Morris
Graves: Instruments for a New Navigation
Tacoma
Art Museum shows Morris Graves sculpture
Review by Alec Clayton published in Art
Access, August 2000
Mention the name
Morris Graves and images immediately spring to mind: flat, unmodulated
landscapes with birds or moons or snakes, soft and mysterious with a minimum of
detail. Seldom does the name evoke
images of sculpture, because Graves is famous for painting and virtually unknown
as a sculptor. In 1962, however, he
created a large body of strangely beautiful, totemic sculptures in steel, brass,
marble and glass. This body of
work, called “Instruments for a New Navigation,” was inspired by the NASA
space missions then in their infancy. They
were further inspired by looking at celestial bodies through telescopes and
through having studied concepts of metaphysical unity, especially Asian
philosophies. These sculptures are
elegant, totemic objects that invite introspection and embody Graves’s quest
for wholeness.
Forty years after
creating these pieces, 90 years old and living in semi-retirement in California,
Graves reassembled them, and now they are being shown for the first time in an
exhibition that started in New York and has traveled to Tacoma, where it is on
display through September 4. The
exhibition features a large number of these odd, fantasy instruments arrayed on
tables, and the sculpture is complimented by a group of paintings from the late
1930s to the early 1990s.
Grace
Gleuck,
writing for the New York Times, was less than laudatory in her critique of these
sculptures when the show opened at Schmidt-Bingham Gallery in New York.
“But alas,” Gleuck wrote of the sculpture, “their whimsical mix of
pseudoscience and philosophical pretensions, their ungainly position between
sculpture and painting, doesn’t work well.
At best these objects are high decoration, a far cry from the delicate
mysteries of Mr. Graves’s luminous paintings at their best.”
I beg to differ.
These sculptures have all the beauty, mystery, elegance and timelessness
of Graves’s best paintings. In
fact, in this show the paintings suffer in comparison with the sculpture.
With about three marvelous exceptions, these are not among the best of
Graves’s paintings. Most of them
are tedious in their overworked detail and refinement of surface. They are too superficially pretty and nothing like the work
Graves is most famous for. Furthermore,
his famous luminosity is lost, as many of these works on paper have faded (they
look much better in reproduction than “in the flesh”).
The sculptures, on
the other hand, have a timeless quality with their references to both celestial
and sea navigation, to stars, compasses, telescopes and magical instruments.
They connect ancient arts with modern science and religious yearnings,
and they are made of materials that will never fade.
In fact, they look amazingly contemporary considering they were done in
the early ‘60s (they probably would not have received a warm reception had
they been shown back then).
Each piece is a
variation on the same basic form: a disc or plaque in cast bronze or marble with
materials such as glass and mirrors on top of rods of nickel-plated bronze on
marble bases, and they are grouped together like instruments in some mysterious
future control room — or maybe a science lab from an ancient fabled city such
as Atlantis.
“Weather
Prediction Instruments for Meterologists” has three discs arranged in
ascending order of size atop crosslike rods on marble bases. The front and largest disc contains sheets of clear glass
that sandwich globs of bronze slag that looks like a floating clump of sea
grass. Behind it is a larger disc
that is a sheet of gray marble with a hole in the center. On the rod that holds this disc is a small fan blade colored
a very light oxidized blue, and behind it is the largest disc, this one a sheet
of translucent glass in a dark blue-green hue.
It is designed, as most of these pieces are, to be looked through, not
at. The colors and striations of
markings are beautiful, and they change according to the light and the position
of the viewer.
“For the Study of
Ultraviolet Light Healing” is square in format with a central grid of
rectangular glass pieces hinged together on a luminescent mauvish red ground.
“The Opposite of Life is Not Death; The Opposite of Life is Time” is
a circular slice of alabaster framed in nickel-plated brass and mounted on a
brass post. Graves has cut an open circle and inserted a tiny hour glass.
The hour glass lays on its side, meaning the sand will never move; time
will never change.
“Instrument for a
New Navigation” is a brass disc atop a pole with three faucet-like
protuberances along its circumference, looking somewhat like an ancient ship’s
wheel. The grass disc holds a blue
marble sheet that looks like stars and celestial clouds in a blue sky.
A hole drilled in the center of this disc contains a lens through which
can be seen Graves’s painting “Waning Moon” on the back wall (also
reflected in this lens are Dale Chihuly vases along the opposite wall, an added
bonus you’ll get at TAM and nowhere else).
“Waning Moon”
is one of the best of the paintings in the show.
On a black ground of crinkled paper are a pair of two-headed eels that
come together to form an elliptical yin-yang symbol. Above this are black and gray linear markings that look like
a hovering insect with spindly legs. A
pair of tiny white dots rear the top are like eyes glowing in the dark.
Other powerful
paintings are “Night Sky #1,” which reflects the disc shapes so prevalent in
the sculpture, and “A Tantra-Yantra Image, India,” which is a playful image
of two phallic shapes in black line on a red-splattered ground.