Points on a Line, a film directed by artist Sarah Morris, will premiere during the Modern Views event at Sotheby’s New York on October 6th. For ticket details, view the reply card or contact Christopher Roth (email: christopher_roth@nthp.org or phone: 203.594.9884 ext.7).
Sarah Morris Points on a Line 2010 35:44 min © Parallax
The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Curator and architect. Architect and architect. Points on a Line documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism.
The two buildings demonstrate a legacy of focus upon details and surface – inside and outside. Capturing the tension of ego and authorship in precisely deferring architectural statements. By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional.
Sarah Morris Points on a Line 2010 35:44 min © Parallax
Morris’s deployment of cinematic codes in relation to architectural precision produces images that go beyond a record of functionality or the streamlining of needs. These are places that remain elusive despite their openness – structures that are open vessels where we search for markers of the corporate aesthetic to come and the legal wrangles that marked the struggle to complete and maintain them. Buildings that require constant representation and new documentation in order to recode and understand what came before and what came next. Obtaining complete unrestricted access for each location of the film, Morris has woven together art, architecture and corporate image production with flowers, the behavior of bees and the patterns of butterflies – window washing, cooking, power-broking and collecting.
Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurants, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s infamous Lake Shore Drive, and Chicago’s Newberry Library. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects.
Sarah Morris Points on a Line 2010 35:44 min © Parallax
Ultimately, Points on a Line is a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.
An edition of the film will be donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It will become part of the artist’s series of films including: Midtown (1998), AM/PM (1999), Capital (2000), Miami (2002), Los Angeles (2004), Robert Towne (2006), 1972 (2008) and Beijing (2008).
Sarah Morris is an internationally recognized artist, known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture and the psychology of urban environments. Morris views her paintings and films as parallel – both trace the urban, social and bureaucratic topologies. In each medium she explores the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics
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Filed under: Modern Views
This Week’s Glass House Conversation is hosted by designer Constantin Boym, founder of Boym Partners Inc. and Director of MFA.DESIGN at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. The work of Boym Partners Inc. is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art , won a 2009 National Design Award in Product Design, and has received numerous awards from the now defunct icon of industrial design, I.D. Magazine. Read the rest of this entry »
