Adrian Searle on artist Sarah Morris\'s exhibition, Lesser Panda

Tag : Colour Curtain

Except as examples of grandiose, mass spectacle, I have no interestin the Olympics, whether this year in Beijing or London in 2012.Olympiads are for architects and city planners, prospectiveterrorists, security consultants and Triumph of the Will types. Themere prospect of a game of ping-pong fills me with horror anddespair.
So I was a somewhat hesitant visitor to the exhibition LesserPanda, by the American artist Sarah Morris at White Cube in Mason'sYard, London. Her show consists of a film about the 1972 MunichOlympics, and a number of paintings, one of which - a huge,corner-turning, eight-panel monster - takes the interlockingOlympic rings as its recurrent motif. Many of Morris's currentpaintings riff on these rings. She is making a film in Beijing. TheOlympics are much on her mind.
But Morris undercuts the sporting allusions and the ideals of theOlympiad: the oddball title of the show refers to a popular Chinesebrand of cigarettes - maybe the fags are less harmful than Beijingsmog. Meanwhile much of her film, 1972, consists of recentinterviews with Georg Sieber, a behavioural and criminalpsychologist who worked with the Munich police in the late 1960sand early 70s, masterminding local law enforcement tactics fordealing with crowd control and demonstrations.
Sieber also advised on Olympic security, and predicted the attack,on September 5 1972, by the PLO Black September faction that tookmembers of the Israeli Olympic team hostage. He quit before thebloodbath that ensued. His is a long and interesting story, told byMorris in understated fragments.
Morris frequently pairs her paintings and films. Both are largelyconcerned with cities: previously she has made films about NewYork, Washington and Los Angeles. Both share extremely highproduction values: Morris's films are shot in 35mm, and herpaintings have a gloss of impersonal perfection. Her work at oncecaptivates, intrigues and resists me. It enters the territory ofthe New York-based Catalan artist Antoni Muntadas, who has studiedthe sinister aspects of the control and choreography of publicspace. In the catalogue that accompanies this show, Morris says:"There is some element of repulsion in front of my paintings . . .something very all-encompassing and dominating about [them] ...that can be extremely empowering or incredibly alienating; I thinkhaving both experiences, the struggle between the two, is what Ifind to be motivating". According to Christopher Turner, in thecurrent issue of Modern Painters, Morris "intends her pulsatingdisplays to be critiques of capitalism", though he admits thismight not, at first, be apparent. This is either ridiculous orserious. I am experiencing the struggle between the two. And howprecisely is a painting - never mind a "pulsating display" -empowering?
Like the abstractions of Barnett Newman or Jackson Pollock,Morris's paintings look great when people move about in front ofthem, even if they don't always do much for the people themselves.As they walk between you and the canvas, they get themselvessnarled up in her paintings' hard-edged complications. The factthat 2028 (Rings) wraps itself around a corner invites seeing it asa kind of insistent and unstable background effect. Whatever logicher paintings have, in their grids and rhomboids, the paintedorigami folds and graphic signage, the colours that reflect thelocale she has been studying - it cannot all be assimilated orentirely remembered.
Technically, Morris's paintings are so accomplished there isnowhere for them to go. They are what they are and do what they do,resolutely declaring themselves as both product and spectacle.Morris may think there is something repellent about them - and sodo I - but it is interesting to observe how people want to getright up close to them, to inspect their sheer gloss-paintedsurfaces, the pristine edges of the shapes.
Two collector types were looking while I was there. "How do they dothat?" one asked, tottering up close to the surface. If she got anycloser her head would have bounced off the canvas. "Are the shapesstuck on?" Gallery invigilators told us all to move back. Up close,it is as if a breath or a cough might spoil the immaculate finish.Next to a Sarah Morris painting I feel sweaty, awkward,street-soiled and gangling. There's not a bleed of paint, an erranthair or a fly trapped anywhere in the paint. If Morris'shorizontals or verticals ever appear off-whack, it is because theworld is wrong. Euclid would run screaming from the room.
To witness such perfection in a handmade object is wearying. EvenMondrian was allowed blips. Barnett Newman was positively sloppy.Morris's unremitting dazzle is somehow soulless and inhuman, whichI guess is the intention. However much the colour sings and theOlympic quoits jump and shuffle about, the general effect isalienating.
Bill Clinton, paper coffee cup in hand, drifts through Morris'sfilm Capital (shot exactly a year before 9/11), and thescreenwriter, producer and Hollywood fixer Robert Towne is theostensible subject of Morris's LA film. Towne was an uncreditedscript doctor on the 1974 political thriller The Parallax View,about a sinister, shadowy organisation that brainwashes and trainsassassins. Morris's own film company is called Parallax Films. Sheis much taken with the idea of conspiracy, but wonders if the truththat is hidden from us is that there is no conspiracy, no granddesign, nothing at all behind the facades of power, just like theWizard of Oz pulling his little levers behind the curtain. Thismight also be the metaphor of her paintings.
Morris's films are full of resonance and unsettled atmospheres,much aided by the ambient soundtracks of her husband, the Britishartist Liam Gillick. Both Morris's and Gillick's art evince asimilar kind of edgy chill. In the film 1972, the camera takes inthe arching roof and thousands of seats of the Munich Olympicstadium. A lone office worker trudges along a distant ramp,briefcase in hand. We see city views, sudden clips of old newsfootage, the head of Georg Sieber - in a car, in his office, beingwatched over by an incongruous toy Pinocchio, who stares and pointsits nose at him, like a compass searching for its north of lies.
Sieber is a persuasive talker. But early on in the half-hour filmhe says: "Historical truth is only the sum of subjectiveperceptions, interpretations and thoughts, which can be checked bycomparing statements and documents. But the real truth remains anideal, a dream, something that isn't real. Next question, please."This is his key speech. We never hear his interlocutor.
In the late 1960s, Sieber persuaded Munich police to replace theirusual heavy-handed approach with one of complicity andcommunication. Talking, Sieber felt, was better than the thwack ofa riot truncheon. When the attack at the 1972 Olympics came, itunfolded in uncanny accordance with one of the possible scenariosSieber had worked through in his security plans. But then Mossadtook over. Sieber went home and watched it all on TV.
Somehow, Morris's film conveys the weight of history and the sheenof the present. It's all down to the shot held for a few extraexcruciating seconds, the telling soundbite, the wordless pan, withGillick's soundtrack adding its layer of unease. Tension doesn'tmount but hangs there, immutable. Morris has said that her filmsare not documentaries, but a "form of inquiry". They might also beportraits - of people, places, the menacing flat-tone mentality ofthe present. Spectacle and social control, public space andsurveillance, architecture as an expression of ideology - all theseissues are at the heart of JG Ballard's writing, which Morrisadmires. Maybe I'll watch the Olympics after all.
· Lesser Panda is at White Cube Mason's Yard, London SW1, until September 6.Details: 020-7930 5373