Un-designing: Serge Murphy, Architecture and Felt Time

A long, broken, burbling line of stuff stretches around the walls of a vast space. Serge Murphy’s exhibition The Shape of Days — a collection of bas-relief assemblages placed closely side by side — reaches around the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavillion in Montréal’s Musée des beaux-arts. At first glance, the work seems like an odd decorative flourish in an oddly empty room. Walking around its perimeter, we move past an overwhelming array of altered everyday objects. Broken into individual units, the burbling line swarms around small shelf-like components, halfway lines jutting out from the wall. A gestural vocabulary spreads out from each shelf in all directions. Elements rest, stack, and protrude above; strings, wires, drawings, bags, and bits of plastic dangle below. Ties, tea, cardboard, colanders, flower pots, pieces of styrofoam, spools of thread; cut, glued, pinned, bent, splattered, speared, clasped, drenched, painted.

In the short text Verb List (1967-1968), Richard Serra succinctly catalogued sculptural potentials with a series of action words: “TO ROLL, TO CREASE, TO FOLD, TO STORE. . . .”¹ 1 - Reprinted in Artists, Critics, Context: Readings in and Around American Art Since 1945, (ed.) Paul F. Fabozzi (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002): 234–35. Murphy’s work shares both Serra’s gestural penchant and the Verb List’s obvious concern for how gestural potential becomes enshrouded in language. The odd assemblages on display incite us to imagine the actions by which they were produced. Yet they also become a syntax, a grammar for containing those traces of movement: shelf-sentences of heterogeneous actions, qualities, and subjects, many linked with “and. . . and. . . and. . . .” Murphy’s concerns with action and ­language echo, reconfigure, and reconsider modern sculptural legacies. From Kurt Schwitters’s assemblages to David Smith’s early totems, twentieth-­century sculpture often fabricated flows of material into succinct gestural units. Many of these works echoed a structuralist belief in the universality of both language and the human body as interpretive keys.