefs are similarly manipulative (and suggest why memorials have abandoned the language of explicit narrative). In Morning Terror (1987-2000-2008), Morris, having already invoked Nazism, turns to another obvious provocation: the victimization of children. The work consists of a cream-coloured cast from which adult and baby faces emerge like death masks. Skeletons and bones are also interspersed. In front of the cast, child-sized clothing hangs from a metal rod, linking innocence with violence and death.
Despite the purported political urgency of these works, their real strength is formal: the use of encaustic and the depiction of American flags evoke Jasper Johns; the fibreglass casts recall Rodin’s The Gates of Hell (1880-1917). Such mixing and matching is typical of Morris, whose retrospectives can sometimes seem like exercises in pastiche. From spare fibreglass forms to tangled felt sculptures to blindfolded graphite drawings, his work has ranged from Minimalism to performance art to earthworks to Conceptual art to Neo-Expressionism. Appropriation, not politics, is what Morris does best.
Natasha Degen
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