Callum Morton's 'Valhalla'  

Melbourne artist Callum Morton first caught the eye of critics and commentators for his displacing installations using architectural elements applied to a gallery wall.

With major prizes and awards in between Morton came to international prominence with the immense success of his installation work, Valhalla, the Australian selection for the 2007 Venice Biennale. Valhalla presents at three-quarter scale a replica of a house his architect father built. Admired by Morton as his father’s best work but also the cause of a disruptive financial crisis which saw the house sold and family displaced, Valhalla- hand tagged by Morton with graffiti, pock-marked as if by shrapnel or shell attack and spewing smoke from the upper floor- takes it point of departure from deep-held memories of osmotically absorbed modernism and a familial back-story perhaps still not full articulated.

The direct quotation and dilapidation of his father’s work- an architect who “never developed his practice fully”— and, Morton’s recasting in other works of iconic modernist/internationalist building — from Seidler, through Mies van der Rohe to Le Corbusier — has led some critics to interpret his work as emblematic and Oedipal destructions. Others, too simply, see his work as reworking modernist grammars into a new popularist vernacular enriched by an extended vocabulary drawn from film and stage. None of this captures Morton.

And it is more than significant that his viewing public is broad including innumerable people with no particular interest in art or theory who have experienced the minor disruptions – he refers to little shocks - of his work in the course of their day-to-day and been seduced. Unsurprisingly then, he is currently best known in Australian for his large public installations – Hotel on a Melbourne’s Eastlink Freeway and the representation of Valhalla during this year’s Melbourne International Arts Festival where people queued constantly for the experience.

In the same way that Engberg’s The Dwelling proved so irresistible at ACCA (and Morton’s International House formed part of that show) there is a choice of media, an accessibility of subject and a multiplicity of reading that makes Morton’s work resonate with a very, very wide public. They sit somewhere near the heart of current experience and operate, like tiny fillips, by making us a little more aware and alive.

Morton’s contributions extend well beyond installation. For many years he worked concurrently as accomplished arts educator – he holds strong, passionately articulated views on the need for artists to teach future artists – having taught at major institutions internationally and in Australia. And this year he joined the very small number of artists called to the boardrooms of major galleries when he was appointed by the Federal Minister of the Arts to the Board of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

During the recent Melbourne International Arts Festival Morton kindly agreed to an extended interview with ArtsHub which is presented here in edited and condensed form. The interview took as its point of departure a short discussion of past works: Gas and Fuel (2002), Valhalla, International Style (1999) and his new works Smokescreen (shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery) and the Grotto (2009 – a functional cafeteria commissioned by the Fundament Foundation and built in Tilberg, the Netherlands)

AH
There is an element of humour that runs in your work……

Callum Morton
Humour has always been there in the work. I was recently asked “is it a joke?” No, it’s not a joke- it’s only a joke if it’s funny isn’t it. In my work I try to include as much as possible. A lot of these works may belong to the language of set production or other forms of visual production as much as they do to art, architecture or design. I do not distinguish one from the other. On the one hand, humor can make something that’s horrible, palatable. Or give you a certain distance from the seriousness of a work. But it’s also a genre in cinematographic terms. I often refer to these works- while they are site specific in the context of their installation- as ‘Works in Exile’.

AH
You have said you are not primarily interested in architecture even though your work is often viewed as a commentary or even critique of modernist architecture. But you are not really critiquing architecture or proposing architectural solutions….

Callum Morton
I never said I was an architect. It’s the form of, or the body of, architecture, a body of work in the urban landscape that I’m projecting things onto. It’s totally different. Much more aligned to fiction or cinema. I’m using the architectural object because I knew it, because my dad was an architect and I inherited a kind of sense of modernity and materials to grapple with.

AH
Although they are thoughtfully placed and installed there seems to be no specific relationship with landscape architecture or landscape.

Callum Morton
No, I think my objects are always in exile. There has been criticism of this work (Valhalla, which was installed in the Arts Centre forecourt) by the people who saw it in Venice, “How could you put it outside there? Why would you do that?”. The thing is they’re assuming its original context was Venice. But its original context was a house that was built by my parents that I discovered was knocked down at that time so I rebuilt it as if it was from the grave, as a kind of cinematographic object. And then it reappears in this new context in Venice and it was out of place there too. So here again its out of context, there is no illusion that it is context. As I wrote in my essay (available in the MIAF 2009 visual arts and design program catalogue), the work does have an ‘objectness’. It’s interesting here (in the Arts Centre forecourt) because the De Kooning was here and has disappeared and the Speigeltent was here and has gone and this house that had disappeared has reappeared. There are these public monuments – Vault –that appear and disappear. The work has been described as Un-monumental for that reason. It’s made of polystyrene, it’s displayed on a box, its not a permanent work- it has a certain life – for a period.

AH
It’s often said that there is little, or even no, critical dialogue about art here.

Callum Morton
A work like International Style, now 10 years old and on show again at ACCA, can be read as an Oedipal drama but I’m disappointed that has only been read as that. My work and the art of many others has been criticized in the press but that’s not dialogue.

Europeans understand much more about dialogue than we do. I’d much rather get slammed and then agree or disagree. Here we often feel this as an affront, as something personal but it should never be that. When I’m asked in Europe “Why did you do this or this?” I’m not offended. All these opinions and dialogues can exist, swell and circulate. In Europe it’s something else again. It’s the way all those crowds go to Documentia- they really demand something of the work – they are angry if the show does not give them some indication of where things are in the world.

AH
In your new work Grotto (and in International Style) you have almost used light to mark a passage of time over the work…….

Callum Morton
With my work, and Grotto in particular, there are always two skins. In Valhalla it was simply a ruined exterior and the public smooth interior.

International Style is a smooth exterior and a sort of corrupted or messy interior. With Grotto there is the Miesian black box and then you go inside and there is this organic grotto. Grotto - I worked with architects on it – is specifically sited –
it’s in the centre of a baroque garden, with radiating paths. It’s quite unusual for the baroque to exist in landscape architecture in Holland. It’s right in the centre but I wanted to do something that was invisible – the black glass partially reflects but is also partially translucent. In certain views it is confusing against the forest behind it. Then at night the illumination lights the space between the glass and the raw grotto and the glass falls away and this other form appear. It’s adding a third tier to that binary dialogue.

AH
You have written of momentary artistic illusion as a poetic moment…..

Callum Morton
I think it is. I like it as a kind of rupture. It’ like a (Walter) Benjamin idea. A notion of small shocks and those shocks can awaken you. It’s reinvesting a sort of magic back into the city. If you follow the familiar pathways was so many of us do then you don’t really look anymore –a kind of stupor state. These little moments of disorientation and the ramifications that activate all these associations are very important to me.

AH
Thank you Callum Morton

Callum Morton was interviewed at the Melbourne Arts Centre during the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival.