Ree Morton at the Fleming Museum - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Peter Gallo

Ree Morton was a remarkable presence in American art whose career began late and ended much too soon. She received her BFA from RISD in 1966 at age 30, and for the next 10 years worked with astonishing intensity. Her star in ascent, having produced a steady stream of works which combined painting, sculpture, writing and performance, she died in an automobile accident in 1977 at the age of 40. Her development did not follow a tidy trajectory. The consistency and seriousness of her effort were precisely what worried her most, as this show of notebook selections makes sometimes painfully clear. Organized and curated by Morton's colleague and friend Barbara Zucker, with Fleming curator Janie Cohen, the show featured selections from Morton's notebooks--pages of drawings, notes, journal entries, letters, collected quotes, plans for work, art world gossip; in addition there were a few objects.

In a short time Morton worked rigorously through formalism, and with great wit she ruffled up its serene masculinism. Along with Laurie Anderson, Eva Hesse, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Thek and others, she opened the field to what the boys of proper modernism had pushed to the margins. Morton also opened her work to the theatrical at a time when that was still a high-art taboo. Jerzy Grotowsky is cited among her influences, and Laurie Anderson is the subject of a lengthy and insightful page of typing. Her reading of Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa provided raw material for at least one work (Sister Perpetua's Lie, 1973) and was technically crucial to the figural play of text in her later work.

The allegorical impulse is everywhere in these jottings and sketches. Morton's never finished notes are the output of a voracious reader. She makes some remarkable links, bringing together thoughts from disparate domains. For instance, a snippet from Bachelard's Poetics of Space follows further along with this idea: "De Chirico is aware that we are what Gaston Bachelard calls `corner dwellers,' that we sometimes need a shallow space to dream." This notion of "shallow space" underlines Morton's resistance to entrenched notions of "deeply rooted structures." She elaborates her position in a list titled "I Hate" which includes "Symbolism, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, Greek Hellenistic Sculpture, Painters--Phony, Paintings--Rectangle, Bad Liars" and "Color Relationships." There is, of course, an "I Love" list, which includes "Good Liars."

The allegorical attitude is especially evident in those writings which Morton has copied from natural science. Botanical taxonomies are a particular interest, and one shares Morton's delight in the discursive flight of even the most empirical and logical discourse. On one page she has copied the names of the varieties of the figwort family, Scrofulariaceae; on another she has chosen certain evocative descriptions of the "Jack in the Pulpit" lily: "A gay deceiver," "a wolf in sheep's clothing," "he comes from a rascally family" and so forth.

One need only make a casual survey of developments in art over the last 20 or 30 years to recognize Ree Morton's pioneering role in American postmodern art, even among those more recent artists who have concerned themselves with issues of "text." Nothing comprehensive has been done with her work since Marcia Tucker mounted a retrospective in 1980 at the New Museum. Still, with so much current interest in the art of the 1970s, one hopes this remarkable show will inaugurate some serious considerations.