There is no truer sign of civilisation and culture than good sanitation. (1946)
Where there’s dirt there’s danger. (1930)
A ring on the floor – reminiscent of Richard Long’s gallery-bound stone circles – surrounding a shapeless object. On closer inspection – a ring of plastic bottles, standing upright; a wad of what looks to be alien hair or a huge gray turd. Containers of ‘Mr. Clean,’ the friendly giant’s face replaced by portraits of male modernists incongruously hovering over Mr. Clean’s stacked pecs (Josef Albers, Adolf Loos, Clement Greenberg...); a pile of lint disgorged from a vacuum cleaner. A tainted blob of dirt circumscribed by antiseptics: Margaret Morgan’s Cleaning Agents (1993).
Morgan, an Australian artist trained in Sydney, New York, and Los Angeles and currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts, is preoccupied with the cleansing effects of a particular strain of modernist discourse. An artistic obsessive compulsive, her work performs as it critiques the aesthetic equivalent of repetitive hand washing. Each carefully choreographed installation, every finely crafted object disinfects the messy surfaces and histrionic attitude of abstract painting, stripping away the highly contagious germs of pretension and intervening in modernism’s desire to regulate disorder.
In particular, Morgan’s spic n’ span surfaces and neatly conceived installations comment on the gendered dimensions of this regulation. From Nietzsche’s anxiety about the feminizing effects of theater (‘in the theater one becomes... herd, female,... idiot’), to Adolf Loos’s excoriation of ornament as a ‘crime’ against the virility of pure form, to Clement Greenberg’s fear of the feminized debasements of kitsch (his excoriation of the ‘leveling out of culture’ promoted by the new mass media, with its the ‘usually’ female readers); from Kasimir Malevich’s white squares to the minimalist geometric structures of Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and Sol LeWitt – an impulse towards systematization has worked in one dominant trajectory of modernism to eradicate the gooey, irrational, emotional, unpredictable and otherwise disruptive (feminine, primitive, other) aspects of human creativity. In this modernism, feminine ostentation and decoration are the dirt, refinement and clarity of design the virility-ensuring ‘Mr. Clean’ of aesthetics. Every little woman needs a man around the house to purge it of its threatening domestic/emotional excesses: hence the pivotal role of Mr. Clean.
In a 1993 series of oil portraits of great geniuses of modernism, Morgan deliberately pollutes the sanctity of these author-names by feminizing their heroic visages. Portrait of Sigmund Freud as Feminine Sexuality forms the instantly recognizable, glowering features of the father of psychoanalysis out of (one assumes women’s) pubic hair; Portrait of Clement Greenberg stages the formalist sage in a tiny likeness visible through the wide edges of a frame covered with what Greenberg would have viewed as repulsively decorative lace embossed patterns, an array of styrofoam food containers inscribed with the phrase ‘Have a Happy Day’ flaring off to the right side; Portrait of Jackson Pollock as Employee of the Month, a small picture of Pollock in lurid colors resting over a plaque commemorating the various winners of this award parceled out by ‘MOMA, CIA, USIA,’ constructs this existentialist hero as a minor, class-bound character in a vast corporate drama, bound tightly through institutional loyalty rather than creatively autonomous. The Portrait of Adolf Loos, etc. includes a tiny painting, its pristine geometry swallowed up in a disproportionately large white frame next to a portrait of Loos on velvet with a painting of organic ornament teetering precariously on its upper edge. Of the series, it is the Portrait of Adolf Loos that most directly addresses the cleansing impulse of, especially, early twentieth-century modernist discourses of aesthetics in the fields of architecture, design, and painting (the impulse that motivated the foundation of the Bauhaus, with its instrumentalized conception of design).
Reacting vehemently against the steamy, erotic, and nostalgic excesses of design movements such as Arts and Crafts and, slightly later, art nouveau, theorists, artists, and architects such as Loos and Le Corbusier called for the eradication from creative forms of all adornment and other signs of the decadence of bourgeois life. For Loos and the practitioners of movements from Purism to De Stijl to Productivism, pure form was to deliver a new humanity, purged of the feminizing stench of bourgeois taste and consonant with the virile rationalism of the machine age. In 1920, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, developers of Purism, wrote: ‘[machines] are true extensions of human limbs... [and] there is no art worth having without th[e] excitement of an intellectual order...’; for Loos himself, in 1908, ‘cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.’ The Enlightenment attempt to reveal a rationalized human consciousness, itself cleansed of the messy vicissitudes of corporeality (Descartes’ call for a cogito stripped of embodiment, a rational governing of the self ‘according to those [opinions] furthest from excess"), ultimately propelled this particular modernism in its desire for a stripped down visual and architectural practice that would mirror a purified, masculinized version of modern Man.
As with her image of Pollock as subordinated, ‘herd’-like employee for MOMA and the CIA, Morgan’s rendition of Loos in her pantheon of modernist masters (themselves posed as disinfectants of sorts) produces an implicit class critique. Loos’s reduction to kitsch artifact, his image trapped in the sickly sweet texture of red velvet, on the one hand seems consonant with Loos’s own attempt to purge aesthetic decadence through the introduction of the other of working class labor. In his 1898 essay ‘Plumbers,’ for example, Loos privileges the master of modern plumbing over Germany’s ‘imitators of French culture,’ who seek refinement over aesthetic complexity; if it is cultural dominance that is sought by Germany and the closely allied Austria, the frivolities of French culture must be rejected and the plumber, being ‘the pioneer of cleanliness,’ must be celebrated as the ‘quartermaster of culture.’
On the other hand, Morgan’s deployment of velvet painting, associated with the working class’s low-brow striving for ‘high’ culture (painting on velvet = Woolworth’s clientele), contradicts the gender implications of Loos’s parodic intervention in aesthetic discourse. Loos counters the corruption of cultural imitation with a specifically virile working class trope: the plumber as the erect ‘pillar of the Germanic idea of culture.’ Loos’s at least partially facetious veneration of the plumber as avatar of industrialism’s efficiency proposes to eliminate the vulgarity and effusiveness of kitsch to ensure a rationalized Germanic culture (ostentation/excess vs. cleanliness/containment: in short, aesthetics and the moral fiber of the German people are at stake). Tracing Loos’s lineaments on velvet, Morgan proposes that his anxieties have to do with his own implication in bourgeois taste, his own tainting with the low-brow brush. Even as we (Loos to Greenberg and beyond) obsessively speak of ornament/otherness as degraded, of purity or an abstracted notion of beauty as an inherent aesthetic value, we trace our own embeddedness in the putrid morass of lint, pubic hair, and feminine excess that is supposed definitively outside.
Bertolt Brecht once wrote: ‘The raging stream is called violent/ But the riverbed that hems it in/ No one calls violent.’ What violence produces this system called plumbing/modernism? Who is the ‘other’ of the neatly plumbed modernist edifice? What is the excremental flow that must be regulated and controlled by the intricate system of pipes we call plumbing? What is being purged (as ‘waste’) from this system? The flood threatens to wreak the regulatory mechanisms of modern urban life, of aesthetics itself: ‘one is powerless and hypnotized in the face of those floods – as if defenseless.... All that’s solid becomes hot and fluid (all that’s masculine [becomes] feminine?).’
Morgan’s strategic attention, via Loos, to plumbing as a metaphor for modernist (aesthetic as well as bureaucratic-institutional) controlling mechanisms links her work closely to two key moments in Dada’s radical critique of institutionalized modernism: Duchamp’s famous Fountain and the plumbing fixture labeled God by Morton Schamberg and the Baroness von Freytag Loringhoven, both from 1917. Duchamp’s urinal (shifted out of the realm of utility and into the realm of the aesthetic through its rotation by 90 degrees) seems to comment ironically on the hypocrisy of art world juries proposing to be open-minded but unable to comprehend any but the most recognizable aesthetics; God extends Nietzsche’s skepticism to imply that constipation is the inevitable effect of the attempt to manage and systematize on the part of modern industrialism as well as modernist aesthetics. A looping tube of metal, God shows the system to be blocked, the phallic thrust of modernist expansion now a pretzel of indirection, turned back on itself solipsistically.
In several interrelated projects completed from 1992 to 1996, Morgan literalizes and otherwise expands her interrogation of the seemingly bizarre link between plumbing and modernism that Loos proposed in 1898. In Portrait of Modern Art as Sanitary System (1992-93), Morgan revises Alfred Barr’s now infamous ‘Chart of Modern Art,’ published on the dust jacket of the catalogue for Barr’s 1936 Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, by merging it with a 1900 diagram of a plumbed house (used to illustrate the reprint of Loos’s ‘Plumbing’ essay in a recent publication). Barr’s chart stages modern art as a series of one-way influences flowing in an orderly system of cultural ‘advancement’ – for example, from ‘Negro sculpture’ to Cubism. As Morgan’s diagram suggests, Barr’s attempt to systematize modern movements parallels the way in which plumbing directs the embarrassing excesses of human embodiment (other kinds of ‘movements’ altogether) away from our consciousness. As Morgan herself has recently noted, ‘Modernism is a house. Lines are drawn. Four walls are erected. Plumbing is lad.’
In another recent version of this ‘portrait,’ Morgan actualized the diagram on a fifteen foot high wall, constructing the lines of flow out of PVC plumbing. In the recent installation of this three-dimensional diagram, Too Much Leverage is Dangerous: An Excerpt (1996, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), the sturdy tubing was backed by blue chalk drawings filling in the edifice of cleanliness (the edifice of art historical discharge). Small metal plaques notated Barr’s various categorizations, while fragile strings provided his interconnections. Mimicking a plumbing cabinet in the Loos illustration, a white cabinet stood in front of the wall; out of it emanated the sounds of peeing, a toilet flushing, and refilling. Installed so that the white of the gallery space became the cleanliness this Rube Goldberg-esque contraption strove to attain, Leverage actively proclaimed the pathos of western culture’s obsession with the regular.
Subtitled ‘A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place (The House that Adolf and Alfred Built),’ the diagram Portrait of a History of Modern Art as Sanitary System (actually a photocopy on vellum, made official with an architect’s stamp) dramatizes the absurdity of Barr’s Diderot-ian classificatory obsession; it also unveils the uncomfortable confluence of terms usually kept neatly apart through the structures of aesthetic judgment proposed by modernist discourse: in Morgan’s words, ‘the constraining and the pleasing,... the pleasures of order and the pleasures of the perversions of order.’
By bringing to view the failure of boundaries to separate one term from another, Morgan also marks another aspect of the dominant, regulatory strain of modernism: the way in which the structure of such discourses necessarily function not only to regulate but to exclude. For who is left out of such a neat map of modernist influence and development? It is not surprising that the names Barr attaches to each movement are all those of white men, exposing the fact that, as Griselda Pollock argues in relation to Barr’s diagram, ‘what modernist art history celebrates is a selective tradition which normalizes, as the only modernism, a particular and gendered set of practices.’
Morgan’s large-scale staging of these concerns, Plumb: Tools for Modern Living (1995, at Artspace in Sydney) dealt with this exclusionary logic. In the center of the gallery, a huge cage made of PVC plumbing parts metaphorized containment of (excremental?) flow as the function of modernist artistic production and display (the cage being an enormous three-dimensional rendition of a grid, the most insistent trope of modernism’s own modernity). Leaning against the gallery walls, surrounding this penetrable void of incarcerated absence, were four large-scale drawings made of blue builder’s chalk on plasterboard (one of boys, one of girls, on of a mother figure, and one of a nineteenth-century artist’s model – all but the latter taken from appropriated photographs), each accompanied by a relatively lengthy text detailing a personal narrative, and panes of glass etched with images relevant to plumbing (the diagram illustrating Loos’s essay, Barr’s schema, Duchamp’s Fountain, a 1924 poster celebrating the plumber as protecting ‘the Health of the Nation’). The etched glass plumbing images (not exactly pictures, in their vague translucency) lean precariously against blue chairs sitting in front of each drawing/text panel.
All of the drawings and texts spark memories of charged moments of cultural engendering, from the personal to the institutional. One particularly striking pair couples a drawing of Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Victorine Meurend, her quiet and quizzical face calmly returning the proprietary gaze, with an etched glass panel of Barr’s chart threatening to slip away from the chair and shatter into a million shards of glass at the slightest provocation. The text, vertically positioned alongside the left side of the drawing, recalls a student’s experience of desire in the dark of an art history classroom, which the text describes as a ‘sanctuary for fantasy,’ severed from the working class curriculum: ‘You desired the Fife Player, little boy and woman as he was... You returned the stare of Manet’s model... Your gaze scanned these surfaces, looking for your reflection...’
Here, Victorine provides a moment of rupture, where desire first ripples the surface of modernist art historical discourse then violently rips apart its closely woven fabric of pretensions and moralizing poses. Contrastingly, because it is etched on glass, Barr’s schema is transparent, ephemeral. The body of its excluded object (Victorine) – even rendered like a whisper in blue chalk – stubbornly asserts the uncontrollable force of otherness to confuse those neat boundaries that are staged by modernism to close off the threat of seduction. The unconscious erupts onto the scene, staring us in the face. Pensive but focused, she folds us back into the flesh of our desires (that flesh the effects of which modernism labors to conceal). The chair that is placed so carefully to orchestrate our position as we negotiate this seemingly quiet but ultimately explosive image remains empty and blocked off as we prowl the room, hedged in by the empty cage of pipes. Barr’s chart, like the bachelors at the bottom of Duchamp’s Large Glass, pumps its fluid endlessly, impotently attempting to engage our increasingly (dangerously) pointed attentions.
Morgan’s project ultimately retraces the paradox it seeks to examine. The slickness of its presentation pushes her fixtures and figures far away from the real mess of everyday life, just as her choice to reference complex and rather esoteric models of aesthetics narrows the potential audience for her work. And yet the greatest strength of these pristine pieces is, not incidentally, their moments of calculated failure – when all of the effects of the antiseptic are suddenly wiped out by one euphorically irrepressible colony of bacteria. This infestation is akin to what Roland Barthes explored as the ‘punctum’ or the ‘third meaning’ in relation to photographs or film stills: that inexpressible moment of raw, uncontrollable emotive meaning that ruptures the neat structures of representation. Evident, erratic, and obstinate, the third meaning is supplementary and obtuse (as opposed to obvious): it opens the field of meaning to desire (there is in the third meaning ‘an eroticism’).
While Morgan astutely admits that she herself is inexorably implicated in the well-plumbed house of modernism (‘I was born in this house. I live here. I work here....’), the most effective moments of her work as I experience it are those in which the plumbing breaks down, so to speak, and the basement floods with unspeakably disgusting liquids. Only with its collapse are we made acutely, uncomfortably aware of the crucial role of plumbing in making the system go. These are the moments in which we are deeply, inextricably, dangerously engaged with Victorine/Margaret, such that the edifice of modernism is turned inside out: the eruption of a meaning ‘which slips away from the inside,’ one that ‘pricks me,... but also bruises me.’ We’re no longer purely inside (Barr’s modernist masters, Loos as ‘Mr. Clean’) nor purely outside (as Victorine tells us, there is no pure outside). With the plumbing dysfunctional, it becomes increasingly clear that the house has always been but a well-maintained mirage.