Morris Graves at Schmidt Bingham - exhibition, Instruments for a New Navigation - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2000 by Ray Kass

Morris Graves, at the age of 89, recently revisited the space race of the 1950s and '60s by completing a series of sculptures begun, but set aside unfinished, four decades ago. At Schmidt Bingham, the pieces were grouped on Turkish carpets and surrounded by lunar and mandala paintings from various periods of Graves's long career. Thus assembled, the sculptures--looking ritualistic, and at once both ancient and modern in style--had the uncanny air of a Jules Verne fantasy.

Each of the 19 radically vertical objects--averaging about a yard in height--includes a precisely cut and polished marble base holding a stainless-steel or bronze shaft. Each rod, in turn, supports a conglomeration of materials (Venetian glass, gold leaf and mica, for example) encased in a flat metal frame and sometimes pierced by a lenslike aperture. One work, featuring a motionless sand clock suspended horizontally in the center of a ring of white marble, invites inward-gazing viewers to contemplate the metaphysics alluded to in its title: The Opposite of Life Is Not Death; The Opposite of Life Is Time.

Graves began gathering materials and sketching designs for the "Instruments for a New Navigation" in 1959, at the end of a 20-year period during which he had created psychologically charged paintings of animals, flora and vessels. (These images had made him famous almost overnight when they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Dorothy Miller's exhibition "Americans 1942:18 Artists from 9 States.") The anthropomorphic "instruments" (his only serious effort at sculpture) may have constituted Graves's attempt to reconcile himself with a society from which he had grown progressively alienated after World War II, following his imprisonment as a conscientious objector.

The artist once described these works, all conceived in 1961-62, as "designed to feel their way into a new aspect of the three-dimensional phenomenal universe ... to gain insight into the mystery of consciousness." This inner search soon led him to an engagement with outward exploration. In 1964, he joined a team of liberal-minded scientists and public-affairs officers at the Goddard Space Center, where an attempt was under way to humanize the space program by drawing on the talents of artists and poets. Graves proposed two talisman-like objects that were to be incorporated into the exterior designs of two early space probes. However, the unlikely collaborative project was soon plagued by bureaucratic delays and eventually canceled.

["Instruments for a New Navigation" is currently on view at the Tacoma Art Museum (June 20-Sept. 4). It then travels to the Museum of Art, Washington State University, Pullman (Sept. 12-Oct. 15); the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Ore. (Nov. 2-Dec. 16); and the Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga (Jan. 13-Feb. 24, 2001).]