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S a r a h M o r r i s
Born 1967, London, UK
Lives and works in New York & London
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Sarah Morris
Midtown
1998
16mm film transferred to DVD, projected, 9:30 minutes edition of 3
Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York and Jay Joplin/White Cube, London
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“There is no frame of reference. I experience perception absent of intellection. All I see is surface and pattern. My ability to distinguish between background and foreground has disappeared. Although I walk through space with limbs still nimble – where touch, taste and smell continue to orient – my eyes reflect but do not see. Height is suggested, but it is without sky or earth. In other words, I see without context…I have become a point of view without a person behind it.”
These are the words of a fictional character that inhabits the world of Sarah Morris’ paintings and films, whose subjectivity is invested in the act of looking itself. Embodying a radically two-dimensional point of view that almost dissolves into the proliferating grids of its environment, rooted in the unrelenting pace, textures, and spaces of the contemporary urban environment, this character explores the perceptual fields of late twentieth century capitalism through the spaces and temporalities of the contemporary metropolis. In Midtown (1998), Morris’ camera moves like a flâneur through the spaces of midtown Manhattan, consuming disjointed fragments of experience without differentiation, conflating public and private, distance and intimacy in fleeting, touristic impressions of ambient spaces and disarticulating coherent space with the angles and depth of shots. Neon signs inserted into gaps, billboards on façades, and the reflections of one building in another’s glistening exterior curtain wall create a jungle of details that dictates a formal rhythm within the film and also recalls the iconography of Morris’ paintings. Her field of vision is that of late twentieth century capitalism, distracted absorption prior to the abstraction and isolation of cognitive rationalization. The camera treats people and buildings with the same undifferentiating gaze, as objects rather than protagonists, without a sense of the relationships that would convey meaning. Exploiting the languages of spectacle and distraction, the film is a hypnotic stream of iconic urban imagery, a frenzy of lights and colors caught in a prism of glassy skyscrapers and teeming crowds and taxis that recalls Walter Benjamin’s heady premonition of filmic reality in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2002 Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL. Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM. Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. 2001 Correspondence, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany. Wild Walls, MAK Center, Schindler House, Los Angeles, CA. 2000 Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland. Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. 1999 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK. 1998 Le Consortium, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Dijon, France.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2003 Days Like These: The Tate Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain, London, UK. 2002 Center of Attraction: 8th Baltic Triennale of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. Projects 77: billboards, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (off-site). Urgent Painting: ARC/Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France. Iconografias Metropolitanas, 25th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil. 2001 Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitan, SITE Santa Fe 4th Annual Biennial, Santa Fe, NM. Playing Amongst the Ruins, Royal College of Art, London, UK. Shopping, EA-Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria. Beautiful Productions, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK. 2000 What If: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Confusion, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany. AM/PM, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. 1999 Frieze, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Dumbpop, Jerwood Foundation, London, UK. 1998 Weather Everything, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig, Germany. Narrative Urge, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden. 1997 Dramatically Different, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France.
Further Reading
Burgi, Bernhard, Diedrich Diederichsen et al., Sarah Morris (Kunsthalle Zurich: Zurich, Switzerland, 2000)
Coles, Alex, “Sarah Morris,” Art & Text no.71 (Nov. 2000-Jan. 2001): 86
Goodeve, Thyrza Nicholas, “To Sit with the Speed Addict,” Parkett no.61 (2001): 96-107
Johnson, Ken, “Sarah Morris ‘Crystal’,” The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2001: E44
Jones, Ronald, Sarah Morris - Capital (Oktagon Press: Cologne, Germany, 2001)
Kempkes, Anke, “Sarah Morris: Hamburger Bahnohof, Berlin,” Frieze (Oct. 2001): 100-01
Klein, Joe, “Capital – The Formal Seat of an Informal Country,” Parkett no.61 (2001): 108-25
Moore, Margaret, “Sarah Morris,” Hemispheres (Jun. 2000): 90-95
Pellegrin, Maurizio, ed. Innerscapes, An Anthology of Artist's Writings (Trieste Contemporanea: Italy, 1998)
Pesch, Martin, “Sarah Morris,” Kunstforum no.150 (Apr.-Jun. 2000): 425-26
Prinzhon, Martin, “Almost Abstraction and Sarah Morris,” Parkett no.61 (2001): 126-33
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