Spotlight: Skateboard Modernism
Spotlight: Skateboard Modernism
In a solo exhibition at Frankfurter Kunstverein in September, 2003, Alex Morrison showed Found Minimalism (2001-), a series of blown-up snapshots taken throughout Europe and North America. The photos depict the minimalist sculptural forms—smooth, planed abutments of disguised heating ducts and sharp-angled concrete landscape planters—that are typical of modern institutional buildings. That these structures are also the found materials of every skateboarder's urban skate-park dream was no accident. Skateboarding was how Morrison knew of them in the first place.
Morrison makes art that builds on the Vancouver School's conceptual use of the formats of mass media. If Jeff Wall is the headmaster of this school, which is populated by charismatic teachers—Ken Lum, Stan Douglas—and gifted students—Brian Jungen, Myfanwy MacLeod—Morrison is its incorrigible truant, who, when he shows up for class, makes very good work indeed.
Both Found Minimalism and an earlier photo series, All the Old Spots (2001), explore the idea of urban functionality given a new life by teenage impertinence. The photos document the telltale signs of a war raging between two communities—one that sets the rules and another that lives to break them. Morrison infers the existence of the latter by photographing the spaces its members inhabit. A photo from All the Old Spots shows a sign sitting atop a set of high-school stadium bleachers that has been altered to exclaim, "Just Say Yo!" The community that urges you to "Just Say No" and allows you to sit on its bleachers—but only on the condition that you don't take drugs—elicits the team spirit of the street in reaction.
Making use of the built environment, skateboarders see opportunities where others can only see concrete and signs that say "Private Property." Similarly, Morrison finds value in structures he can adapt to. In the ongoing project Every House I've Ever Lived in Drawn from Memory (1998-) he depicts his past residences in skeletal outline. Sketched with an impressively casual finesse, the houses hover in space. Drawn in perspective, they have transparent walls rendered with a notional thickness, as if conjured by the X-ray vision of recollection. Transcribed onto the gallery walls each time it is shown, this is the work that launched Morrison's international career. He debuted the project at Halifax's eyelevelgallery in 1998, and has subsequently drawn it in numerous galleries in Canada, Europe and the United States. In conversation, Morrison spoke of the drawings, stripped as they are of biographical content, as a "critique of the attachment to things." The comment may be a reflection of his chosen lifestyle, but the drawings themselves tell a melancholy tale of the transience of modern life. As he continues to travel—Morrison most recently lived in Berlin on an artist residency sponsored by the Canadian government—the number of houses continues to grow. The current total stands at 40.
The co-curator at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Vanessa Joan Müller, sees Morrison's use of autobiographical material "without emphasis on the ego" as one of his greatest strengths. Although always in vogue, youth culture as a subject matter for art has been particularly fashionable of late; goth culture, for example, was a strong influence at last year's Whitney Biennial. Morrison's work, in contrast, as Müller notes, is not personality-driven or simplistically reliant on nostalgia for youth; he uses his own history as a source, but extends beyond this, elaborating details from his past into a meditation on the construct of identity itself. While other so-called skateboarder artists, for instance the Americans Ed Templeton and Mark Gonzales, get by making a kind of faux outsider art that is secondary to the main show—their identities as "skaters"—Morrison targets the idea of authenticity upon which that identity depends.
Skateboarding has a strange autochthonous character (invented, some say, by 14-year-olds in California). Despite its commercialization, it is a pursuit that retains an integrity comprised of two components: the athletic expression of personal freedom and the group ethic that works to protect this. The status skateboarders have as outsiders is their community's galvanizing element. Regarded as ungovernable city marauders, they tend to be happily complicit in the mythology of menace they supposedly represent.
Morrison portrays himself as an enthusiastic participant in the perpetuation of the skateboarder myth. He traffics in intelligent vicariousness, yet pushes his work beyond this, finding within his past, and contemporary art's available array of formats, the material of and mechanisms for excoriating self-reflection.
If there is a persona lurking within Morrison's art, its backbone is a series of anecdotes recounted in the bookwork Sparagmos (1999), a chronicle of some of the everyday poor judgments of young people—the seamy misdemeanours and alcohol-sodden, near-fatal car crashes. The title, derived from Euripides' Bacchae, refers to a ritual that involves ripping apart live animals, and the artist suggests an analogy between ancient and modern types of debauch:
...I throw the bottle across the parking lot at the windows smashing one of them. We just stand there looking at all the broken glass on the tables and in people's food. Three big guys start running after us...
Morrison's ability to question his own behaviour and see through the fictions that support it appears early in his work. Sparagmos comes complete with self-reflective footnotes in which the author indulges in an anguished, earnest monologue of self-reproach whose effect is often hilarious.
...He thought that charm could replace substance and style could do the work of emotional involvement. He dreaded relatedness, with anyone or anything, or indeed with himself...uncertainty about the stability of his autonomy led him to dread lest in any relationship he would lose his identity...
In 2002, Morrison reformatted this material into Patterer's Diary. Patterer's Diary presents the text of Sparagmos on a series of posters printed in pastel shades of pink, green, yellow, white and blue. Using these confectionary hues, he creates a kind of Pop art. Working with the Vancouver art dealer Catriona Jeffries, who represents Morrison, he showed the posters, arranged in vertical bands of colour, at Art Forum Berlin in September, 2003 (they have also been shown at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and Frankfurter Kunstverein). The text, which might be taken as gospel in book form, becomes, when presented in the fly poster format, a reflection on our tendency to fabricate the past into self-advertisements of identity. Morrison further emphasizes this calculated use of his experience by presenting the footnotes from Sparagmos as a framed work separate from the main body of the text. The expanded footnotes articulate a self-aware, self-doubting inner voice that differs sharply from the cool, detached narration of Patterer's Diary. The road to maturity is always scattered with the corpses of dubious achievements, and this makes it easy to identify with the tone, if not the substance, of the author's ruminations.
Rarely has the biographical basis of an artist's work been so literal and yet so mercilessly picked apart. Presenting himself as a paid-up member of his hip urban milieu, Morrison also laughs at its pretensions. In *Not Actual Layout of Apartment (2001) he mocks up a composite ad of the kind posted in laundromats and on telephone poles by people looking for a roommate:
...We Are: a household of creative, spiritual, aware, artistic, health concious, nature loving, active men and women with good attitudes...intelligent, bright, bookish (quiet times are essential!)...we don't watch t.v....rely on communication to solve differences, politically and environmentally aware...You are: grown up...NO DRUGS, fun to live with, funky, know how to respect common space, open minded, queer positive, single, easy going, with a sense of humour...
The list goes on; membership in the precincts of the cool turns out to be a rather fussy, bourgeois affair.
Morrison's sophistication lies in this ability to be both self-regarding and self-critical. Key here is the way the artworks he makes become a facet of this self-perception. If the Vancouver School has a unifying element, it is its treatment of the language of representation as part of a continuum. This is in keeping with the central innovation of art made in the last quarter of the 20th century: the exchange of art's previous condition of noble apartness for seamless incorporation into and complicity with the world of mass media. Morrison applies this insight to analyze the identity that his participation in the world of skateboarding—or youth culture generally—has helped to create. On this topic, he offers the analogy of "seeing punks on television." For the punk—or the skateboarder—who has taken the time to authentically construct his or her self-image, the representation confounds, as Morrison notes, "like an evil mirror." Deriding this reaction, however, is not the artist's point. Rather, when it comes to the deliberate manufacture of "realness," the truth lies somewhere in between.
The two sides of this self-understanding are evident in the related works Homewrecker (1999) and Housewrecker (2002). In the first, a grainy video, the eponymous artist plays up his bad-boy reputation, skateboarding through the hallways and, via a makeshift ramp, off the kitchen counters of a Halifax apartment (once the home of the Victoria-based artist Lucy Pullen).
Housewrecker, which was shown in Frankfurt and at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver last winter, expands on this deleterious attitude to domestic space, to devastating effect.
Housewrecker, a large-scale installation, is made from a video Morrison filmed of skateboarders at a party destroying the graffiti-scarred, decimated Vancouver home from which they are being evicted. Morrison projects rapidly-repeating segments of the beer-addled debauch, along with the original video, onto the interior walls of a house-like structure that comes complete with four walls, an elevated floor, a ceiling and two small inner rooms. Entering it, one feels suitably claustrophobic. First, one sees a monitor playing a video of a door rattling ceaselessly, moving, Morrison explains, in time to the sound of a punk band that was playing on the other side of the door. The band's two-chord rumble provides a soundtrack for the installation, its noise made more sinister by repetition.
Projected opposite, and menacing the viewer from above, is a video of plaster dust raining down from two holes in a ceiling. Further inside, one sees a clip of a young man repeatedly smashing his skateboard against a wall, and another of a fellow skateboarder incessantly jumping up and down on a couch. The artist's precise, tightly focused use of audio and visual elements, combined with the restrictive space, drives home the sense of inarticulate fury that permeates the work.
In Housewrecker Morrison doesn't merely document a disaffected strain of youth culture but actually captures the malevolent force of its energy. In the pristine forms of contemporary art he finds the value of abstraction, transforming the everyday pointlessness of the vandals' act into its meaning: the eternal adolescent impulse to seek in the arena of staged emotions a true expression of self.
According to the artist, many viewers of Housewrecker ask if he directed the action in the video, which can be seen in its entirety projected onto the back interior wall of the structure. The comment suggests that the behaviour Morrison documents is simultaneously not quite believable and too good to be true. In this he captures perfectly the tension between artifice and the authentic, the spontaneous and the contrived. An obvious analogy here is the recent global phenomenon of reality television, which promotes the idea that real life is hidden somewhere inside the apparatus of its representation, putting in a fleeting appearance for those who wait to see it. Morrison works, in contrast, not to construct the real, but to measure the cost of contemporary culture's wholesale acceptance of the idea of its contrivance. One consequence of this is the nagging persistence of self-consciousness, which may be a greater price to pay than one might think.
This series of essays on emerging Canadian artists is sponsored by The Fraser Elliott Foundation in memory of Betty Ann Elliott.
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