Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World

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THE D R AWI N G CENTER

Ree Morton At the Still Point of the Turning World

Ree Morton At the Still Point of the Turning World

September 18 – December 18, 2009

MAIN GALLERY & DR AWING ROOM

Curated by João Ribas

DR AW I NG PA P ERS 87

Cornelia H. Butler, Jo達o Ribas, and Allan Schwartzman in Conversation Essay by Lucy R. Lippard

Ree Morton, 1974, photograph by Frank Owen

Foreword

The Drawing Center is proud to present the first museum exhibition to focus on the drawing-based work of Ree Morton.

Celebrated by her peers as well as younger generations of artists, Morton pioneered a body of work that uniquely responded to and challenged the Postminimal and Feminist Art of the 1970s through her use of personal narrative, humor, and poetic imagination.

With this presentation we hope to reinvigorate Morton’s all too brief and under-recognized career and to introduce her oeuvre to a new audience.

I commend the exhibition’s curator, João Ribas, and assistant curator, Rachel Liebowitz, for their keen sensitivity to the material and dedication to stimulating a fresh dialogue about Morton’s work.

For their insightful participation in the roundtable discussion featured in this publication, special thanks go to Cornelia H. Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Allan Schwartzman. We are honored that Lucy R. Lippard contributed a new introduction to her 1973 essay, “At the Still Point of the Turning World,” to this volume as well.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the support and expertise of the Estate of Ree Morton. On behalf of The Drawing Center, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Ted Bonin, as well as his colleagues Amy Levin and Ariel Phillips at Alexander and Bonin. I extend special thanks to the lenders to the exhibition: Alexander and Bonin, New York; Carolyn Alexander; Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich; Ted Bonin; Franklin Furnace Archive; Gail and Tony Ganz; Susan Harris and Glenn Gissler; Karen Gulbran and Evan Holloway; Barbara and David Karron; the LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut; The

Museum of Modern Art, New York; Lenore Pereira and Richard Niles; Susan and Leonard Nimoy; Dr. and Mrs. S.R. Peterson; and those who wish to remain anonymous.

We are most grateful to The Henry Luce Foundation and The Judith Rothschild Foundation for their generous support of this exhibition.

The Drawing Center’s hard-working and conscientious staff deserves recognition for their enthusiasm in bringing this project to fruition. Special thanks go to Anna Martin, registrar; Dan Gillespie, operations officer; Emily Gaynor, public relations and marketing officer; Nicole Goldberg, director of development; Jonathan T.D. Neil, executive editor; Joanna Ahlberg, managing editor; and Peter J. Ahlberg, designer.

Brett Littman Executive Director

PL . 1

Untitled (“Line” Drawing), c. 1968–70

PL . 2

Untitled (“Line” Drawing), c. 1968–70

Cornelia H. Butler, Jo達o Ribas, and Allan Schwartzman in Conversation June 2009

Ree Morton’s influential body of work was, remarkably, produced in less than a decade, between her decision to turn to art full time after raising a family in the late-1960s and her tragic death in an automobile accident in 1977, shortly before her 41st birthday. Her early work reveals an artist of prodigious curiosity and inventiveness who attempted to reconcile the formal language and process emphasis of Postminimalist art with the now prevalent notion of personal narrative—part of the artist’s wish to be “ light and ironic on serious subjects without frivolity.”

Repetitive, minimal forms lead to more biographically tinged mark-making, ranging from abstracted diagrams acting as topographies of memory to heraldic and botanical illustrations. Morton’s marked interest in phenomenology, decoration, kitsch, and the emotive potential of materials is merged in a sculptural practice that is equally rooted in the intimacy of experience. Grounded in affect, spatiality, and sentimentality, Morton’s pathbreaking body of work also presaged the formal vocabulary and theatricality of later installation art.

Morton’s investment in notions of personal narrative, intimacy, humor, and poetic imagination have made her work not only a vital contribution to feminist artistic practice but also central to the very character of the art of the last three decades. Yet, the scope of her artistic production—her grounding explorations of spatial arrangements, cartographic ‘memory’ maps, and decorative form, as well as her use of literary texts, natural materials, and primitive architectural tropes—remains largely unrecognized, as does the importance of the medium of drawing to her startlingly rapid development as an artist. The following conversation between myself, independent curator Allan Schwartzman, who organized the first Ree Morton retrospective at the New Museum in 1980, and Cornelia H. Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, traces Morton’s life and work through the lens of these concerns, from her place in the art practice of the 1970s to the continuing relevance of Morton’s enterprise to contemporary artists today.

–João Ribas

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[João] Probably the appropriate place to start our conversation would be with the particulars of Morton’s biography. I think of her almost as a case study of a certain approach to feminist art practices in the mid-’60s and early-’70s: her coming to be an artist already in her 30s, after raising three children and going to nursing school. Of course this particular biographical narrative comes to influence the nature of the work very quickly. Morton had lived this peripatetic life as the wife of a navy officer until the late-1960s, coming to an artistic practice through drawing, almost as a diversion, as something to do outside of her family life; yet there is this very quick and total immersion in art-making. The entire body of work is produced between ’68 and ’77.

[Allan] There’s something about Ree that distinguishes her at this time: the work comes into form as mature pretty much from the start. Hers is an evolved aesthetic; it’s layered, operating on many different levels at the same time, not specifically one thing or another.

Her work is not just narrative, not just personal, not just poetic. It’s not just formal, or satiric, or political. It is all these things interwoven that come out of a range of experiences that formed her before she became an artist. I think a lot of the first generation feminist artists “found” themselves through the process of liberation by making art, and so there’s a kind of learning curve that takes place in a lot of their art.

But with Ree, her awakening of consciousness results in her decision to become an artist. So by the time she begins making art out of art school, she has already lived a life, already made certain choices consciously. She already understands what interests her in making art and so she’s not battling demons through her work. She’s not trying to identify her personhood through making art. It’s already there.

She’s going with it and she’s flying. I think this brings a kind of maturity to her work almost from the start that is somewhat unique at that moment.

[Connie] Although isn’t it true that the choice to become an artist after having been a mother and a partner, and experiencing motherhood, is a classic feminist biography?

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[A] It is. And she herself calls her story “a feminist classic” in her own writings.

[C] You hear that story over and over. It’s true that the work appears fully mature and realized and that’s one of the things I’ve always thought was so startling about it, but the biography doesn’t really account for that.

[J] For this Athena-like emergence?

[C] Yes. Or art as salvation.

[J] What’s striking to me is there’s a very immediate sense of having that life or personal myth become—well, actually that’s not true; I was going to say allegorical content or metaphorical content for the work. In fact, she starts as a sort of process artist, so she doesn’t come to the narrative aspect, or this notion of having personal narrative become joined with this Postminimalist formal language, until 1970, 1971.

[A] She comes out of Eva Hesse. I think that’s the greatest role model for her. Her earliest work, when she’s finishing school, looks like Hesse’s work, and I think the trajectory of that particular artist— coming out of a formal, male-driven abstract language, and through it finding a personal female voice—is Ree’s journey as well.

Part of what’s compelling is that that is where she starts, but she moves out of it rather rapidly without having to rebel against it, by utilizing its tools and its information and combining that with a lot of other kinds of information that were exterior to the language of modern art—a lot of narrative and decoration and handicrafts, all these things that had until then been taboo within mainstream high art, but that were central to the development of the so-called minor arts associated with women.

[C] One of the things that is so startling about it is how once she turns to that subject matter of her own life, and her children in particular, which is actually quite taboo in terms of feminist subject

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PL . 3

Untitled, 1969

PL . 4

Untitled, c. 1969

PL . 5

Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970

matter, the way that she does it is so celebratory and so joyous and yet instinctively conceptual at the same time and so smart; it’s completely unlike really anything else that’s going on at the time.

[A] Absolutely. I guess part of it is that it comes out of that experience in both a narrative and in a personal way, but it’s not confessional. She’s not working out any kind of catharsis through the work.

She filters that experience through a series of investigations that are quite rigorous in thought even if often frivolous in visualization, that really do come out of the language of art at the time, even though they may not appear to in an obvious way.

[C] And so what about that frivolousness—because I don’t know her writings well enough—what about that frivolous use of materials?

That’s a clear choice too, obviously, to go from the Postminimalist and Eva Hesse and being immersed in that reductive language, which is against color and reference, and then to go in this completely other direction.

[A] I may not have the story entirely accurate anymore, although I once knew it, but in 1974, when she taught at Philadelphia College of Art, there was to be a faculty show. Up until then, the faculty shows there were male dominated, so a collision occurred between the women-artist teachers and the male-artist teachers. One of the men, I can’t remember who, basically said that the women should stick to bake sales; and so Ree made a sculpture called Bake Sale, which consisted of a table that looked somewhat like the kind of more formally driven work she’d been making in ’72 and ’73, on which she displayed real cakes. I think she put some bows on the wall as well. That was the catalytic event that transitioned her into making the more decorative works that preoccupied her for the rest of her years. That’s what led her to more alternative materials. That’s what led her into the idea of color and art as decoration in an unapologetic way.

[C] And almost a kind of parody of feminist ideology and feminist vision…

[A] Exactly.

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[J] It seems to me two things started happening. One was an attempt to deal with the idea—again a taboo idea—of domesticity and decor.

This is especially directed in your direction Connie, particularly because of WACK!, as what was so fascinating about the combination of a lot of the work in the exhibition was precisely the agency that could be rethought into some of those otherwise deflated themes which would have been seen as reactionary at the time. It’s perhaps the difference between a third- and fourth-wave position, where themes of domesticity, motherhood, and kitsch can be reclaimed as having agency within an artistic practice. The other part of it is a really defined sense of a semantic value of certain found or literary material; when Morton starts the Game Map Drawings [PLS. 27–32], and the sort of cartographic, memory-based associative work based on ‘mental maps,’ I think she quickly sees this incongruous and slightly bizarre humor in the combination of both those things.

For example, the drawings start to be filled with archaic architectural and symbolic forms, and spatial tropes then develop in the later sculptural work into a provocation with domestic and decorative imagery. So it seemed like she was, in a sense, moving in these two directions: trying to bring domesticity and personal narrative into the work as part of her particular condition as a woman making art, and at the same time, tapping into something which was maybe atavistic, deeply rooted in human symbolic acts, in the experience of place and an interest in spatiality. I say this because it’s fascinating that Merleau-Ponty had a major influence on her; it was surprising to me that she would have been interested in phenomenology.

[A] Everybody was at the time. There was a reading list and he was at the head of the list. What was interesting was that all those artists, male and female, read the same things. They were not as oppositional or divergent in their paths even though the work of men and of women who were addressing feminism in a conscious way were very different.

Ree was someone who taught all the time, so she went from a student taking notes to a teacher preparing for class. She was always drawing from many different sources at once and somehow fusing these simultaneously. You have to remember the broader historical context: in the

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PL . 6

Untitled, c. 1972

PL . 7

Untitled, 1972

PL . 8

Untitled, 1972

late-’60s and early-’70s, everyone, male and female, was throwing out the rule book and reexamining what art could be and not accepting too many premises. That’s what process art is all about.

So add to that another level of information and experience, which is a woman’s experience, and that’s Ree. To her, finding a Victorian plant book that speaks about plants in a moralistic way and which therefore was the launching point for Weeds of the Northeast, as well as the very decorative plant drawings with banners from 1974 [PLS. 10, 39, 40], I don’t think is so dissimilar in a funny way from Richard Serra splattering lead on the floor and seeing how it reacts, or leaning two things against one another and seeing what kind of tension exists. They just use different materials with different behaviors and identities.

[C] It’s not only Merleu-Ponty which was in the air but, in terms of a popular feminist reading list, she was clearly looking outside the art world as well. In Ree’s journals and papers, which I was looking at recently, there are numerous notes related to teaching in which she mentions Betty Friedan, Linda Nochlin, Simone de Beauvoir and others. Clearly she was thinking about bringing a feminist discourse into her work as a teacher. And this idea of “women’s experience” makes me think of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, which is very different but not unrelated in terms of thinking through motherhood.

[J] It’s funny; I was going to mention that.

[C] And what I was going to say is, in fact, though Ree comes out of phenomenology and Postminimalism and this other trajectory, and Mary is, of course, working through the French theorists, and a quite conceptual approach to working with photography—in fact, it’s not so different at all. The subject matter, in some instances, is actually the same—the labor of mothering, the labor of the studio and so on.

Mary first of all didn’t recognize Ree’s work, or said she didn’t, and she was really, really, I think I would say, bothered by it.

[J] Why?

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1�

SCALEY BULB

PL . 9

Untitled (Woodgrain, Scaley Bulb), 1974

PL . 10

Trumpet Weed, 1974

[C] Bothered by the materiality, bothered by the subjectivity, everything that it appears to be at first look; it’s just an interesting juxtaposition, Kelly and Morton. The incredibly sculptural and tactile presence of Morton’s work versus the restrained rigor of Kelly’s project. Ree wasn’t involved with the same kind of material at all in terms of French theory and [Laura] Mulvey, but, as you say, it’s all in the mix at that time.

[J] I was going to ask you in reference to this about the aspect of sentimentality in the Newfoundland drawings [PLS. 11–12, 34–36], which were made based on what she called “the greatest summer of her life,” which was spent with her children; there’s an intense affect, and it’s that affective topography that she’s trying to register, a topography which is based on her own emotional attachment to a place, mediated through these people. There is also a total opacity, a distance, because the imagery is so abstract, everything is so widely abstracted and turned into these basic marks, which I think go back to the early work. So there is a close sentimental attachment to the memory of a place, the attempt to create a memory of this experience, while abstracting it to take in the condition of motherhood and art-making, which is similar to the premise of Post-Partum Document.

That’s what has always been striking about Morton’s work; it’s about the closest, most intimate and, one would think, incommunicable experience, which is an experience of sharing a place with a particular person, but wanting to reconstitute that for the viewer in an abstracted way, which seems very different in that sense from the conceptual use of photography as a document. It’s not a document. It’s closer to the way memory works. It’s fuzzy and abstract, but yet an attempt to communicate what an experience was like, which seems to be pretty singular, in terms of the way she approached this idea of transcription, or of a cartography of memory.

[A] Well, you have just there characterized Ree’s work and its personality.

[J] And so maybe that’s part of how influential the work has become to a much younger generation of artists.

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PL . 11

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

PL . 12

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

[A] Which is actually interesting. That is one of the key transition moments within her work, where she’s coming out of a more abstract formal language, even while using it in a somewhat personal or diaristic way. That’s where personal experience infuses the works. There are things about the making of those drawings which tell a story that you don’t even need to know. A lot of those drawings were drawn while she was watching her son play baseball [PL .13]. The mapping in them is the mapping of the game.

[J] Right.

[A] So it comes out of a personal experience even though it’s not confessional work. In many ways Ree represented the spirit of the New York art scene in the ’70s, similarly to how Gordon Matta-Clark was a touchstone of the period. Both of them died at a similar time and, somehow, that artist-driven scene seems to die with them.

The ’80s goes on to be a market-driven scene, very different in character and quality and presentation. As that world evolved in the ’80s, it seemed as though someone like Ree was destined to fade further and further from significance or influence or even memory. At a certain point, Ree’s seemed destined to be perceived as a wonderful moment not fulfilled because hers was such a brief career. But now, several generations later, there are many artists who seem to be very influenced by her. Maybe art needed several generations of break precisely because her work’s strength is her sensibility and her kind of multivalent way of expressing her experience and her observations of the world, and not how it may fit into a continuum in the way that direct influences tend to be more commonly tracked.

[C] There’s Gordon Matta-Clark, also Smithson, who dies at that time, and there’s something—there is tremendous permission in that work too, I think. It’s the multivalent, it’s the discursivity, it’s the intense production in a short period of time. It also may be—I’ve wondered about this too—a particular relationship to art school; there is a kind of rejection of traditional training. With her it’s because she goes to school late. That’s how it manifests I think.

[A] How hard or easy was it to position her in WACK!?

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PL . 13

Baseball Map, 1972

[C] It was hard, as you would probably expect I think. I had a category called Family Stories, which is where she ended up because that’s the easiest access point; but then by juxtaposing her with Mary Kelly, which I think only did happen in the Los Angeles installation, that complicated it in ways that I thought were interesting.

[J] In that sense is it hard to position the work even outside of a feminist narrative, just in the continuity of artistic practice of that time?

Is it one of those things that really breaks a particular dominant tendency and just veers off in another direction?

[C] As you’ve said, I think it absolutely breaks it. It doesn’t look or act like anything else. It’s humble and yet very ambitious in terms of her understanding of architecture and space. The work is also striking in terms of its very mature and personal iconography, and also because the career is cut short. Who knows where she would have ended up. I almost think there’s something in common with Smithson and his practice of drawing, and even with Matta-Clark to some extent, the early energy drawings and the tree drawings, in terms of some kind of a style, at least in the practice of drawing, that she seems aligned with; but no, I think it’s singular certainly in feminist art.

[J] I get the sense from some of the people I’ve spoken to who knew her and had shows with her that there seems to have been an interesting shift in how the work apparently is perceived—from being conservative and marginal and safe and not having much political agency to now being seen as very productive and radical—precisely because it wasn’t overly didactic and really was nonessentialist; there seems to have been quite a shift of context in that way.

[A] There was nothing that she did for which she did not understand the implications, so in doing something that was decorative or sentimental, she understood what that meant and that these were political acts. Coming from the lineage from which she came, or anyone who went through art school, they were all connected to this history.

I think Ree, like so many women of the time, very consciously took on history. They knew that they were trying to change history, but

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she, like many of these women, was not conscious of or attempting to make “historical work.” She was not trying to take a position. She was not trying to position herself as a significant artist. This is a term that someone like Ree and many other women would have rejected.

[C] I think that is true. I think she shares that with a lot of the other feminist artists who also weren’t trying to make significant work.

There is a sense of questioning the whole notion of monumentality and significance—undermining it with gesture, humor, and color.

[A] They weren’t trying to take a position and protect it and defend it. They were living in the present in many ways. They understood that they were taking on a big history in a big present and that was, I think, where the focus lay. There wasn’t a market. There were not museums collecting contemporary art in any consistent, meaningful way and so there was not a lot at stake, except of course the largest issues of art history—there was nothing to lose and therefore so much to gain.

I think that either consciously or unconsciously, artists like Ree set aside individual ego as the territory of “authorship.” The collective spirit was essential to pursuing what they pursued. For someone like Ree, it gave her freedom. She didn’t need to ever make a point about breaking rules. The decorative was radical for art then even though it’s the antithesis of radicality.

[C] And it’s the questioning of those languages and those kinds of hierarchies that they were all invested in that is fundamentally a kind of deeply feminist project.

[J] She has this fabulous line in one of the notebooks where she lists all the things she’s accomplished—you know, “did this, did a show here, traveled here, taught here,” and then at the bottom it reads, “Not bad for a girl.”

[A] It was part of her application to the Guggenheim Foundation.

This may have been her third application to the Guggenheim Foundation for an individual artist’s grant. She kept getting rejected.

It’s a wonderful piece of writing.

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[J] I think that kind of approach—it’s slightly self-deprecating but also ironic—is this very Thomas Mann idea that you take the language that is being used against you and you throw it back.

[C] It’s the same voice that you see in and out of Lee Lozano’s work of the late-’60s, the General Strike and that period, where she’s working with text; and of course hers gets much angrier and much more ironic. What was the title of her retrospective? Win First...? 1 Remember that thing? That was right out of her writings; it was about being in for the long haul and what that means as a woman.

The only choice was to actually make humor of it because, I think, there was nothing to lose.

[A] There’s something in Ree’s work that I never really thought about so fully—and I don’t know if there’s anywhere to go with this— but the work doesn’t ever seem to express conflict, and yet this is a woman who was a wonderful devoted mother who deliberately left her children when she divorced her husband to become an artist.

The Newfoundland drawings to which you refer were made during a summer when she was reunited with her children and spending continuous time with them. There must have been some kind of conflict or turbulence that was part of her personal experience and that never made it into the work. I have always found that both interesting and admirable, but also somewhat mysterious.

[J] There’s a sense, in particular with the spatial environments, of sheltering and enveloping. It’s not exactly protectiveness, but an attempt at creating a space that you can enter into, and that sort of envelops you. You can talk about Morton’s work in terms of theatricality, or the lack of frontality, denying part of the logic of painting as a spatial arrangement, etc., or you can talk about it in the sense that she creates these environments, like with the untitled piece [PL. 33] from—was it ’73?—and the piece that has the extensions, Paintings and Objects [PL. 14]— [A] ’73.

1�

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This 2006 retrospective of Lee Lozano’s, curated by Adam Szymczyk, was titled Lee Lozano: Win First Don’t Last Win Last Don’t Care.

PL . 14

Paintings and Objects, 1973

[J] The physical articulation of the piece in space invites you in, and then as soon as you’re inside, you’re enclosed within this structured space. It’s as if you’re fully immersed in this— [A] Very different from Richard Serra taking on a similar set of issues.

[J] But not in a sense of trying to control you, or give you this vertiginous folly, or this confrontation of precariousness, but rather this slightly enveloped sense of comfort.

[A] In the late-’70s I was in Elizabeth Murray’s studio. She was talking about how her paintings evolved. She spoke about them literally as a kind of birth process. She pointed at one of the forms that was in the process of evolving on the canvas—which had thus far arrived at a place very different from where it had begun, and inevitably it would evolve into something very different yet—and said, “You see that womb shape?” I found it fascinating that with what is ordinarily perceived of as typical abstract visual language, she associated her work and her process with birth. This was a mother speaking and I think what you’re describing in Ree is very similar.

[C] It’s interesting you bring her up because I think Elizabeth’s body of work has that same feeling of remarkable confidence and lack of conflict; and it’s also similarly totally idiosyncratic from the beginning. There’s nothing else in painting like it in the last 30 years.

[A] Very early on, her Madame Cezanne paintings are coming out of the grid, much in the same way that Ree comes out of Eva Hesse.

[C] I remember talking to her and talking to Elizabeth early on when I was starting to research Feminist Art, asking, you know, “Was the work feminist? Where did she stand because of her feminism?” And she, perhaps like Ree, absolutely recognized that she came out of it and that as an artist, it enabled her to make work.

Again, the position wasn’t conflicted. After that, politically she had no real interest in it except to sort of profoundly live it in a way.

I also specifically remember her talking about having her children

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with her in the studio and how inhospitable the art world was to the artist/mother duality.

[A] Did Ree ever refer to herself as a feminist artist? I’m not sure.

I think she thought of herself as a woman artist.

[C] Yes, exactly. As did many of her peers.

[J] I want to develop two things out of what we’re talking about.

One other defining thing about the work that we haven’t talked about—and Helen Molesworth has developed this—is how the work begins to articulate an understanding of space which we now associate with installation art, moving away from discrete sculptural practice and process-based sculpture, this sort of classic Postminimal kind of idea of process, towards notions of theatricality and environment. This sense of the installation as the specific use of space and environment is so prevalent in Morton’s work; and it emerges very quickly in her work, from the Oberlin piece to probably the culmination, which is To Each Concrete Man [PLS. 43–46]. Is she generally included in the history of that development? Is it in fact an example of an emergence of a kind of vocabulary of installation art, which she is helping to form and establish, along with Bob Gober and a group of other artists?

[A] I think what Helen’s saying is brilliant and in a certain way obvious at this point, but was not so obvious then. You can look even broader than that and consider someone like Louise Bourgeois. It’s maybe one of the reasons why she hasn’t fit neatly within history because she broke from a formalist line and introduced one’s personal story as an essential element of art. Maybe that was as much a formal “invention,” but it just didn’t look like one.

[C] But I think to link her more to Louise Bourgeois and the idea of the femme maison for example, coming out of Surrealism and a kind dream space, which is where Louise is located—I don’t know what follows Ree after that, but I think that’s more where she belongs.

It’s clear her work is an important part of some unwritten history of installation art—the kind of theatrical, tableau-like space she creates

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for the collision of text, landscape, and personal symbolism. Does it end up in some territory of Ann Hamilton in terms of this kind of enveloping psychological space? I don’t know.

[A] I like this idea of Bob Gober, who owes so much to feminism, following in this lineage.

[C] Yes, absolutely right.

[J] You just mentioned Surrealism, which is the other thread that I wanted to develop. An important aspect about Morton is the extent to which she is a highly literary artist. There is a direct connection to literature, thematically, in terms of influence, imagery, and reference, and in terms of a narrative thread in her work, which brings us back to the condition of Surrealism, where literature and visual art are so closely intertwined. Scott Burton called her “Emily Dickinson in love with Raymond Roussel.” Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, from which she drew titles for artworks [PLS. 15–16], if not the whole idea of how she uses narrative, was a huge influence, as was T.S. Elliot. So there’s a highly literary set of influences she’s engaged with.

[A] Yes. I think part of what she loved about Impressions of Africa in addition to the narrative itself, is that there is this man who traveled by boat all around Africa and wrote a novel about it but never stepped foot in Africa. He never left the boat.

[C] That’s so great.

[A] And the perversity of that was such a Ree thing; you can hear a bell go off for her in just that one tidbit and you can see how those points of perversity highlight her work in so many ways. Ree was a reader. She read many things and fused them together. This is a woman who delighted in a lot of different kinds of information and saw fusion and connecting points and cohabitation where others didn’t. She was not a categorically bound person. I don’t know if this came out of her own personal liberation that led her to become an artist or if she was always someone who had this kind of phantasmagoric flexibility in her being.

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PL . 15

The Incomparables Club, 1972

PL . 16

The Seargent Major’s Jealousy, 1973

[C] It just makes me think of Allen Ruppersberg. I guess he is a little older than Gober but, on this end of that lineage, someone who, in terms of this multimedia approach to making installation, was also influenced by Roussel, was also very literary, very funny, very discursive. It’s quite different work, but also singularly not categorizable as something and— [A] Absolutely and therefore comparatively obscure for much of his history.

[C] Yes, that’s right.

[J] There’s a similarity in that he was a “copyist.” She was also a transcriber. When you look at her notebooks or her papers, you have to really read very closely because it’s hard to tell what’s in her own voice and what’s just a transcription of another text.

[A] I think the fact that these sensibilities we speak of here are uncommon, I do not think they were alien to the art scene in which they existed. It was not a large art community and it contained a big mix. The scene wasn’t that factionalized, at least within a certain core, and so I think the art world has developed in a far more rigidified way since then as processed through the market. But I don’t think that that kind of differentiation was so complicated at that point or made any of these artists that remote. And let’s just say that Ree was in the mix. She showed in the same places as everybody else. She had a very similar kind of biography. It’s only in the period that follows where the art becomes a lot more categorizable and a lot more driven by their similarities than— [C] Which is all about the market I guess too.

[A] I think so.

[J] But does that create, just in terms of a contemporaneous reading, a sort of nostalgia? There seems to be a sense that artists are looking back to her work for a pluralistic approach that brings together formal and conceptual rigor with the narrative that can be drawn from the specificity of one’s life—that can be incredibly liberating for any

41

artist who’s working today. As someone who teaches, I’ve become very acutely aware that if you tell students something normative about contemporary art, it immediately freezes them up. So there’s a liberating sense in that she combined these two antinomic tendencies. She also represents a time in which there wasn’t this largesse or, as you mentioned, a market-driven focus. Are we, in a sense, looking back at her and artists like her with this sort of rose-colored-glasses cliché of a prelapsarian era?

[A] Let’s look at a few specific things she’s made. In 1972 and ’73 she makes a number of works called Paintings and Objects—a very consciously generic title for a number of works that indeed consist of paintings and objects. In 1976, she makes paintings entitled Regional Pieces which very deliberately have the object-like presence of paintings [PL. 17]. In these works she makes her own frames, which are pleated curtains made of Celastic. She titles them Regional Pieces, which I think is also a pun on “regional art,” a term that had some currency then, but also referred to them as sunsets and seascapes.

They are deliberately fashioned as framed, domestically scaled objects that look like traditional saleable paintings, kind of. I am sure the works were in part triggered by the desire to play with this idea, but there’s no real market at this point.

There are one or two young galleries showing younger artists that opened at this time, but there’s still no market to speak of. She bought into the language of the market in a way that I think it would be too strong to call a critique, that was neither playing into a market nor excluding itself from one, but was certainly addressing the idea of the history of painting as domestically scaled decoration.

So if we romanticize some of this, it’s not so off-base since she played with that idea. One always wonders when an artist dies unexpectedly, and young, where they would have gone with their work. I think with Ree’s work this is a particularly curious question because her last body of work is, in fact, although very connected to previous work, in certain ways very different from it.

[J] The Sullivan—

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PL . 17

Study for Regional Piece, 1976

[A] The Louis Sullivan paintings [PL. 18]. When she was teaching in Chicago, she made a series of very deliberately small-scale easel paintings, each of which is drawn from a motif in Louis Sullivan’s architectural decoration— [J] The argument in The Grammar of Ornament— [A] Exactly. She takes the flowers that he has abstracted and used as the forms of the frieze-work in some of his buildings and she’s put them back into two-dimensional images, by making paintings of them. But they’re not individual paintings. They’re arranged as a frieze at a specific frieze-like height—clearly installation in the fullest sense, with a text printed underneath it, a quote by Sullivan about the artist as a dreamer and a visionary. It’s an extremely enigmatic work. It comes out of ideas of the decorative treated in a very undecorative way. The individual flowers are brightly colored, but the ground against which they are displayed is a kind of industrial grey that almost makes the wall disappear. It’s a very strange, enigmatic work that’s far more elegiac than most of her other works, even though it begins to suggest some of these more somber qualities that earlier works’ shared but may not have been characterized by so obviously.

[J] That’s also a move away from what you just described, the tableaux paintings or these, again, domestically-scaled paintings. It assumes a specific space, and that’s, of course, a site-specific, controlled, and articulated direct artwork in space.

[A] It’s adaptable to different spaces, but under specific conditions, and in every condition the wall or the room becomes a complete architectural space for the art. She may be making paintings. They may be of a saleable scale. But this is one work; it’s as unsaleable as easel painting gets.

[C] They act more like consumable paintings or conventional paintings, but the thing is, it’s still completely eccentric. It’s very strange how it exists in the space, but also to be looking at Louis Sullivan I think, and I’m sure Adolph Loos too. This whole idea of the decora-

44

PL . 18

Drawings for Manipulations of the Organic, 1977

tive; she is clearly interested in it because of its feminizing, gendered language. I think it’s still totally playful and radical even though the paintings look a little more like something that might enter the market in a conventional way— [A] It’s tragic, but also somewhat fitting that her work ends—(and the artist-centric spirit of the times dies)—around the same time as the market kicks in, that she never got to play into and respond to the market. Ree’s one of those artists who had such a self-generated kind of flexibility and capacity to evolve that I have a feeling the market would have been neither a barrier nor a hindrance for her. I think she could have existed within that space a lot better than a lot of other artists have.

[C] It’s always true with these careers, but I think seeing the things in person and experiencing what you were describing earlier, those qualities of the installation in particular—it’s been so hard to actually see the work, and that’s allowed for pushing her even further to the margins than she actually was. Because of these shows, there has been building up a kind of actual physical experience of the work, which I think is really important.

[A] She’s a great role model. The first really major show I did was her retrospective.

[J] In 1980, right?

[A] In 1980. I had met her shortly before she died. I spent just enough time with her to know her personality, to know what her presence was like, and I learned so much about her through her notebooks, through trying to put together her history. She’s a very vivid personality. She was very present. Her immediacy and warmth and embrace as a human being, her lust for life, to borrow a cliché, was palpable and immediate both in her real life personality and in the personality that comes through in her writing. I feel grateful that I got to know her sensibility early in my evolution as an art viewer because the complexity of her work gave me a large frame of reference for what art could be, for what a meaningful artist can be.

46

Maybe you have artists of a younger generation who are looking for that. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of work that interests you, but how many visions grab hold of you fully? For me, she’s one of those people.

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Ree Morton, Woman’s Building, Los Angeles, 1975

Ree Morton: Dreamer Woman Lucy R. Lippard (2009)

“The Dreamer-man becomes the seer…

He dreams his dream with open eyes, with clear vision of realities, with far foreseeing outlook, with intense persistent concentration upon an idea, a purpose.” 1

An artist who starts late and dies at the age of forty has to be good to be remembered at all. The line of Ree Morton’s life, from nursing student, military wife, and mother to artist was indeed memorable. She was talented, dedicated, and determined. Her mature work—not quite ten years of it—chewed away at the boundaries of traditional mediums. She is now a member of that tragic sisterhood of artists in the 1970s who proved themselves but were never allowed the joy of building on their accomplishments—Eva Hesse, Suzanne Harris, Ana Mendieta.

The art world goes on, dashing from one side to another like a dog on a walk, inventing, reinventing, dismissing and resurrecting styles, materials, forms, and theoretical rationales. Yet Morton’s work “holds up,” as the pundits like to say, even though it is rarely seen. Installation is an ephemeral form, dependent as it is (or should be) on context, on the space in which it is built and the angles from which it is seen. Once dismantled, it no longer exists.

Morton was one of its many inventors. It was a natural extension of her drawings and sculpture. If the object pieces only hint at their backstories, the installations were experimental narratives, focused 1�

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Part of a quotation from the architect Louis Sullivan used by Morton on the announcement of her last exhibition (Ree Morton Loves Louis Sullivan) in Chicago in April 1977.

in one sense, expansive in another. She could almost magically pull images in and out of three dimensions. A drawn form might be echoed by a log in shared space; a Celastic ruffle turns a frame into a window; a dotted line is a pattern and a path. Her consummate curiosity communicated itself through touch—tender, willful, daring.

“Drawing in space” is a twentieth-century cliché used to describe sculpture that leapt off its pedestal into the air. Morton adapted the notion to incorporate several spaces—that of the flat plane, the reaching branch, the delineated territory of her art. And she played with verbal space, with language, influenced by literature to think, perhaps, in terms of the theatrical gesamptkunstwerk—incorporating all the senses, though her style was far from operatic. Her formal vocabulary, however, evokes shifting “mental pictures,” as she intended. Even some of the frontal, pictorial drawings wander a bit, suggesting other ways of seeing them. At the end of her life she was working again in two dimensions, “punning in paint,” as I wrote in an obituary, “balancing on the line between Daring and Dumb.”

I am often asked about the list running down the margins of the 1973 article. At first I actually couldn’t remember if it was mine or hers, but given the fact that it is a play on Ree’s name and it was didactic and uncredited, it can only be blamed on me. I was emboldened at the time by conceptual art and by feminism to be “inventive,” like my artist friends; I figured that if anything artists did could be called art, then anything critics did could be called criticism. The early-’70s was of course a time when women artists empowered themselves through protests and sheer courage to take themselves as seriously as male artists did. That is not to say that the hierarchy shared their opinions, but with the support of a strong community, women took off. The days of the scorned “Queens housewife” who had kids and therefore couldn’t possibly make serious art were over. Morton was part of this movement and, like so many women of her generation, grew within it. Had she emerged from the chrysalis of her early life a decade before, her fortunes would have been quite different—not because she would have been less of an artist, but because she would have had less of a

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Detail of the list that accompanied the author’s essay in the December 1973 issue of Artforum

chance. (At least she saw her work in the Whitney Annual, thanks in part to her longtime supporter Marcia Tucker, a measure of recognition that surely meant a great deal to her.)

Morton mapped her life like a series of new places. In 1974, she said, “I really love Stonehenge or any kind of situation where there is a location which somehow has been set aside for a purpose whose meaning is not clear, or a place where there have been left markings by people whose meaning is not clear but you know that people were there and that they were doing something with that space.”

Regarding Landscape, a series of pieces located between nature and artifice at Artpark on the Niagara River in 1976, were among Morton’s most exciting works, predicting a direction she never got to follow. Particularly poignant, in the light of her death less than a year later, was The Maid of the Mist, a Symbolic Rescue—an actual “performance” starring a ladder and a flowered lifesaver wreath sent over a cliff to save the mythical “Indian maiden” supposedly sent over Niagara Falls in a flowery canoe to become the river’s bride.

In a purely feminist twist, Morton cut loose the rope to which the wreath was attached. It “floated free,” she wrote. “The rescue had become a memorial event.”

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At the Still Point of The Turning World* Lucy R. Lippard (1973)

She likes Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa because “the mental pictures are always changing; you can’t make them concrete. There’s no frame of reference, no story line, no location.” Her own work offers a private sign language which engenders a private space partly constructed from memory, which accounts for the flavor of dislocation. I first saw Ree Morton’s work in the 1970–71 Whitney Annual. It didn’t look like everything else—a wood and screen “manger” with twigs and branches in and beneath it. She still works with containers and enclosures, but after the neatly constructed screened racks, the object status became more ambiguous and, at the same time, innocent, obsessive, repetitive. Bundles of branches, cut logs, used more loosely, led her later in 1971 into a curious area between painting and sculpture, between welcoming “environment” and a closed, pictorial space.

Morton uses fences and paths and dotted lines, tables and platforms and panels, to isolate forms and directions, to make new connections between them. What appear to be fragments are drawn together by shared shape or connotation into a common space. But once the space is established, it disappears by allusion from its boundaries. A large framed and gated and three-part piece shown in Philadelphia last year revolved around “Sister Perpetua’s Lie” from Roussel. A series of drawings reflecting the shapes of the sculptural elements surround the quotation: “To the question, ‘Is this where the fugitives are hiding’ the * The title is taken from T.S. Eliot; the following quotation has hung above Morton’s desk for several years: At the still point of the turning, world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards: at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered.

53

nun, posted before her convent, persistently replied ‘No’ shaking her head from right to left after each deep peck of the winged creature.” I harp on these literary sources because Morton’s work conveys a highly abstract and hermetic narrative quality. Signs and shapes repeated again and again as though to say “Now do you see?” are islands in a landscape, things that seem imbued with meaning, but what meaning?

Most sculptors working in an area between sculpture and painting limit themselves to bending one or the other medium toward the other (e.g., boxlike, planar, relief sculptures, or bulging shaped or assembled canvases). Ree Morton, on the other hand, straightforwardly combines the two without altering the identity of either. Her drawn or painted sheets of paper on the wall could stand on their own as two-dimensional art, were they not enticed into real space to interact with three-dimensional elements which, in turn, might stand on their own as sculpture, or as natural “finds.” Often the sculpture provides the frame by unconventionally drawing it out from the wall, radically changing the scale of the hanging rectangle. The materials used to perform these sleights of eye are frequently wood—large gracefully sloping tree branches, logs, twigs, stumps, 2x4s. (The lines of the branches resemble “drawn” lines without resorting to the forced naturalness of expressionism.)

(Other components: not quite arcs, not quite circles; posts, trunks, logs split lengthwise; dirt and wooden floor sections; the ubiquitous dotted line in two or tree dimensions; flattened and rounded tree sections, clay patties, plaques, boards, stones; a rock, a dolly, benches, wheels, trunks that open on spindly legs, fence posts and lopsided pickets; doors, shelves, roofs; hanging, lying, leaning, supported, supporting; a lot of little objects rather plaintively lost in space and then found again echoed in drawings on wall or floor or remembered in similar shapes on the other side of the room—the most precarious aspect of Morton’s work, dangerously close at times to fussiness, but usually conquered by associations and alienations clear enough to be provocative, not coy.)

Until recently, Morton’s work has lined up against at least one wall, providing an almost Surrealist space by which the sculptural elements elude illusion, but bar entrance. Now some of the pieces lead from the dotted paths of pictorial space into real roads around

54

and into the sculpture. The roofs, shelters, paths, gates, and yards imply architectural plans and an ambiguous area between interior and exterior space. In the multipartite piece shown recently at Artists Space, based on materials and memories from a summer in Newfoundland, a Magrittean contrast between careful arrangement and natural materials, outdoors and indoors, was intensified by the diffused artificial “daylight” and the black shuttered windows that pushed into the room. In the last two years the “places” have become more schematic, a necessity as they more ambitiously expand and fragment. The ritual quality is also heightened in newer works. The Newfoundland piece was all green and gray and white and natural wood and stone—clean and fresh and peaceful with an almost “homey” intimacy laid over the ominous clarity of a dream.

Morton seems to be topographically mapping her own exposed zones, making Japanese gardens of her fantasies, within the limitations of her own loft and house life. The influence of memory is very strong (the stones on wooden pedestals ranged on a “table” in the Newfoundland piece look a bit like souvenirs in a gift shop).

All of Morton’s pieces exist in that very controlled, but still dispersed and uncaptured space which hovers between the pictorial and the sculptural (not necessarily in respective relation to the drawn and three-dimensional elements). The space in both her sculpture and her drawings recalls that of the American Indian or other so-called naïve artists. At the same time, my reference may be to the highly sophisticated use of multiple viewpoint found in ancient Chinese and other Eastern landscapes. And there is also an openness that is rooted in repetition and “uniformity,” the slight awkwardness or confrontational innocence that is an attribute of so much of the best American art. The spaces are compact but welcoming, like little shelters for the expanding imagination, the legendary door in the wall.

This essay was originally published in Artforum in December 1973; it is reprinted here by permission of the author.

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Plates

PL . 19

Page from the artist’s notebook, c. 1968

PL . 20

Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970

PL . 21

Untitled, 1970

PL . 22

Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970

PL . 23

Wood Drawings, 1971

PL . 24

Untitled (Stretcher Piece), c. 1971–73

PL . 25

Pink Numbers, 1971

PL . 26

Untitled, 1972

PL . 27

Game-Map Drawing I, c. 1972–73

PL . 28

Game-Map Drawing II, c. 1972–73

PL . 29

Game-Map Drawing III, c. 1972–73

PL . 30

Game-Map Drawing IV, c. 1972–73

PL . 31

Game-Map Drawing V, c. 1972–73

PL . 32

Game-Map Drawing VI, c. 1972–73

PL . 33

Untitled, 1973

PL . 34

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

PL . 35

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

PL . 36

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

PL . 37

Line Series, 1974

PL . 38

Line Series, 1974

PL . 39

Bitter Buttons, 1974

PL . 40

Jack in the Pulpit, 1974

PL . 41

Untitled (Woodgrain, Currents in a Stream), 1974

PL . 42

Untitled (Woodgrain, Three Pink Cells), 1974

To Each Concrete Man in the artist’s studio, 1974

PL . 43

Woodman (Study for To Each Concrete Man), 1974

PL . 44

Woodman (Study for To Each Concrete Man), 1974

PL . 45

Man (Study for To Each Concrete Man), 1974

PL . 46

Little Creature (Study for To Each Concrete Man), 1974

Ree Morton, Something in the Wind, South Street Seaport Museum, New York, 1975

PL . 47

Untitled (Notes for Something in the Wind), c. 1975

PL . 48

Test Piece, c. 1975

PL . 49

Test Piece, c. 1975

PL . 50

Devil Chaser, 1976

PL . 51

Devil Chaser, 2nd version, 1975–76

PL . 52

Page from the artist’s notebook, 1975

L ist o f W or k s

PL. 1

PL. 6

Untitled (“Line” Drawing), c. 1968–1970

Untitled, c. 1972

Pencil on paper

Ink on vellum

24 x 19 inches

19 3/4 x 30 inches

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Galerie, Zürich

Galerie, Zürich

PL. 2

PL. 7

Untitled (“Line” Drawing), c. 1968–1970

Untitled, 1972

Pencil on paper

Pencil on paper

24 x 19 inches

23 x 29 inches

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York,

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

Galerie, Zürich PL. 8 PL. 3

Untitled, 1972

Untitled, c. 1969

Pencil on paper

Pencil on paper

23 x 29 inches

18 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Collection of Dr. and Mrs. S.R. Peterson

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

PL. 4

Untitled, 1969

PL. 9

Pencil on paper

Untitled (Woodgrain, Scaley Bulb), 1974

20 3/4 x 14 1/2 inches

Crayon and colored pencil on paper

Collection of Susan Harris and Glenn Gissler

19 x 24 1/2 inches Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

PL. 5

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970

Galerie, Zürich

Pencil on paper 14 x 10 inches

P L . 10

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Trumpet Weed, 1974

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Crayon and colored pencil on paper

Galerie, Zürich

22 x 30 inches The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift 2005

P L . 11

P L . 17

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

Study for Regional Piece, 1976

Pencil on paper

Mixed media and paper

22 1/4 x 30 inches

29 1/2 x 41 inches

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The

Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz

Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift 2005

P L . 18

Drawings for Manipulations of the Organic, 1977 P L . 12

Crayon and pencil on seven sheets of vellum

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

14 x 17 inches

Pencil on paper

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

15 x 22 inches

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Collection of Susan and Leonard Nimoy

Galerie, Zürich

P L . 13

P L . 19

Baseball Map, 1972

Notebook, c. 1968

Watercolor and pencil on paper

11 x 8 1/2 x 1/2 inches

15 1/2 x 22 inches

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Collection of Susan and Leonard Nimoy

Image courtesy of The Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont

P L . 14

Paintings and Objects, 1973

PL. 20

Acrylic and pencil on canvas and wood in six

Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970

parts

Pencil on paper

53 3/4 x 66 x 60 1/2 inches

14 x 10 inches

Private Collection

Collection of Carolyn Alexander, New York

P L . 15

P L . 21

The Incomparables Club, 1972

Untitled, 1970

Watercolor and pencil on paper

Pencil on paper

15 x 22 inches

14 x 10 inches

Private Collection, New York

Collection of Ted Bonin, New York

P L . 16

PL. 22

The Seargent Major’s Jealousy, 1973

Untitled (Repetition Series), 1970

Watercolor and graphite on paper

Pencil on paper

15 x 22 inches

14 x 10 inches

LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

PL. 23

PL. 28

Wood Drawings, 1971

Game-Map Drawing II, c. 1972–73

16 objects: felt-tip pen, pencil, acrylic, clay,

Watercolor and pencil on paper

sponge, and hardware on wood

47 x 22 1/2 inches

Range: 2 1/2 to 17 1/2 x 6 to 34 inches

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Anonymous Collection, Dallas, Texas

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

P L . 24

Untitled (Stretcher Piece), c. 1971–73

PL. 29

Acrylic, pencil, canvas, wood, and masonite in

Game-Map Drawing III, c. 1972–73

five parts

Watercolor and pencil on paper

21 x 21 1/2 x 66 inches

47 x 22 1/2 inches

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Galerie, Zürich

Galerie, Zürich

PL . 25

PL. 30

Pink Numbers, 1971

Game-Map Drawing IV, c. 1972–73

Mixed media on paper

Watercolor and pencil on paper

8 1/2 x 11 inches

47 x 22 1/2 inches

Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

PL . 26 / COVER

Galerie, Zürich

Untitled, 1972 Watercolor on paper

P L . 31

22 3/8 x 14 1/2 inches

Game-Map Drawing V, c. 1972–73

Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York,

Watercolor and pencil on paper

and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

47 x 22 1/2 inches Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

PL. 27

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Game-Map Drawing I, c. 1972–73

Galerie, Zürich

Watercolor and pencil on paper 47 x 22 1/2 inches

PL. 32

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Game-Map Drawing VI, c. 1972–73

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Watercolor and pencil on paper

Galerie, Zürich

47 x 22 1/2 inches Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

PL. 33

PL. 39

Untitled, 1973

Bitter Buttons, 1974

Watercolor, pencil, and crayon on canvas with

Crayon and colored pencil on paper

wood blocks

22 1/2 x 30 inches

96 x 68 1/2 inches

Collection of Karen Gulbran and Evan

Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Holloway

PL. 34

PL. 40

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

Jack in the Pulpit, 1974

Pencil on paper

Colored pencil and crayon on paper

22 1/4 x 29 7/8 inches

29 3/4 x 41 3/4 inches

The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

Private Collection, New York

Committee on Drawings Funds 2007 P L . 41 PL. 35

Untitled (Woodgrain, Currents in a Stream), 1974

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

Watercolor and pencil on printed paper

Pencil on paper

19 x 25 inches

22 1/4 x 30 inches

Private Collection, New York

Private Collection, New York

Photograph by Clements/Howcroft Photography of Fine Art, Boston

PL. 36

Newfoundland Drawing, 1973

P L . 42

Pencil on paper

Untitled (Woodgrain, Three Pink Cells), 1974

22 1/4 x 14 7/8 inches

Watercolor, crayon, and pencil on paper

The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

19 x 25 inches

Committee on Drawings Funds 2007

Collection of Barbara and David Karron, Los Angeles

PL . 37

Line Series, 1974

PL. 43

Watercolor, crayon, and pencil on paper

Woodman (Study for To Each Concrete Man),

22 1/4 x 30 inches

1974

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Watercolor, pencil, and canvas on wood

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

11 3/4 x 5 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches

Galerie, Z端rich

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

PL. 38

Line Series, 1974 Watercolor, crayon, and pencil on paper 22 1/4 x 30 1/4 inches Collection of Lenore Pereira and Richard Niles

Galerie, Z端rich

PL. 44

PL. 48

Woodman (Study for To Each Concrete Man),

Test Piece, c. 1975

1974

Enamel on Celastic, wire, and wood

Watercolor and pencil on canvas on wood

1 1/2 x 12 x 6 inches

13 1/2 x 7 x 1 1/2 inches

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Galerie, Zürich

Galerie, Zürich PL. 49 PL. 45

Test Piece, c. 1975

Man (Study for To Each Concrete Man), 1974

Enamel on Celastic, wire, and wood

Oilstick and canvas on wood; carpet and tile on

3 1/2 x 14 x 5 1/2 inches

plywood

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

11 1/4 x 5 1/2 x 1 inches

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Galerie, Zürich

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

PL. 50

Devil Chaser, 1976 PL. 46

Crayon and pencil on two sheets of paper

Little Creature (Study for To Each Concrete Man),

17 x 14 and 11 x 14 inches

1974

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Hide and nails on wood

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

8 1/2 x 10 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches

Galerie, Zürich

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

P L . 51

Galerie, Zürich

Devil Chaser, 2nd version, 1975–76 Wire and enamel on Celastic and acrylic on

P L . 47

plywood

Untitled (Notes for Something in the Wind),

Dimensions variable

c. 1975

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

Marker on five sheets of legal paper

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

Each 12 1/2 x 8 inches

Galerie, Zürich

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

P L . 52

Galerie, Zürich

Notebook, 1975 8 x 5 3/5 x 1/2 inches Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive Image courtesy of The Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont

NOT PICTURED

Untitled (“Line” Drawing), c. 1968–1970

Notebook, 1973

Pencil on paper

14 x 11 x 1/2 inches

24 x 19 inches

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

Notebook, 1973–74 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 7/8 inches Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Untitled (“Line” Drawing), c. 1968–1970 Pencil on paper

Love Me, 1974

24 x 19 inches

Crayon and colored pencil on paper

Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy of Alexander

29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches

and Bonin, New York, and Annemarie Verna

LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT

Galerie, Zürich Swamp Cabbage, 1974 Notebook, 1969

Crayon and colored pencil on paper

11 x 9 x 3/4 inches

29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT

Notebook, 1969

Notebook, 1975

8 5/8 x 5 5/8 x 3/4 inches

14 x 10 3/4 x 7/8 inches

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Notebook, c. 1969–70

Notebook, 1975

10 3/8 x 7 7/8 x 9/16 inches

11 x 8 5/8 x 11/16 inches

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Untitled, 1970

Notebook, 1977 (inscribed September 1976)

Pencil on paper

11 x 8 3/4 x 7/8 inches

19 1/8 x 14 7/8 inches

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York Notebook, 1970–72

All images © Estate of Ree Morton, Courtesy

14 x 11 1/4 x 3/8 inches

of Alexander and Bonin, New York, and

Courtesy of Franklin Furnace Archive

Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich

Untitled (Exercises), 1972 Watercolor and pencil on paper 15 x 22 1/4 inches Private Collection, New York

CONTRIBUTORS

Cornelia H. Butler is The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

João Ribas is curator at The Drawing Center.

Lucy R. Lippard is the author and editor of more than 20 books on art and politics, including important monographs on figures such as Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, and pathbreaking works of criticism, most notably From The Center: Essays on Women’s Art (1976). Her critical anthology of conceptual art practices of the 1960s, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973), continues to shape writing about that work to the present day. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the Frank Mather Award for criticism from the College Art Association. She lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.

Allan Schwartzman is an art historian specializing in postwar and contemporary art and provides long-term planning consultation for private and public art collections. He was a founding staff member of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, and served as curator from 1977–80. From 1980–83 he was director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Since then he has written extensively about art for a variety of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America.

He was contributing editor of Connoisseur, and continues to serve as contributing editor of Art & Auction. He served as a board member of Franklin Furnace from 1980–2000, and currently serves on the board of Artists Space.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Co-Chairman

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning

Frances Beatty Adler

World is made possible by The Henry Luce

Eric Rudin

Foundation. Additional support is provided

by The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Dita Amory Melva Bucksbaum*

Generous funding for the publication

Suzanne Cochran

has been provided by Agnes Gund,

Anita F. Contini

Annemarie and Gianfranco Verna, Zürich,

Frances Dittmer

Francis H. Williams, Susan and Leonard

Bruce W. Ferguson

Nimoy, and Martha and Sam Peterson.

Stacey Goergen Steven Holl Michael Lynne* Iris Z. Marden George Negroponte Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro Elizabeth Rohatyn* Jane Dresner Sadaka Allen Lee Sessoms Pat Steir Jeanne C. Thayer* Barbara Toll Isabel Stainow Wilcox Candace Worth Executive Director Brett Littman *Emeriti

E D WA R D H A L L A M T U C K P U B L I C AT I O N P R O G R A M

This is number 87 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Jonathan T.D. Neil Executive Editor Joanna Berman Ahlberg Managing Editor Designed by Peter J. Ahlberg / AHL&CO This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk.

It was printed by BookMobile in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 9 4 2 3 24 - 4 8 - 8 LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER : 2009935468 Š 2 0 0 9 T he D rawing C enter

T H E D R AW I N G PA P E R S S E R I E S A L S O I N C L U D E S

Drawing Papers 86 Unica Zurn: Dark Spring Drawing Papers 85 Sun Xun: Shock of Time Drawing Papers 84 Selections Spring 2009: Apparently Invisible Drawing Papers 83 M/M: Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible Drawing Papers 82 Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking Drawing Papers 81 Greta Magnusson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting Drawing Papers 80 Kathleen Henderson: What if I Could Draw a Bird that Could Change the World?

Drawing Papers 79 Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings

T O O R D E R , A N D F O R A C O M P L E T E C ATA L O G O F PA S T E D I T I O N S , V I S I T D R AW I N G C E N T E R . O R G

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

3 5 W O O S T E R S T R E E T | N E W YO R K , N Y 10 013 T 212 219 216 6 | F 212 9 6 6 2 9 76 | D R AW I N G C E N T E R . O R G

Cornelia H. Butler, Jo達o Ribas, and Allan Schwartzman in Conversation Essay by Lucy R. Lippard

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 87

$20.00 US

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