When people are out of order, they speak out of turn, are improper, or interrupt formal proceedings; when things are out of order, they are mixed up, out of place, out of line, or have ceased to function... Yet, what else comes out of order? Pleasure, satisfaction, a sense of control; and equally out of order comes chaos, a sudden release from the strictures of such control.1
Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members as in the case of those of a well shaped man.2
Interior. Day. A house, a kitchen. Black and white. Close-up. A plughole. A woman is cleaning the sink, taking a certain pleasure in the banality of this gesture, the emptiness of it, when she notices a dark hair in the plughole, a not unusual thing to find in a bathroom, though a little out of place in a kitchen sink perhaps. She pulls the hair from the plughole in her efforts to achieve the complete order and cleanliness she is seeking in the stillness of the reverie which her repetitive work produces in her. This is the daydream of the end of dirt, that compelling substance which Freud defines simply as ‘matter in the wrong place’. In this case, the hair – the piece of dirt – is not the object, the thing she expects to find; rather it grows as she pulls it, becoming thicker, longer and apparently attached to a foreign body which lies beyond the plughole in that unformed space of refuse of grime, of waste, carried away underground, to the sewers. A camera movement takes us behind (beneath) the scene to show us the S-bend of the plumbing and the occlusion which is a pregnant bulge in the pipe; the music keys us into the horror of what may follow.
As she pulls the hair, which is now an abject rope, an umbilical cord, the face of a humanoid creature ‘crowns’ in the plughole and with another strong pull, a fetal object is violently discharged, springing across the kitchen in the force of this release – like the birth scene from Alien in which a monstrous creature escapes a man’s body in a shocking birth/death scene. Lifeless, the dark, hairy body with cord still attached lies on the kitchen floor and in her quest for order the woman picks it up, places it in a plastic bag and dumps it in the rubbish bin. Time passes but she can’t get the object out of her mind. Taking it from the rubbish bin, she empties it in the bath, running the water and while she is distracted by a phone call, the bath of course overflows and the creature grows into a man, covered in hair but still lifeless. She shaves him, dresses him, makes him into the man she wants but he remains motionless, so she wraps him in a large plastic bag – a body bag but also an amniotic sac and leaves him while she takes a bath...
You get the picture. Cinephiles will recognize it as the scenario of Alison MacLean’s extraordinary and brilliant short film, Kitchen Sink (1989), concise in its intensification of effects, drawing upon the power of horror to pass backwards and forwards through cinema (Alien, Frankenstein, Un Chien Andalou andHitchcock’s Psycho) and across the border between domestic comfort and homeliness and the deep discomfort and unease of the home’s uncanny spaces.
Cinema has long found domestic spaces (now called ‘service areas’ in modern architecture magazines) to be filled with horror (the shower scene in Psycho[FIG. 1],
the bathroom in Reservoir Dogs) because these are the places where the body’s solid boundaries are disrupted. MacLean’s film is a kind of pretext – a precursor – to the work of Los Angeles-based artist, Margaret Morgan; for two reasons. Firstly, its narrative of a woman’s creative imagination giving birth to both her worst fears and her wildest dreams speaks to the ambivalence which women artists feel in modernism’s house, where they are granted restricted access to certain rooms. Secondly the location of the film in the kitchen and bathroom identifies the imaginative potential of these modern spaces and this is an abiding concern in Margaret Morgan’s work; representative of modernist efficiency and the sites of domestic order, they are also women’s workplaces, the territories where disorder is the norm and where a constant struggle to shape the mess of life into a sense of control takes place. This activity stands as a symbol of all such desires to make sense: the labor of the intellectual or the artist as well as the plumber and the housewife.
Morgan’s work in the last five years has drawn on the materials of plumbing and its centrality in modern life; its necessity to efface, to cover over traces of the dirt of its manufacture in order to establish its fundamental newness, its absolute originality and lack of origins. Modernity’s dependence upon mind rather than body results in anxieties in the face of any return or reminder of the material from which it arose and this unease is frequently absorbed in obsessive cleanliness. Nadir Lahiji & D.S. Friedman suggest that cleanliness is the response to a guilt modernity has had to internalize3: and nowhere is this more clearly manifest than in the sanitary and pristine nature of modernism and of museum hygiene.
Morgan takes us beyond the kitchen and the bathroom into the narrative space of modern art, making absolutely clear that its sources – which it is careful to purge in the neatness of the order it proposes – also belongs in the territory of that which it has ostensibly superseded (the ancient, the classical, the primitive and above all, the body). Moreover she makes clear that there is a gendered dimension in this great divide and the intersection of these two orders occurs in domestic space – the kitchen sink, the bath, the shower, the toilet bowl, all of which we might see as the appendages of a complex system of order which they serve to mask. Morgan’s focus is on the point at which these appendages – and particularly the toilet bowl – enter public space: the public toilet and the emblematic figure which marks this transition from private to public is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) [FIG. 2].
There is an ironic operational system and logic in Morgan’s work which is made visible in a very beautiful diagram/flow chart entitled Barr/Loos: Portrait of a History of Modern Art as a Sanitary System (1993). In this wry manifesto – the last great manifesto of the twentieth century – Morgan projects two orders, one aesthetic and the other instrumental, onto the material support of an architectural drawing, producing the image of an erection which demolishes a favorite separation of two orders of knowledge (the pure and the applied) which we have Kant to thank for establishing. By combining two earlier diagrams – a plumbing diagram from 1900 used by Adolf Loos and Alfred Barr’s 1936 ‘Chart of Modern Art’ which illustrated the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Cubism and Abstract Art, Morgan maps Barr’s hierarchy of forms onto a more domestic frame, bringing it home as it were, making visible a set of relations and dependencies which the avant garde prefers to forget.
This house within which modernism dwells provides shelter, but man seeks to leave its feared maternal embrace, recoiling in disgust when it tires him. In the obscene kiss and tell of poetic license, Sidney Nolan recalls his affair with Sunday Reed, whose patronage has made it possible for him to reach prominence as an artist: Steeled by a noon whisky, I entered her tired plumbing.4
Margaret Morgan’s fondness and respect for plumbing is first evident in a striking series of acrylic paintings & collages of bathrooms done almost twenty years ago when the artist was living in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Using the classical connotation of the suburb’s name, Morgan’s painting of the time recast ‘masterpieces’ of Western art, especially of neoclassicism, in a more suburban vein. Influenced by an activist art world, then seeking to establish the structure in which artists’ work could be supported by a public commitment to its necessity rather than a market-driven imperative of sales figures or private patronage, Morgan’s work drew its strength from a refreshing delight in the ordinary, the everyday and its subject matter gave space to excluded experience and particularly that of women. Morgan has referred to a principle which informed this deliberate choice: the conviction that to represent is of consequence5 and the quality of drawing, the ‘mastery’ of technique were aspects of the artist’s work which first commanded attention in the late 1970s.
Compositionally the domestic paintings deployed a particular geometry which arose from the specific difficulties of visually representing the confined space of the rooms in low-cost housing – poorly maintained rental accommodation for working class people, migrants and then art students. Perspective’s grand vision has to be twisted and distorted in order to see in two dimensions the spatial constraints which an aesthetics of economy imposes upon the body of the dweller. The ‘vision’ which results is an embodied one, experienced in the skin rather than seen with the eyes alone.
This is not, however, the ordered space of, for example Flemish or Dutch painting, where everything has its assigned place, enclosed though it may be. Rather, the spaces of Morgan’s bathrooms are improvised, formed from pieces of found objects, like wallpaper, barely attached to the wall or fixtures which are held together rather than belonging together. The clutter of empty toothpaste tubes & other bathroom ‘mess’ are incorporated in these ‘lived-in’ rooms. In the antiseptic caste system of architectural discourse, these spaces constitute ‘bad design’, a designation which becomes a moral judgement upon their occupants. Morgan’s work has consistently sought to challenge the social assumptions of aesthetic rules, not in order to dismiss the value of judgement but rather to propose a different basis upon which it might be established.
From the ‘blueprint’ of her ‘manifesto’ Barr/Loos: Portrait of a History of Modern Art as a Sanitary System and mindful of Adolf Loos’ designation of the plumber as an installateur6 Morgan builds the diagram as a gallery installation, using PVC pipes, standard plumbing joins (S-bends) and builders chalk. The portrait is thus materialized as a wall fixture, a bas-relief, eschewing function in spite of form, refusing a key aspect of modernism’s anti-decorative and functionalist impulse. Choosing to realize a kind of ‘instrumental beauty’, Morgan’s construction was first produced using black pipes in two different installations entitled Too Much Leverage is Dangerous: Modernism and Plumbing (University of California, Irvine, 1994) and Plumb: Tools for Modern Living (Artspace, Sydney 1995). The weight of the blackness gave rather more force to the plumbing ‘background’ shifting the balance of her initial diagram to emphasize those points of contentious intersection between modern art and its sources in ‘primitivism’.
In a later version entitled Out of Order (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1997) white PVC pipes are substituted, achieving a skeletal effect for the system and weight is given by filling in ‘shadows’ and background details using the deepness of blueprint. This choice of deep blue color resonates in a number of ways; it is the background color of several finely drawn chalk works which are part of the exhibition – renderings of found photographs and portraits of important figures in modern art, accompanied by narrative texts, imagined conversations with the figures in the images (family snapshots from the fifties, portraits of Tatlin, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Adolf Loos, Richard Hamilton, Victorine Meurent, Manet’s model) and there is a melancholy in the color, suggestive of Matisse. This is the blue of the abstract body of woman in modern art, but Morgan’s technical command of her craft rewrites this connotation, ironizing it. The depth of blue takes us to the meaning of the verb ‘to plumb’ – to establish depth – and the word itself, plumbum from the Latin word for lead, the base metal used to give weight to the plumb-line which indicates depth and verticality. And the blue is also water, Thales’ fundamental element, the origin of the world, the source of life. (Courbet, as we know, modernizes this idea, placing the source closer to home – in the woman’s body – and the shadow of this figuration is given true force in the Alison MacLean film with which I began.)
But these ‘natural’ flows are frequently occluded by the lead-weight of art history, a history which is masculine as Morgan reminds us. In an earlier series, Portraits of Modern Men (1993), Morgan parodies the positions of well-known figures: Greenberg (Portrait of Clement Greenberg as a Ghost for Every Day of the Week), Pollock (Portrait of Jackson Pollock as Employee of the Month), Loos (Portrait of Adolf Loos as Pure in its Rationality as a House of His Design) Freud (Freud’s Beard) – an exquisite portrait formed of pubic hair. In 1997 Morgan continued with her use of bodily materials, making a series of delicate drawings using urine to etch outlines of plumbing diagrams on paper. These paraesthetic works touch the surface of the paper with a startling subtlety.
Picking up on her materialization of the Loos/Barr diagram, Morgan has reworked and ‘streamlined’ the messiness of Barr’s schematization and the relatively Byzantine nature of Loos’ house in Schools, Factories etc (1998) In all her work, Morgan draws upon the structural mechanisms of order which determine aesthetic value and administrative control. Plumbing stands as a fitting metaphor of this ordering of flows, suggesting that, rather than social engineering, which both conservatism and liberalism have always used as a term of abuse to limit social change, processes of aesthetic engineering are more insidious means of arranging cultural values.
Morgan’s persistent concern with plumbing and especially with bathrooms and toilets takes its inspiration from Duchamp’s Fountain, turned from vertical to horizontal and no longer functional. But she goes further than this strategy of reversal, continuing to observe the banality of the everyday operation of waste control in its seriality, an ongoing process unaffected by the removal of an apparatus and its repositioning in the art gallery or museum – sites which are increasingly dependent upon the continuation of the same social order which the avant-garde has ostensibly challenged throughout the century. In Century (1998), one hundred photographs of public toilets, the title refers as much to the twentieth century’s hygienic impulses as to the arbitrary numeric limit the artist has set herself in the work. The sanitary exercise of cleansing history of the mess which is life finally engages us in a fascination with that which is excluded from this process, as the art of the twentieth century constantly affirms. Each stage of purification which eliminates the orthodoxy it seeks to supersede is followed by an overflow, a spillage, an excess which perforates its seamlessness. What better metaphor than plumbing to represent the constant recirculation of materials, the leakages and the blockages which modernism is.
Notes
Margaret Morgan, Out of Order, exhibition catalogue, Melbourne, Victoria: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1997
Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture, London: Dover Publications, 1960, p. 72
Nadir Lahiji & D. S. Friedman, eds., Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, p. 53
Sidney Nolan, Paradise Garden, 1971
Margaret Morgan, op. cit.
Adolf Loos, ‘Plumbers’ (first published in Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 17 July 1898) in Nadir Lahiji & D. S. Friedman, eds. op. cit. p. 15
Margaret Morgan’s fondness and respect for plumbing is first evident in a striking series of acrylic paintings & collages of bathrooms done almost twenty years ago when the artist was living in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria. Using the classical connotation of the suburb’s name, Morgan’s painting of the time recast ‘masterpieces’ of Western art, especially of neoclassicism, in a more suburban vein. Influenced by an activist art world, then seeking to establish the structure in which artists’ work could be supported by a public commitment to its necessity rather than a market-driven imperative of sales figures or private patronage, Morgan’s work drew its strength from a refreshing delight in the ordinary, the everyday and its subject matter gave space to excluded experience and particularly that of women. Morgan has referred to a principle which informed this deliberate choice: the conviction that to represent is of consequence5 and the quality of drawing, the ‘mastery’ of technique were aspects of the artist’s work which first commanded attention in the late 1970s. 
