Margaret Morgan has been looking at the history of 20th-century modernism for the past decade. Her work makes many references to where toilets and bathrooms have figured in that history. She cites the case of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 in New York presented a ‘work of art’ that was an inverted urinal. To a county that at the time believed Cubism to be the height of nonconformity, Duchamp's piece excited a frenzied disavowal of his work and that of the Dadaists. This moment and others that arose with the birth of the modern American city inspired Morgan to create work that presented a history of culture as a system of flows — a series of stoppages and blockages.
‘I've done a lot of different work around this idea,’ she says. ‘When I was asked to address Australian art history, and our participation in that history, I saw it as very much a case of reception at a distance, especially earlier this century. Some of the great moments I look at in this partial history include the first time somebody brings a modernist painting into the country, inside a suitcase, and the first time Picasso is reproduced in colour here.’
Morgan has been living and working in the United States for the past few years. Currently she lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at UCLA and exhibits at the Susanne Vielmetter LA Projects gallery. While the conceptual part of her project was planned in the United States, she has returned to Australia recently to construct her installation, being supplied materials by the local plumbing supplier Tradelink and receiving assistance in putting the structure together from visual arts students at the Victorian College of the Arts. The resulting installation is called Hotel Australia.
‘It's a three-dimensional model for something that could be seen as a hotel. It's a watering hole, a place to come along to, have a drink, hang out and then pass through. There are usually a couple of rooms to stay in when you are visiting, and different people will stay different times in the hotel. I really liked that way of thinking about Australian art history, and it provided an ideal metaphor for presenting my partial version of that history.’
The structure is made of PVC piping, of a dimension roughly three metres cubed. The pipes and plumbing junctures have different labels on them. There are three different types of labels or ‘registers’, which offer different versions of historical circumstance and discussion. This allows Morgan to present a variety of ways of following her partial history, with each register having its own internally cohesive narrative flow. People can follow one register in its entirety before looking at the second and third, or they can look at a particular event from the perspective of all three registers before moving on to another event.
‘The history is based on minor and major things,’ she says. ‘I've gone back to Humphrey McQueen's The Black Swan of Trespass, his Marxist analysis of Australian art history up to the end of the Second World War, and I'm also looking at the writing of Ian Burns, Nigel Lendon, Charles Merriweather, Anne Steve and Helen Grace, particularly Grace's work about the history of the art workers' union. Many of these perspectives are fading into obscurity. What is so fascinating for me is that these writings are full of very revealing minor points, not the grand narrative of dates and paintings. They describe the debates that were going on at the time, how different factions in the Australian art world saw things and how they were negotiating this modernist art history.’
From Festivities (May 2001), the magazine of the Federation Festival in Melbourne.