Artist : Robert C. Morgan
Genre : Drawings and Film
Period : November 15 till December 10
Everyday, 9.00AM till 10.00PM
Location : Gaya Fusion Art Space
Jl. Raya Sayan, Ubud
Tel: 979252
Robert C. Morgan is one of New York’s most important
curators, having organized many major museum retrospectives,
plus he has published over one thousand articles and reviews
in more than fifty magazines, including Flash Art, Art in
America and Art Press. He is also a prolific artist whose
own work has been shown at venues like the Whitney Museum
of American Art and the MOMA in New York. In his current exhibition
at Gaya Gallery he presents ‘Recent Works on Paper and
Early Super 8 Films’.
In some ways the Gaya Gallery is not the ideal venue for this
very private and ‘intimate’ exhibition. The tiny,
gem-like, drawings appear lost on the vast wall space of the
gallery. A more intimate gallery would, perhaps, be more appropriate.
But, as you sit in the darkened section of the gallery, which
has been curtained-off to create a ‘cinema’ screening
area, and watch the flickering images of the Super 8 films
(unfortunately transferred to digital video and projected
poorly by a video projector) pass before your eyes, it is
possible to feel yourself transported to another time and
place. Maybe it is a New York loft in the mid-1970s, an artist
studio in Sydney, or a corner of a darkened Public Space in
Toronto. A small gathering of people wait patiently for the
next exciting Super 8mm film reel to be ‘spooled’.
It is very interesting to revisit artist’s films of
the 1960s and 1970’s, you can suddenly feel overcome
by an overpowering sense of nostalgia and sadness for a bygone
era. The advent of the lightweight 16mm, 8mm and super 8 cameras
and inexpensive film stock during this period allowed artists
for the first time (and young independent film-makers) with
little or no funds, crews or training, to explore and produce
challenging and innovative two dimensional ‘time-based’
art works in their studios and outside locations. A new generation
of independent film-makers was born. Their films looked different
due not only to the new technology, but also to their study
of the works and writings of the Russian formalist film-makers,
in particular Sergei Eisenstein, who’s writings and
films of the 1920s became essential reading and viewing. His
films, ‘Battleship Potemkin’, ‘Strike!’
and ‘October’ were all ‘seriously’
viewed, analyzed, dissected and discussed. A ‘new’
film language, including terms such as ‘intellectual
montage’, ‘the jump-cut’, ‘rhythmic
montage’, ‘parallel editing’, ‘associational
editing’ and even ‘real-time’ fixed camera
film-making, became part of the accepted language in the film
community. The impact was felt almost immediately in the commercial
American film industry, which had traditionally used the illusion
of reality as the basic element of their conventional Hollywood
movie making style.
Many artists embraced the new technology for the opportunity
to explore the emerging time-based medium, but, on the main,
rejected storytelling. Their interest lay in the ‘new’
formalist film language, the medium of film for itself, and
the exploitation and analysis of popular film and television
culture. Robert C. Morgan’s Super 8 films were created
in this milieu and are fine examples of artist films of this
era. In his film, ‘Slave’, he takes images and
sequences of images from television. ‘Ben Hur’,
a ‘traditional’ Hollywood film, and an advertisement
for Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, are re-edited together,
in a never ending cycle of interchanging scenes, without sound,
leaving their sequence to determine the meaning. “In
fact”, Robert C. Morgan says, “I dislike television,
but the medium gives me an excuse to re-interpret this stupid
imagery without sound, to show these dumb electronic images
for what they are in the form of a critique”. The movie
demonstrates that the meaning of any film is contextual and
that it is not the content of the images in a film which is
important, but their combination. The viewer perceives each
sequence of images and organizes them into a larger context
by subliminally adding the relationship between them. ‘Slave’
makes a strong comment on the superficiality of television,
but, the strength of the movie is found in its use of semiotic
suggestion, where the cascading images create different viewer
imposed narratives and interpretations.
In ‘The Turkish Bath at 78 RPM’ Robert C. Morgan
places a print of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ painting
‘The Turkish Bath’ on a record turntable and films
the painting rotating at 78 RPM. The voyeuristic nature of
Ingre’s painting is highlighted. A collection of luscious
nude Parisian ‘demi-modes’, masquerading as ancient
goddesses, are depicted luxuriating in what we would call
an exotic ‘day spa’. John Berger would call the
painting “an image of patriarchal possession depicting
the female body for masculine consumption”. The ‘sexy’
ladies of leisure and pleasure are intentionally intended
to arouse feelings of envy and lust in the male eye. Initially,
as we watch the movie, we become more aware of the circular
nature of the painting. The internal circular movements and
rhythms of the painting become clear. The rounded shapes of
breasts, thighs and bottoms roll and spin across the screen,
but, as Robert C. Morgan begins to inter-cut and play with
localized sections of the painting, what emerges is a startling
frenzy of female flesh that rapidly builds to an orgasmic
climax. His film thoroughly succeeds in stripping bare the
inherent meaning of the painting, and exposing it as mid 19th
Century pornography, masquerading as high art.
It is difficult to conceptually divorce Robert C. Morgan’s
works on paper from his films. Inspired by a recent trip to
Korea, the works on paper are all simply called ‘Gwang
Ju Drawings’. Created in subtle earth colors and a limited
tonal range of brown and ochre, these small ‘drawings’
are filled with Korean ideograms (a graphical symbol that
represents an idea), other script forms, bold gestural lines,
geometric intricacies, and blocks of color creating a collection
of tantalizing images that suggest some form of oriental pictograms.
The drawings hold a semiotic relationship to each other, and
convey Robert C. Morgan’s personal recollections, his
history and his thoughts. The drawings convey the sequential
expression of moments in time and can be interpreted as a
‘storyboard’ for memory. For ‘time-based’
artists this exhibition is of interest and importance, viewing
it is essential.
