Sarah Morris
Encyclopedia
Sarah Morris is a British-born American artist
.
, graduating magna cum laude. She studied at Jesus College
, Cambridge University, associated with Professor Raymond Williams
, when Professor Stephen Heath was situated and did her final year in the Social and Political Sciences [SPS] department. She attended the Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program from 1989-90.
Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been making abstract paintings and films. The confluence of her studies in film theory and political philosophy has greatly informed her practice. Morris’s work derives from close inspection of architectural details combined with a critical sensitivity to the psychology of a city, its politics, its key protagonists as well as its citizens. Morris began her career making graphic paintings that adapted the dramatic, emotive language used in newspaper and tabloids. She was interested in the idea of emptying out and playing with the narrative forms of specific articles found in The New York Times
and the New York Post
. Her 1995 painting Guilty from that series, inspired the name of Dakis Joannou
’s yacht designed by Jeff Koons
.
Her first studio was situated in Times Square
and its location was a key influence on her practice. The visual and aural density of the site, as well as the prevalence of midtown corporate culture, provided the impetus for her interest in the architecture of power and what Nicolas Bourriaud
called an “art of amplification.”
Morris curated several shows, including a series titled "Closeup" in the early 1990s, held in the Times Square studio location with Rita Ackermann
, Mariko Mori
, Bernadette Corporation and a group show of Sam Taylor-Wood
, Gary Hume
, and Jane and Louise Wilson
, amongst others. In 1997, Morris curated a group show titled "Hospital", after the lyrics of the Modern Lovers' song, at Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin which included work by Darren Almond
, Liam Gillick
, Richard Hamilton
, Jeff Koons
, Jorge Pardo, Richard Phillips
, and Jane and Louise Wilson
. In 1999-2000, she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin
. She received the Joan Mitchell
Foundation Painting Award in 2001.
Morris has exhibited widely — at Museum für Moderne Kunst
, Frankfurt (2009), Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna
(2009), Fondation Beyeler, Riehan/Basel (2008), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2008), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen
, Rotterdam (2006), Moderna Museet
, Stockholm (2005), Palais de Tokyo
, Paris (2005), Kestner Gesellschaft
, Hannover (2005), Kunstforeningen
, Copenhagen (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
(2002), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2002), and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof
, Berlin (2001), among others.
Morris named her studio “Parallax” both for the Hollywood classic, The Parallax View
, and for the idea of parallel production. Generally the term parallax
refers to an optical phenomenon whereby the position or direction of an object appears to shift due to a change in the position of the observer. This apparent change is relational, and it always involves a new line of sight. In her studio activity Morris is involved with the parallel production of paintings and films, each with its own set of related concerns, allowing for different narratives and interpretations to emerge. Indecipherability and the idea of not being able to perceive depth also go along with the idea of parallax.
Morris’s paintings explore the codes and power structures of architecture and cultural symbols. Her work focused initially on the vocabulary and signs belonging to media and advertising, before gradually turning to other signs, those of the city and urban planning. Through her paintings, Morris manages to disembody the cities she explores in her films, removing them from all narrative or figurative content. Drawing from graphic and industrial design, Morris typically works with household gloss paint, focusing on surface and the condensation of space and culture. Joanna Burton writes, “There is no clear foreground, no distinct background, only surface: places where the eye is left more easily to roam, spots where it is hard to untangle the gaze.” The regularity of the painted surface, that suggests no depth whatsoever, becomes analogous to the mirror-like surfaces of the buildings Morris depicts in series such as “Midtown” and “Los Angeles”.
Morris’s paintings have often been seen in the lineage of Pop
, post-painterly, and Minimal art of the 1960s yet, she has been able to free herself nonetheless from her influences to develop a singular identity that lies at the crossroads of Pop, Conceptual art
and geometric abstraction. As one critic describes, “Stella
resonates here, too, this time as the painter of concentric squares and mitered mazes, generating complexity and dynamic spatiality out of unremitting flatness.” Referred to as, “Mondrian
s seen through a politically inflected kaleidescope”, Morris intentionally leaves the criticality of her work open-ended. Mark Rappolt writes that her work, “focuses on the surface of things and that even when it delves deeper its only to look at the ways in which that surface is prepared (scrubbed, vacuumed, made up, rehearsed).” Her paintings have been described as “quite literally caught between what they say and what they do.” Along the same vein, Morris was asked by The editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman
in 2000 to think of a project using Kate Moss
. In response, Morris proposed to shoot and design the cover of British Vogue in May 2000. Similar to Richard Hamilton's
design of the Beatles
White Album, she was interested in intervening in the surface and packaging of the magazine. The image was a riff on the Roxy Music
album, The Atlantic Years.
In her films, Morris uses a conceptual strategy of duality, which examine both the surface of a city – its architecture and geography – as well as its ‘interior’: the psychology of its inhabitants and key players. Morris investigates how metropolises turn their outward appearances into self-referential cosmoses. As Martin Hebert explained in a description of her film “Los Angeles”, “This is Los Angeles as it likes to present itself: a string of ideas corralled into hectic but workable geometry. A town, as Christopher Isherwood
once put it, which is like an advertisement for itself.” Morris assesses what today’s architectural façades and urban structures, cities and nations, might conceal. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in conspiratorial studies of power, the structures of control, and global socio-political networks.
Morris employs very different kinds of cinematography – from documentary recording to apparently narrative scenarios – which work as a method of visual distraction, a way of exploring the urban environment, and more particularly its issues of social power and representation. In her films, “Midtown” (New York), 1998, “AM/PM” (Las Vegas), 1999, “Capital” (Washington D.C.), 2000, “Miami”, 2002, “Los Angeles”, 2004, and "Beijing", 2008, Morris exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, creating both a memory and most importantly, Morris’s fantasy of the city, constructing multiple fragmentary situations for the viewer. The films track the urban plan, architecture, and various sites of production. The fragments of daily life, both extraordinary and ordinary, point to an overall connectivity; a network of social systems which extends all the way to the viewer. As Morris states, “this whole network…is much larger than us and there is no external position, there is no objective position.”
Strategies of communication remain at the heart of Morris’s work. She is interested in ‘the most simplified, coded way to have a conversation with the viewer’. The intricately designed works construct a virtual architecture and a monopoly-like indexing, and co-opting of, existing power structures, be it corporate, governmental, or seemingly individual. Her paintings and films illuminate, and are illuminated by, the political debates of the past decades they address, over power and economics, critical urbanity, or inclusion and exclusion. Her work pinpoints that moment of moral crosschecking that occurs when we contemplate our role in relationship to the roles offered us by society. It pinpoints a moment of moral conversion when we ambiguously accept or reject or acquiesce to what’s generally available for us as citizens.
Chicago investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city made all the more resonant in the wake of President Barack Obama
’s administration.
When Mies van der Rohe emigrated to American in 1938, with the help of Philip Johnson
, and was established as the Head of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology
, he not only created an image of America, but the reality of the contemporary American society. Continuing to play with duality, Morris’s Chicago is tandem with “Points on a Line”, shifting the lens to a panorama of an American city in transition. In Chicago, Morris reveals a new cityscape by tracking its modern architecture, the seemingly dead printed world of publishing headquartered there, as well as its industrial role. A century after the publication of Upton Sinclair
’s “The Jungle
”, the issues shift from food production to consumption and a struggling printing, publishing and advertising world.
A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score by the artist Liam Gillick
, range from John Hancock Center
, Vienna Beef
factory, Playboy
Headquarters, Fermilab
– home of the nation’s largest energy particle accelerator, Mayor Richard Daley
, Ebony
headquarters, and Alinea
.
Chicago captures the varied layers of a complex metropolis without verbal commentary or narration. It exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, and collides the city’s everyday moments with issues of social power and representation.
Points on a Line is an exploration of Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois) and Philip Johnson's
Glass House
, in New Canaan, Connecticut
. The film documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism
.
The two buildings demonstrate a legacy of focus upon details and surface – inside and outside. By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional.
Morris's deployment of cinematic codes in relation to architectural precision produces images that go beyond a record of functionality or the streamlining of needs. These are places that remain elusive despite their openness – structures that are open vessels where we search for markers of the corporate aesthetic to come and the legal wrangles that marked the struggle to complete and maintain them. Buildings that require constant representation and new documentation in order to recode and understand what came before and what came next. Obtaining complete unrestricted access for each location of the film, Morris has woven together art, architecture and corporate image production with flowers, the behavior of bees and the patterns of butterflies - window washing, cooking, power-broking and collecting.
Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant
s, the Seagram
Building, Mies van der Rohe’s infamous Lake Shore Drive
, and Chicago’s Newberry Library
. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson
practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. The restaurant remains a site of projection and desire – active as a site of negotiation and display. Morris’s film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.
The soundtrack, composed by the artist Liam Gillick
, lends an atmospheric progression to the film.
Morris’s feature-length film Beijing, 2008, focuses on the city at a pivotal moment in history, suffused with the exhilaration, spectacle, and paranoia of the Olympic
moment.
Beijing is a paradoxical city: at once historical and futuristic, Maoist and hypercapitalist. It is undergoing unprecedented change and reinvention. Morris's Beijing captures the variances within this change, both large and small, from Sunday morning T'ai chi at the Temple of Heaven
to the monumental Bird's Nest
on the Olympic Green
; from the family-run newsstand to the President of China, Hu Jintao
. Morris's version of cinema vérité relays the schisms of the city through its architecture, infrastructure, and inhabitants, as well as addressing broader questions of celebrity, political power, and, the effects of change.
As with her previous films, architecture and infrastructure are not the only "characters" in Beijing: former President Bush
, actor Jackie Chan
, classical pop sensation Lang Lang
, Dr. Henry Kissinger
, Olympian Michael Phelps
, director Zhang Yimou
, and architects Rem Koolhaas
, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Norman Foster
, among others, make appearances in the film.
In 1972 (2008), Morris used Dr. Georg Sieber as a central character. Dr. Sieber was the head psychologist of the Olympic Police during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Sieber was present on Connolly Street on the morning of September 5, 1972, when members of the terror group Black September
attacked and took hostage the members of the visiting Israeli Olympic Team known as the Munich massacre
. Later that morning he resigned from his position. Sieber was hired by the International Olympic Committee
and Munich Police to project possible scenarios that would jeopardize the safety of the Olympic Games and prepare the security training that they would require.
One of the scenarios written by Sieber was an almost exact prognosis of what was to play out in reality. Continuing her investigation of the concept of the “peripheral” character, it becomes clear that Sieber had proposed an alternative method of navigating the situation that could have led to a different outcome. It is the failure of this planning and its political motivations that captivates Morris. The film begins with Dr. Sieber in the back of a BMW
7 series stating: “Especially in this case, there won’t be a historical truth in the sense of a reality. Historical truth is only the sum of subjective perceptions, interpretations and thoughts, which can be slightly proven by comparing dates and comparing statements and documents. But the real truth remains an ideal, a dream, something, which isn’t real....”
Robert Towne is a portrait of the legendary Hollywood script-writer, director, producer and actor who was best known for his screenplays, including Chinatown
[1974], Shampoo
[1975], and Personal Best [1982] and as a script doctor behind films such as Bonnie and Clyde
[1967], The Parallax View
[1974], and The Godfather
[1972]. His works are marked by their moral ambivalence, realistic dialogue and ruthless dissection of cruel or corrupt systems of social authority.
In the film, an interview with the subject covers topics ranging from his Academy Award-winning screenplay for “Chinatown” (1974), the role of authorship, his relationship with colleagues such as Robert Evans, Warren Beatty
, Pauline Kael
, and the reoccurring themes in his film work - conspiracy, paranoia, corruption, and power.
In Morris's Robert Towne, the lens shifts from a wide panoramic view of a city to an intimate portrait of an individual citizen within that city and a model of a progressive work methodology. Morris describes him as an “elliptical figure” whose career exemplifies a certain characteristic mode of working in the film industry, marked by collaboration, shared or changing roles. The film examines a figure who parallel to Morris’s own work, couples modern America’s economic and cultural success with a dark underbelly of conspiracies and individual power-relations. Morris’s paintings and films posits that the city itself is series of conspiracies.
The film interestingly parallels Morris’ later film, Beijing, and introduces Personal Best, after which Morris titled her exhibition at Air de Paris in 2011.
Los Angeles explores an industry fuelled by fantasy and examines the trenchant relationship between studio, producer, director and talent. The film investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city. It reveals a new cityscape of Los Angeles by tracking its de-centered plan, complex architecture, and most importantly its crucial role as a center of film production. “Los Angeles” posits the city as a hyper-narrative within a very distinct duration of time. Here the city is caught at its most ebullient and narcissistic moment: the week leading up to the Oscars.
A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score, range from the rehearsals and pre-production moments of the Academy Awards
to a John Lautner house, Brad Pitt
on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith
at Twentieth Century Fox, the final taping of Hollywood Squares
at CBS
, the Bonaventure Hotel
, Pat Kingsley at work, I.M. Pei’s Creative Artist’s Agency, Mulholland Drive
, the Department of Water and Power, and the Vanity Fair
party. Los Angeles captures the varied layers of a complex metropolis without verbal commentary or narration.
On the occasion of Los Angeles, Morris created a film poster in collaboration with M/M Paris
, the design partnership consisting of Mathias Augustyniak (b. 1967, Cavaillon) and Michael Amzalag (b. 1968, Paris). Together, they have created film posters for many of Morris's other films, which serve as conceptual markers for the films, allowing for a visual presence both in the city and the exhibition space. The poster for the film Robert Towne was inspired by Towne's description of the director as "an anarchist who wants to the control the fantasy world". Relating also the role of the artist, the statement could also describe the act and struggle of directing in general.
Operating between a documentary, the biography of a city, and a form of non-narrative fiction, Miami shifts between sites of production, leisure and work. The Coca-Cola
bottling plant, the Grand Prix and the hotels of Morris Lapidus
are just a few of the places that interweave in a sequence of urban images that combine towards a new ultra-vision of a place.
Capital was shot in Washington during the final days of the Clinton administration and continues Morris's investigation of the way we decode and therefore begin to understand the built world around us. It is a record of now unimaginable access to the centers of power.
First exhibited at the National Gallery in Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof
), Capital draws a complex and layered city portrait. The Mall
, the White House Press Office, the World Bank
, uniformed members of the Secret Service
, the Presidential motorcade, the Watergate Complex
, the Kennedy Center, the J. Edgar Hoover Building
, The Pentagon
, the daily activities of the President and an overall consideration of the city form a sequence of reflection points for her series of paintings. While her earlier paintings from New York and Las Vegas offered a new examination of the codes and structures of our urban environment, these new works introduce a revised mapping of power, desire, urbanism and design.
Taking its title from an all-day/all-night convenience store, AM/PM examines the Las Vegas Strip
, portraying the disorienting world of corporate hotels and casinos which utilize and redefine the spectacle in relation to architecture. AM/PM posits the concept of distraction itself as a strategy and the city as a conspiracy, which manipulates and directs the visitor.
Shot in New York during a single day, Midtown brings together sequences which show the streets of midtown Manhattan
- combining the anonymity of the crowded side-walks with the power of the buildings that frame the everyday movements of the city. Almost a catalogue of peripheral actions, it explores the narrative possibilities inherent in the simplest actions, and the typical activity of the street. The fragmented narrative emphasizes the structure of modern life as well creating a space in which the viewer takes an extremely active role.
, Frankfurt (2009) and Museo d’Arte Moderna
, Bologna (2009). "Chimera", at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt intersects both the unique post-modern architecture of the Hans Hollein
museum across two floors and the exhibit itself. Morris's largest site-specific installation to date was "Robert Towne", commissioned by the Public Art Fund
. The 20000 square feet (1,858.1 m²) artwork expanded across the ceiling of the plaza and the lobby of the historic Lever House
building in Manhattan, the first building to have a public plaza, built in 1951. Morris was attracted to the complicated, 'unresolved' nature of the public plaza and its 'Jacques Tati
element'. Morris has also realized site specific artworks at the Gulating Court House in Bergen, Norway (2011), Gateway School of Science, New York (2010), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2008), Public Art Fund
/Lever House (2006), Key Biscayne
, Miami (2005), Palais de Tokyo
(2005), UBS Zurich Headquarters (2001) and ICA Boston (1999).
, New York, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, San Francisco, California; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; Museum fur Moderne Kunst
, Frankfurt, Germany; Neue Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof
Berlin, Germany; Tate Modern
, London, England; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Miami Art Museum
, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, California; Stedelijk Museum
, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Victoria and Albert Museum
, London, England; Albright-Knox Art Gallery
, Buffalo; Galerie fur Zeitgenossiche Kunst, Leipzig; Yale Center for British Art
, New Haven; and Dallas Museum of Art
, Dallas..
artists from around the world, led by Robert J. Lang
filed a complaint—in the Northern District of California—against Morris for copyright infringement
of their original works. The artists allege that Morris produced a number of paintings by simply coloring their origami crease pattern
s. The allegation claims that as many as 25 of Morris' work were simply colorized version of the crease pattern
s. It is not entirely clear, however, that crease patterns are protected by copyright, as it is possible that the courts may consider them useful works rather than artistic ones.
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
.
Education and exhibitions
Morris double majored in Semiotics and Political Philosophy at Brown UniversityBrown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, graduating magna cum laude. She studied at Jesus College
Jesus College, Cambridge
Jesus College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The College was founded in 1496 on the site of a Benedictine nunnery by John Alcock, then Bishop of Ely...
, Cambridge University, associated with Professor Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
, when Professor Stephen Heath was situated and did her final year in the Social and Political Sciences [SPS] department. She attended the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
Independent Study Program from 1989-90.
Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been making abstract paintings and films. The confluence of her studies in film theory and political philosophy has greatly informed her practice. Morris’s work derives from close inspection of architectural details combined with a critical sensitivity to the psychology of a city, its politics, its key protagonists as well as its citizens. Morris began her career making graphic paintings that adapted the dramatic, emotive language used in newspaper and tabloids. She was interested in the idea of emptying out and playing with the narrative forms of specific articles found in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
and the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
. Her 1995 painting Guilty from that series, inspired the name of Dakis Joannou
Dakis Joannou
Dakis Joannou born 1941 is a Greek Cypriot industrialist and art collector based in Greece. He owns hotels and a construction business and has been a major international distributor of Coca-Cola "across 27 countries, from Greece to Switzerland to Russia to Nigeria."-Life and career:Joannou is...
’s yacht designed by Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
.
Her first studio was situated in Times Square
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets...
and its location was a key influence on her practice. The visual and aural density of the site, as well as the prevalence of midtown corporate culture, provided the impetus for her interest in the architecture of power and what Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art , and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from...
called an “art of amplification.”
Morris curated several shows, including a series titled "Closeup" in the early 1990s, held in the Times Square studio location with Rita Ackermann
Rita Ackermann
Rita Ackermann is a Hungarian-American artist.-Early life and education:Rita Ackermann was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1968.Ackermann trained at the University of Fine Arts Budapest from 1989 until 1992...
, Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori
Mariko Mori is a Japanese video and photographic artist. While studying at Bunka Fashion College, she worked as a fashion model in the late 1980s. This strongly influenced her early works, such as Play with Me, in which she takes control of her role in the image, becoming an exotic, alien...
, Bernadette Corporation and a group show of Sam Taylor-Wood
Sam Taylor-Wood
Samantha "Sam" Taylor-Wood OBE , born Samantha Taylor, is an English filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist. Her directorial feature film debut came in 2009 with Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon...
, Gary Hume
Gary Hume
Gary Stewart Hume is an English artist. His work is strongly identified with the YBA artists who came to prominence in the early-1990s. In 1996, Hume was nominated for the Turner Prize, but lost out to Douglas Gordon. Hume was elected a Royal Academician in 2001.-Life and work:Hume was born in...
, and Jane and Louise Wilson
Jane and Louise Wilson
Jane Wilson and Louise Wilson are British artists who work together as a sibling duo. Jane and Louise Wilson's art work is based in video, film and photography...
, amongst others. In 1997, Morris curated a group show titled "Hospital", after the lyrics of the Modern Lovers' song, at Max Hetzler Gallery, Berlin which included work by Darren Almond
Darren Almond
Darren James Almond is an artist based in London. He graduated from Winchester School of Arts in 1993, with a BA degree in Fine Arts.-Life and career:...
, Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.-Life and career:...
, Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
, Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces....
, Jorge Pardo, Richard Phillips
Richard Phillips (artist)
Richard Phillips , is an artist from the United States of America. He was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts and lives and works in New York City. Phillips is known for his large-scale glossy hyper-realistic paintings, recalling the pictorial style of magazines from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and...
, and Jane and Louise Wilson
Jane and Louise Wilson
Jane Wilson and Louise Wilson are British artists who work together as a sibling duo. Jane and Louise Wilson's art work is based in video, film and photography...
. In 1999-2000, she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin
American Academy in Berlin
The American Academy in Berlin is a research and cultural institution in Berlin whose stated mission is to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of the United States and the people of Germany.The American Academy was founded in September 1994 by a group of prominent...
. She received the Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell was a "second generation" abstract expressionist painter. She was an essential member of the American Abstract expressionist movement, even though much of her career took place in France. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era's few...
Foundation Painting Award in 2001.
Morris has exhibited widely — at Museum für Moderne Kunst
Museum für Moderne Kunst
The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main was founded in 1981. The museum was designed by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. Because of its triangular shape, it is called "piece of cake"....
, Frankfurt (2009), Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna
Mambo
Mambo is a musical form and dance style that developed originally in Cuba and then later in Mexico. The word "mambo" means "conversation with the gods" in Kikongo, the language spoken by Central African slaves taken to Cuba.-History:...
(2009), Fondation Beyeler, Riehan/Basel (2008), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2008), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the main art museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The museum began in 1847 with the collection of Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans . Much of the museum's original collection was destroyed in a disastrous 1864 fire...
, Rotterdam (2006), Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet
Moderna museet, the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, that was first opened in 1958. Its first manager was Pontus Hultén...
, Stockholm (2005), Palais de Tokyo
Palais de Tokyo
The Palais de Tokyo is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, near the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The eastern wing of the building belongs the City of Paris and hosts the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris...
, Paris (2005), Kestner Gesellschaft
Kestner Gesellschaft
Kestner Gesellschaft is a museum for the exhibition of international contemporary art in Hanover, Germany.The Kestner Society , is has existed since 1916 Kunstverein in Hanover. The association is also distinguished from the cultural and historical domiciled in Hannover Kestner Museum...
, Hannover (2005), Kunstforeningen
Kunstforeningen
Kunstforeningen , now officially called Gammel Strand after its address, is an exhibition space and non-profit membership organization located at Gammel Strand in Copenhagen, Denmark...
, Copenhagen (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
The Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum located in the heart of downtown North Miami, Florida. The structure was designed by the internationally acclaimed architecture firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, New York, which worked in conjunction with the Miami firm of Gelabert-Navia to...
(2002), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2002), and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof is a former railway station in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstraße in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as the Museum für Gegenwart , a contemporary art museum....
, Berlin (2001), among others.
Artistic practice
Sarah Morris’s work is concerned with decoding the built environment. Focusing on the urban experience, she explores techniques of communication – the relationships between signs and symbols and their referents in the physical world. As an exploration of the elaborate conversation between architecture and power, Morris’s paintings and films complement and connect to one another. Generating a constant back and forth play between the two media, this duality is a key element of her practice. Morris describes her films as ‘condensed manifestos’ for the paintings – they are a compendium of images and situations that could provide the visual source and psychological complexity from which the paintings begin and abstractly evolve.Morris named her studio “Parallax” both for the Hollywood classic, The Parallax View
The Parallax View
The Parallax View is a 1974 American thriller film directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn and William Daniels. The film was adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr and an uncredited Robert Towne from the 1970 novel by Loren Singer...
, and for the idea of parallel production. Generally the term parallax
Parallax
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. The term is derived from the Greek παράλλαξις , meaning "alteration"...
refers to an optical phenomenon whereby the position or direction of an object appears to shift due to a change in the position of the observer. This apparent change is relational, and it always involves a new line of sight. In her studio activity Morris is involved with the parallel production of paintings and films, each with its own set of related concerns, allowing for different narratives and interpretations to emerge. Indecipherability and the idea of not being able to perceive depth also go along with the idea of parallax.
Morris’s paintings explore the codes and power structures of architecture and cultural symbols. Her work focused initially on the vocabulary and signs belonging to media and advertising, before gradually turning to other signs, those of the city and urban planning. Through her paintings, Morris manages to disembody the cities she explores in her films, removing them from all narrative or figurative content. Drawing from graphic and industrial design, Morris typically works with household gloss paint, focusing on surface and the condensation of space and culture. Joanna Burton writes, “There is no clear foreground, no distinct background, only surface: places where the eye is left more easily to roam, spots where it is hard to untangle the gaze.” The regularity of the painted surface, that suggests no depth whatsoever, becomes analogous to the mirror-like surfaces of the buildings Morris depicts in series such as “Midtown” and “Los Angeles”.
Morris’s paintings have often been seen in the lineage of Pop
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, post-painterly, and Minimal art of the 1960s yet, she has been able to free herself nonetheless from her influences to develop a singular identity that lies at the crossroads of Pop, Conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
and geometric abstraction. As one critic describes, “Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
resonates here, too, this time as the painter of concentric squares and mitered mazes, generating complexity and dynamic spatiality out of unremitting flatness.” Referred to as, “Mondrian
Mondrian
Mondrian may refer to:* Piet Mondrian , artist* The Mondrian, a tower in the Cityplace neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas, named for the artist* Mondrian Hotel, a 1959 hotel in Los Angeles...
s seen through a politically inflected kaleidescope”, Morris intentionally leaves the criticality of her work open-ended. Mark Rappolt writes that her work, “focuses on the surface of things and that even when it delves deeper its only to look at the ways in which that surface is prepared (scrubbed, vacuumed, made up, rehearsed).” Her paintings have been described as “quite literally caught between what they say and what they do.” Along the same vein, Morris was asked by The editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman
Alexandra Shulman
Alexandra Shulman, OBE , is the editor of the British edition of Vogue. She is one of the country's most oft-quoted voices on fashion trends. She took the helm of Vogue in 1992, presiding over a circulation increase to 200,000 and a higher profile for the publication...
in 2000 to think of a project using Kate Moss
Kate Moss
Kate Moss is an English model. Moss is known for her waifish figure and popularising the heroin chic look in the 1990s. She is also known for her controversial private life, high profile relationships, party lifestyle, and drug use. Moss changed the look of modelling and started a global debate on...
. In response, Morris proposed to shoot and design the cover of British Vogue in May 2000. Similar to Richard Hamilton's
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
design of the Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
White Album, she was interested in intervening in the surface and packaging of the magazine. The image was a riff on the Roxy Music
Roxy Music
Roxy Music was a British art rock band formed in 1971 by Bryan Ferry, who became the group's lead vocalist and chief songwriter, and bassist Graham Simpson. The other members are Phil Manzanera , Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson . Former members include Brian Eno , and Eddie Jobson...
album, The Atlantic Years.
In her films, Morris uses a conceptual strategy of duality, which examine both the surface of a city – its architecture and geography – as well as its ‘interior’: the psychology of its inhabitants and key players. Morris investigates how metropolises turn their outward appearances into self-referential cosmoses. As Martin Hebert explained in a description of her film “Los Angeles”, “This is Los Angeles as it likes to present itself: a string of ideas corralled into hectic but workable geometry. A town, as Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an English-American novelist.-Early life and work:Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
once put it, which is like an advertisement for itself.” Morris assesses what today’s architectural façades and urban structures, cities and nations, might conceal. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in conspiratorial studies of power, the structures of control, and global socio-political networks.
Morris employs very different kinds of cinematography – from documentary recording to apparently narrative scenarios – which work as a method of visual distraction, a way of exploring the urban environment, and more particularly its issues of social power and representation. In her films, “Midtown” (New York), 1998, “AM/PM” (Las Vegas), 1999, “Capital” (Washington D.C.), 2000, “Miami”, 2002, “Los Angeles”, 2004, and "Beijing", 2008, Morris exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, creating both a memory and most importantly, Morris’s fantasy of the city, constructing multiple fragmentary situations for the viewer. The films track the urban plan, architecture, and various sites of production. The fragments of daily life, both extraordinary and ordinary, point to an overall connectivity; a network of social systems which extends all the way to the viewer. As Morris states, “this whole network…is much larger than us and there is no external position, there is no objective position.”
Strategies of communication remain at the heart of Morris’s work. She is interested in ‘the most simplified, coded way to have a conversation with the viewer’. The intricately designed works construct a virtual architecture and a monopoly-like indexing, and co-opting of, existing power structures, be it corporate, governmental, or seemingly individual. Her paintings and films illuminate, and are illuminated by, the political debates of the past decades they address, over power and economics, critical urbanity, or inclusion and exclusion. Her work pinpoints that moment of moral crosschecking that occurs when we contemplate our role in relationship to the roles offered us by society. It pinpoints a moment of moral conversion when we ambiguously accept or reject or acquiesce to what’s generally available for us as citizens.
Films
- Chicago (68 minutes, 2011)
Chicago investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city made all the more resonant in the wake of President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
’s administration.
When Mies van der Rohe emigrated to American in 1938, with the help of Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson
Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect.In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and later , as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture...
, and was established as the Head of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design, and law...
, he not only created an image of America, but the reality of the contemporary American society. Continuing to play with duality, Morris’s Chicago is tandem with “Points on a Line”, shifting the lens to a panorama of an American city in transition. In Chicago, Morris reveals a new cityscape by tracking its modern architecture, the seemingly dead printed world of publishing headquartered there, as well as its industrial role. A century after the publication of Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
’s “The Jungle
The Jungle
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel with the intention of portraying the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion of the book pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking...
”, the issues shift from food production to consumption and a struggling printing, publishing and advertising world.
A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score by the artist Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.-Life and career:...
, range from John Hancock Center
John Hancock Center
John Hancock Center at 875 North Michigan Avenue in the Streeterville area of Chicago, Illinois, is a 100-story, 1,127-foot tall skyscraper, constructed under the supervision of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with chief designer Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Khan...
, Vienna Beef
Vienna Beef
Vienna Beef is a manufacturer of hot dog used in the classic Chicago style hot dog, as well as Polish sausage and Italian beef, delicacies of independent Chicago-style hot dog and beef stands...
factory, Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
Headquarters, Fermilab
Fermilab
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics...
– home of the nation’s largest energy particle accelerator, Mayor Richard Daley
Richard M. Daley
Richard Michael Daley is a United States politician, member of the national and local Democratic Party, and former Mayor of Chicago, Illinois. He was elected mayor in 1989 and reelected in 1991, 1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007. He was the longest serving Chicago mayor, surpassing the tenure of his...
, Ebony
Ebony (magazine)
Ebony, a monthly magazine for the African-American market, was founded by John H. Johnson and has published continuously since the autumn of 1945...
headquarters, and Alinea
Alinea (restaurant)
Alinea is a restaurant in Chicago that opened on May 4, 2005. Its head chef and owner, Grant Achatz, is known for his preparations and deconstructions of classic flavors....
.
Chicago captures the varied layers of a complex metropolis without verbal commentary or narration. It exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, and collides the city’s everyday moments with issues of social power and representation.
- Points on a Line (36 minutes, 2010)
Points on a Line is an exploration of Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois) and Philip Johnson's
Philip Johnson
Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect.In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and later , as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture...
Glass House
Glass House
The Glass House or Johnson house, built in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut, was designed by Philip Johnson as his own residence and is a masterpiece in the use of glass. It was an important and influential project for Johnson and for modern architecture. The building is an essay in minimal...
, in New Canaan, Connecticut
New Canaan, Connecticut
New Canaan is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, northeast of Stamford, on the Fivemile River. The population was 19,738 according to the 2010 census.The town is one of the most affluent communities in the United States...
. The film documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
.
The two buildings demonstrate a legacy of focus upon details and surface – inside and outside. By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional.
Morris's deployment of cinematic codes in relation to architectural precision produces images that go beyond a record of functionality or the streamlining of needs. These are places that remain elusive despite their openness – structures that are open vessels where we search for markers of the corporate aesthetic to come and the legal wrangles that marked the struggle to complete and maintain them. Buildings that require constant representation and new documentation in order to recode and understand what came before and what came next. Obtaining complete unrestricted access for each location of the film, Morris has woven together art, architecture and corporate image production with flowers, the behavior of bees and the patterns of butterflies - window washing, cooking, power-broking and collecting.
Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurant
The Four Seasons Restaurant
The Four Seasons is a restaurant in New York City located at 99 East 52nd Street , in the Seagram Building.Opened in 1959, the Four Seasons is associated with a number of milestone firsts in the hospitality industry. The Four Seasons is credited with introducing the idea of seasonally-changing...
s, the Seagram
Seagram
The Seagram Company Ltd. was a large corporation headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada that was the largest distiller of alcoholic beverages in the world. Toward the end of its independent existence it also controlled various entertainment and other business ventures...
Building, Mies van der Rohe’s infamous Lake Shore Drive
Lake Shore Drive
Lake Shore Drive is a mostly freeway-standard expressway running parallel with and alongside the shoreline of Lake Michigan through Chicago, Illinois, USA. Except for the portion north of Foster Avenue , Lake Shore Drive is designated as part of U.S...
, and Chicago’s Newberry Library
Newberry Library
The Newberry Library is a privately endowed, independent research library for the humanities and social sciences in Chicago, Illinois. Although it is private, non-circulating library, the Newberry Library is free and open to the public...
. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson
Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect.In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and later , as a trustee, he was awarded an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and the first Pritzker Architecture...
practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. The restaurant remains a site of projection and desire – active as a site of negotiation and display. Morris’s film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.
The soundtrack, composed by the artist Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.-Life and career:...
, lends an atmospheric progression to the film.
- Beijing (86 minutes, 2008)
Morris’s feature-length film Beijing, 2008, focuses on the city at a pivotal moment in history, suffused with the exhilaration, spectacle, and paranoia of the Olympic
Olympic Games
The Olympic Games is a major international event featuring summer and winter sports, in which thousands of athletes participate in a variety of competitions. The Olympic Games have come to be regarded as the world’s foremost sports competition where more than 200 nations participate...
moment.
Beijing is a paradoxical city: at once historical and futuristic, Maoist and hypercapitalist. It is undergoing unprecedented change and reinvention. Morris's Beijing captures the variances within this change, both large and small, from Sunday morning T'ai chi at the Temple of Heaven
Temple of Heaven
The Temple of Heaven, literally the Altar of Heaven is a complex of Taoist buildings situated in the southeastern part of central Beijing. The complex was visited by the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvest...
to the monumental Bird's Nest
Beijing National Stadium
Beijing National Stadium, also known officially as the National Stadium, or colloquially as the Bird's Nest , is a stadium in Beijing, China. The stadium was designed for use throughout the 2008 Summer Olympics and Paralympics.-History:...
on the Olympic Green
Olympic Green
The Olympic Green is an Olympic Park in Beijing, China constructed for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Since then, the streets around the park have been used for an exhibition street race of the FIA GT1 World Championship in 2011, after a race at Goldenport Park Circuit in the vicinity.- Beijing...
; from the family-run newsstand to the President of China, Hu Jintao
Hu Jintao
Hu Jintao is the current Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China. He has held the titles of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China since 2002, President of the People's Republic of China since 2003, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission since 2004, succeeding Jiang...
. Morris's version of cinema vérité relays the schisms of the city through its architecture, infrastructure, and inhabitants, as well as addressing broader questions of celebrity, political power, and, the effects of change.
As with her previous films, architecture and infrastructure are not the only "characters" in Beijing: former President Bush
President Bush
President Bush may refer to one of the following Presidents of the United States:* George H. W. Bush, 41st President * George W. Bush, 43rd President and son of George H. W. Bush...
, actor Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan, SBS, MBE is a Hong Kong actor, action choreographer, comedian, director, producer, martial artist, screenwriter, entrepreneur, singer and stunt performer. In his movies, he is known for his acrobatic fighting style, comic timing, use of improvised weapons, and innovative stunts...
, classical pop sensation Lang Lang
Lang Lang (pianist)
Lang Lang , born June 14, 1982, in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, is a Chinese concert pianist, currently residing in New York, who has performed with leading orchestras in Europe, the United States and his native China. He is increasingly well known around the world for his concert performances,...
, Dr. Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
, Olympian Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps
Michael Fred Phelps is an American swimmer who has, overall, won 16 Olympic medals—six gold and two bronze at Athens in 2004, and eight gold at Beijing in 2008, becoming the most successful athlete at both of these Olympic Games editions...
, director Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou is a Chinese film director, producer, writer and actor, and former cinematographer. He is counted amongst the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, having made his directorial debut in 1987 with Red Sorghum....
, and architects Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas
Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and "Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design" at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA. Koolhaas studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the Architectural...
, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Norman Foster
Norman Foster
Norman Foster or Norm Foster may refer to:* Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank , English architect and designer* Norman Foster * Norman Foster , U.S...
, among others, make appearances in the film.
- 1972 (38 minutes, 2008)
In 1972 (2008), Morris used Dr. Georg Sieber as a central character. Dr. Sieber was the head psychologist of the Olympic Police during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Sieber was present on Connolly Street on the morning of September 5, 1972, when members of the terror group Black September
Black September (group)
The Black September Organization was a Palestinian paramilitary group, founded in 1970. It was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and officials, and fatal shooting of a West German policeman, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, their most publicized event...
attacked and took hostage the members of the visiting Israeli Olympic Team known as the Munich massacre
Munich massacre
The Munich massacre is an informal name for events that occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Bavaria in southern West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually killed by the Palestinian group Black September. Members of Black September...
. Later that morning he resigned from his position. Sieber was hired by the International Olympic Committee
International Olympic Committee
The International Olympic Committee is an international corporation based in Lausanne, Switzerland, created by Pierre de Coubertin on 23 June 1894 with Demetrios Vikelas as its first president...
and Munich Police to project possible scenarios that would jeopardize the safety of the Olympic Games and prepare the security training that they would require.
One of the scenarios written by Sieber was an almost exact prognosis of what was to play out in reality. Continuing her investigation of the concept of the “peripheral” character, it becomes clear that Sieber had proposed an alternative method of navigating the situation that could have led to a different outcome. It is the failure of this planning and its political motivations that captivates Morris. The film begins with Dr. Sieber in the back of a BMW
BMW
Bayerische Motoren Werke AG is a German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1916. It also owns and produces the Mini marque, and is the parent company of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. BMW produces motorcycles under BMW Motorrad and Husqvarna brands...
7 series stating: “Especially in this case, there won’t be a historical truth in the sense of a reality. Historical truth is only the sum of subjective perceptions, interpretations and thoughts, which can be slightly proven by comparing dates and comparing statements and documents. But the real truth remains an ideal, a dream, something, which isn’t real....”
- Robert Towne (35 minutes, 2006)
Robert Towne is a portrait of the legendary Hollywood script-writer, director, producer and actor who was best known for his screenplays, including Chinatown
Chinatown
A Chinatown is an ethnic enclave of overseas Chinese people, although it is often generalized to include various Southeast Asian people. Chinatowns exist throughout the world, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australasia, and Europe. Binondo's Chinatown located in Manila,...
[1974], Shampoo
Shampoo
Shampoo is a hair care product used for the removal of oils, dirt, skin particles, dandruff, environmental pollutants and other contaminant particles that gradually build up in hair...
[1975], and Personal Best [1982] and as a script doctor behind films such as Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were well-known outlaws, robbers, and criminals who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the "public enemy era" between 1931 and 1934...
[1967], The Parallax View
The Parallax View
The Parallax View is a 1974 American thriller film directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn and William Daniels. The film was adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple Jr and an uncredited Robert Towne from the 1970 novel by Loren Singer...
[1974], and The Godfather
The Godfather
The Godfather is a 1972 American epic crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo. With a screenplay by Puzo, Coppola and an uncredited Robert Towne, the film stars Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Sterling Hayden, John Marley, Richard...
[1972]. His works are marked by their moral ambivalence, realistic dialogue and ruthless dissection of cruel or corrupt systems of social authority.
In the film, an interview with the subject covers topics ranging from his Academy Award-winning screenplay for “Chinatown” (1974), the role of authorship, his relationship with colleagues such as Robert Evans, Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty born March 30, 1937) is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director. He has received a total of fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Director in 1982. He has also won four Golden Globe Awards including the Cecil B. DeMille Award.-Early life and...
, Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
, and the reoccurring themes in his film work - conspiracy, paranoia, corruption, and power.
In Morris's Robert Towne, the lens shifts from a wide panoramic view of a city to an intimate portrait of an individual citizen within that city and a model of a progressive work methodology. Morris describes him as an “elliptical figure” whose career exemplifies a certain characteristic mode of working in the film industry, marked by collaboration, shared or changing roles. The film examines a figure who parallel to Morris’s own work, couples modern America’s economic and cultural success with a dark underbelly of conspiracies and individual power-relations. Morris’s paintings and films posits that the city itself is series of conspiracies.
The film interestingly parallels Morris’ later film, Beijing, and introduces Personal Best, after which Morris titled her exhibition at Air de Paris in 2011.
- Los Angeles (26 minutes, 2004)
Los Angeles explores an industry fuelled by fantasy and examines the trenchant relationship between studio, producer, director and talent. The film investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city. It reveals a new cityscape of Los Angeles by tracking its de-centered plan, complex architecture, and most importantly its crucial role as a center of film production. “Los Angeles” posits the city as a hyper-narrative within a very distinct duration of time. Here the city is caught at its most ebullient and narcissistic moment: the week leading up to the Oscars.
A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score, range from the rehearsals and pre-production moments of the Academy Awards
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
to a John Lautner house, Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received two Academy Award nominations and four Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one...
on the set of Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005 film)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a 2005 American romantic comedy action film directed by Doug Liman and written by Simon Kinberg. The original music score was composed by John Powell...
at Twentieth Century Fox, the final taping of Hollywood Squares
Hollywood Squares
Hollywood Squares is an American panel game show in which two contestants play tic-tac-toe to win cash and prizes. The "board" for the game is a 3 × 3 vertical stack of open-faced cubes, each occupied by a celebrity seated at a desk and facing the contestants...
at CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
, the Bonaventure Hotel
Bonaventure Hotel
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites is a , 35-story hotel in Los Angeles, California, constructed between 1974 and 1976. Designed by architect John C. Portman, Jr., it is the largest hotel in the city. The top floor has a revolving restaurant and bar...
, Pat Kingsley at work, I.M. Pei’s Creative Artist’s Agency, Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive is a street and road in the eastern Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California. It is named after Los Angeles pioneer civil engineer William Mulholland...
, the Department of Water and Power, and the Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
party. Los Angeles captures the varied layers of a complex metropolis without verbal commentary or narration.
On the occasion of Los Angeles, Morris created a film poster in collaboration with M/M Paris
M/M Paris
M/M is an art and design partnership consisting of Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag , established in Paris in 1992....
, the design partnership consisting of Mathias Augustyniak (b. 1967, Cavaillon) and Michael Amzalag (b. 1968, Paris). Together, they have created film posters for many of Morris's other films, which serve as conceptual markers for the films, allowing for a visual presence both in the city and the exhibition space. The poster for the film Robert Towne was inspired by Towne's description of the director as "an anarchist who wants to the control the fantasy world". Relating also the role of the artist, the statement could also describe the act and struggle of directing in general.
- Miami (28 minutes, 2002)
Operating between a documentary, the biography of a city, and a form of non-narrative fiction, Miami shifts between sites of production, leisure and work. The Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola is a carbonated soft drink sold in stores, restaurants, and vending machines in more than 200 countries. It is produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, and is often referred to simply as Coke...
bottling plant, the Grand Prix and the hotels of Morris Lapidus
Morris Lapidus
Morris Lapidus was the architect of Neo-baroque Miami Modern hotels that has since come to define the 1950s resort-hotel style synonymous with Miami and Miami Beach....
are just a few of the places that interweave in a sequence of urban images that combine towards a new ultra-vision of a place.
- Capital (18 minutes, 2000)
Capital was shot in Washington during the final days of the Clinton administration and continues Morris's investigation of the way we decode and therefore begin to understand the built world around us. It is a record of now unimaginable access to the centers of power.
First exhibited at the National Gallery in Berlin (Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof is a former railway station in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstraße in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as the Museum für Gegenwart , a contemporary art museum....
), Capital draws a complex and layered city portrait. The Mall
National Mall
The National Mall is an open-area national park in downtown Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. The National Mall is a unit of the National Park Service , and is administered by the National Mall and Memorial Parks unit...
, the White House Press Office, the World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
, uniformed members of the Secret Service
United States Secret Service
The United States Secret Service is a United States federal law enforcement agency that is part of the United States Department of Homeland Security. The sworn members are divided among the Special Agents and the Uniformed Division. Until March 1, 2003, the Service was part of the United States...
, the Presidential motorcade, the Watergate Complex
Watergate complex
The Watergate complex is a group of five buildings next to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. in the United States. The site contains an office building, three apartment buildings, and a hotel-office building...
, the Kennedy Center, the J. Edgar Hoover Building
J. Edgar Hoover Building
The J. Edgar Hoover Building is located in Washington, D.C. It is the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation . The building, named for former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, is located at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The building received its official name, the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I...
, The Pentagon
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
, the daily activities of the President and an overall consideration of the city form a sequence of reflection points for her series of paintings. While her earlier paintings from New York and Las Vegas offered a new examination of the codes and structures of our urban environment, these new works introduce a revised mapping of power, desire, urbanism and design.
- AM/PM (13 minutes, 1999)
Taking its title from an all-day/all-night convenience store, AM/PM examines the Las Vegas Strip
Las Vegas Strip
The Las Vegas Strip is an approximately stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard in Clark County, Nevada; adjacent to, but outside the city limits of Las Vegas proper. The Strip lies within the unincorporated townships of Paradise and Winchester...
, portraying the disorienting world of corporate hotels and casinos which utilize and redefine the spectacle in relation to architecture. AM/PM posits the concept of distraction itself as a strategy and the city as a conspiracy, which manipulates and directs the visitor.
- Midtown (9 minutes, 1998)
Shot in New York during a single day, Midtown brings together sequences which show the streets of midtown Manhattan
Midtown Manhattan
Midtown Manhattan, or simply Midtown, is an area of Manhattan, New York City home to world-famous commercial zones such as Rockefeller Center, Broadway, and Times Square...
- combining the anonymity of the crowded side-walks with the power of the buildings that frame the everyday movements of the city. Almost a catalogue of peripheral actions, it explores the narrative possibilities inherent in the simplest actions, and the typical activity of the street. The fragmented narrative emphasizes the structure of modern life as well creating a space in which the viewer takes an extremely active role.
Site-specific artworks
Morris has developed site-specific projects for institutions internationally since 1999. In July 2010, she realized "Hornet", a permanent artwork which opened that summer at K20, celebrating the re-opening of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum in Düsseldorf. The artwork covers an entire wall of the interior courtyard, measuring almost 2000 square feet (185.8 m²). Hovering between abstraction and representation, the artwork calls forth the lack of boundaries between graphic design, aesthetics, and the commercial, while at the same time playing with the idea of cross-pollination in general, particularly in the arts. Morris selected the name "Hornet" because it is both futuristic and utilitarian, as well as playful and sometimes dangerous. In 2009 Morris produced two large scale site specific wall paintings on the occasion of her museum solo shows at the Museum für Moderne KunstMuseum für Moderne Kunst
The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main was founded in 1981. The museum was designed by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. Because of its triangular shape, it is called "piece of cake"....
, Frankfurt (2009) and Museo d’Arte Moderna
Mambo
Mambo is a musical form and dance style that developed originally in Cuba and then later in Mexico. The word "mambo" means "conversation with the gods" in Kikongo, the language spoken by Central African slaves taken to Cuba.-History:...
, Bologna (2009). "Chimera", at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt intersects both the unique post-modern architecture of the Hans Hollein
Hans Hollein
Hans Hollein, is an Austrian architect and designer.Hollein achieved a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1956, then attended the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1959 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1960...
museum across two floors and the exhibit itself. Morris's largest site-specific installation to date was "Robert Towne", commissioned by the Public Art Fund
Public Art Fund
The Public Art Fund is a non-profit organization founded in 1977 by Doris Freedman , a Director of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, and the President of the Municipal Art Society. They have organized highly visible artists' projects, new commissions, installations and exhibitions in...
. The 20000 square feet (1,858.1 m²) artwork expanded across the ceiling of the plaza and the lobby of the historic Lever House
Lever House
Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and located at 390 Park Avenue in New York City, is the quintessential and seminal glass-box skyscraper built in the International style according to the design principles of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Completed in 1952, it was...
building in Manhattan, the first building to have a public plaza, built in 1951. Morris was attracted to the complicated, 'unresolved' nature of the public plaza and its 'Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati
Jacques Tati was a French filmmaker, working as a comedic actor, writer and director. In a poll conducted by Entertainment Weekly of the Greatest Movie Directors Tati was voted the 46th greatest of all time...
element'. Morris has also realized site specific artworks at the Gulating Court House in Bergen, Norway (2011), Gateway School of Science, New York (2010), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2008), Public Art Fund
Public Art Fund
The Public Art Fund is a non-profit organization founded in 1977 by Doris Freedman , a Director of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, and the President of the Municipal Art Society. They have organized highly visible artists' projects, new commissions, installations and exhibitions in...
/Lever House (2006), Key Biscayne
Key Biscayne
Key Biscayne is an island located in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay. It is the southernmost of the barrier islands along the Atlantic coast of Florida, and lies south of Miami Beach and southeast of Miami...
, Miami (2005), Palais de Tokyo
Palais de Tokyo
The Palais de Tokyo is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, near the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The eastern wing of the building belongs the City of Paris and hosts the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris...
(2005), UBS Zurich Headquarters (2001) and ICA Boston (1999).
Public collections
Work by Morris is held in the public collections of various museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, New York, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, San Francisco, California; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; Museum fur Moderne Kunst
Museum für Moderne Kunst
The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main was founded in 1981. The museum was designed by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. Because of its triangular shape, it is called "piece of cake"....
, Frankfurt, Germany; Neue Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof
Hamburger Bahnhof is a former railway station in Berlin, Germany, on Invalidenstraße in the Moabit district opposite the Charité hospital. Today it serves as the Museum für Gegenwart , a contemporary art museum....
Berlin, Germany; Tate Modern
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...
, London, England; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Miami Art Museum
Miami Art Museum
The Miami Art Museum is an art museum located in Downtown Miami, Florida, in the United States. It was founded in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, and in 1996 became the Miami Art Museum...
, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, California; Stedelijk Museum
Stedelijk Museum
Founded in 1874, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for classic modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has been housed on the Paulus Potterstraat, next to Museum Square Museumplein and to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam Zuid...
, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
, London, England; Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is an art museum located in Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York. The gallery is a major showplace for modern art and contemporary art. It is located directly across the street from Buffalo State College.-History:...
, Buffalo; Galerie fur Zeitgenossiche Kunst, Leipzig; Yale Center for British Art
Yale Center for British Art
The Yale Center for British Art is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale University which houses the most comprehensive collection of British Art outside the United Kingdom...
, New Haven; and Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas Museum of Art
The Dallas Museum of Art is a major art museum located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, USA, along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood. In 1984, the museum moved from its previous location in Fair Park to the Arts District, Dallas, Texas...
, Dallas..
Allegation of copyright infringement
On April 29, 2011, a group of original origamiOrigami
is the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, which started in the 17th century AD at the latest and was popularized outside Japan in the mid-1900s. It has since then evolved into a modern art form...
artists from around the world, led by Robert J. Lang
Robert J. Lang
Dr. Robert J. Lang is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has long been a student of the mathematics of origami and of using computers to study the...
filed a complaint—in the Northern District of California—against Morris for copyright infringement
Copyright infringement
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
of their original works. The artists allege that Morris produced a number of paintings by simply coloring their origami crease pattern
Crease pattern
A Crease Pattern is an origami diagram type that consists of all or most of the creases in the final model, rendered into one image. This comes in handy for diagramming complex and super-complex models, where the model is often not simple enough to diagram efficiently.The use of crease patterns...
s. The allegation claims that as many as 25 of Morris' work were simply colorized version of the crease pattern
Crease pattern
A Crease Pattern is an origami diagram type that consists of all or most of the creases in the final model, rendered into one image. This comes in handy for diagramming complex and super-complex models, where the model is often not simple enough to diagram efficiently.The use of crease patterns...
s. It is not entirely clear, however, that crease patterns are protected by copyright, as it is possible that the courts may consider them useful works rather than artistic ones.
Literature
- Chinnery, Colin, Anthony Lane, and Andrea Phillips. Sarah Morris: Beijing (Museo d’Arte Moderna di Boogna, Museum fur Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Walther Konig, Cologne 2009)
- Burton, Johanna, Diederichsen, Diedrich, de Looz, Pierre-Alexandre. Sarah Morris: Lesser Panda (White Cube Gallery, London 2008)
- Thierry Somers, "Sarah Morris, Psychology of the Future." 200% Number 4 2010; 131-150
- Sarah Morris, "A Few Observations on Taste or Advertisements for Myself." Texte Zur Kunst, September 2009; 71-74
- Erhard Metz, "Sarah Morris: Gemini Dressage", Feuilleton Frankfurt, June 3, 2009
- Michael Archer. "Sarah Morris", Artforum, May 2009, p. 170
- Mark Rappolt, "Sarah Morris", Art Review, May 2009, pp. 70–7
- Hans Ulrich Obrist, "Sarah Morris", Adam & Eve, March/April/May 2009, pp. 78–91
- Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, "Sarah Morris: An interview." Art in America December 2008: 146-149
- Michael Archer, "Sarah Morris, White Cube." ArtForum November 2008: 362
- Eric Banks, "Seeing Red", Men's Vogue, August 2008, pp. 114–119
- Adrian Searle, "Dazzled by the Rings", The Guardian, July 30, 2008
- Christopher Turner, "Beijing City Symphony", Modern Painters, July/August 2008, pp. 56–59
- Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Christina Bechtler, "Sarah Morris: Rings, Origami, Beijing", Arena Homme+, Summer/Autumn 2008: 258-68
- Holger Liebs, "Lage 26 warnight gefragt", Suddeutsche Zeitung 26/27, April 2008; 18
- Philippe Parreno, "All Hawaii Entrees/Lunar Reggae", Irish Museum of Modern Art, Charta, 2006: 126
- Kristin M. Jones, "Sarah Morris", Frieze, November 2008:163
- "Sarah Morris Lever House, Public Art Fund." artforum.com, September 22, 2006.
- Toni Schlesinger, "Wonderful Towne! Lever House Hosts Homage to Screenwriter", The New York Observer, September 18, 2006
- Marcus Verhagen, "Nomadism", Art Monthly October 2006
- Tanja Widmann, "To Offer You Something", Texte Zur Kunst, September 2006, pp. 248–251
- Art Now (25th Anniversary Edition), edited by Uta Grosenick, Burkhard Riemschneider, Taschen, pp. 196–199, 2005
- Ezra Petronio and Stephanie Moisdon, Bar Nothing by Sarah Morris, Self Service, Issue No.21, Fall/Winter 2004, pp. 302–315
- Gaby Wood, "Cinéma Vérité", The Observer Magazine, May 23, 2004: 22
External links
- Radial Matrix Flickr
- China 2008 And Other Power Plays According to SARAH MORRIS - 032c Magazine
- Sarah Morris, Built to Last - W Magazine
- White Cube: Sarah Morris
- Friedrich Petzel Gallery: Sarah Morris
- Air de Paris: Sarah Morris
- Galerie Meyer Kainer: Sarah Morris
- Public Art Fund: Sarah Morris
- Vernissage TV: Sarah Morris
- Vimeo: Sarah Morris
- Flickr Hive Mind
- Cinéma vérité - The Guardian
- Dazzled by the rings - The Guardian
- Sarah Morris interview with Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Art in America
- Sarah Morris: Living the Bauhaus
- Patrick McMullan: Sarah Morris
- A statement by Robert J. Lang
- The complaint by Robert Lang et al against Sarah Morris, Case No. C11-01366-EMC
- Exhibit A in the complaint against Sarah Morris