In the short text Verb List <\/em>(1967-1968), Richard Serra succinctly catalogued sculptural potentials with a series of action words: \u201cTO ROLL, TO CREASE, TO FOLD, TO STORE.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Reprinted in Artists, Critics, Context: Readings in and Around American Art Since 1945<\/em>, (ed.) Paul F. Fabozzi (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002): 234\u201335.<\/span> Murphy\u2019s work shares both Serra\u2019s gestural penchant and the Verb List<\/em>\u2019s 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 \u201cand.\u2009.\u2009.<\/em> and.\u2009.\u2009.<\/em> and.\u2009.\u2009.<\/em>\u2009.\u201d Murphy\u2019s concerns with action and \u00adlanguage echo, reconfigure, and reconsider modern sculptural legacies. From Kurt Schwitters\u2019s assemblages to David Smith\u2019s early totems, twentieth-\u00adcentury 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anthropomorphism, of course, remains an important force in recent sculpture, even if theoretical accounts of it have changed. Indeed, Murphy writes that, \u201csculpting is looking for shapes that resemble us.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Serge Murphy, quoted in the wall text at the Mus\u00e9e des beaux-arts.<\/span> Yet the myriad recognizable, cheap commodities he uses complicate this drive toward resemblance, introducing prosthesis and possession into the equation. Referring to the reach of hands, the objects extend the body\u2019s capacity, for instance, its propensity for holding things augmented by bags and bowls. In their usefulness these objects also act as economic lures, enticements toward the practices of ownership: seeking, selecting, and buying. Awash with things, these works require a \u201cnoun list\u201d as well as a verb list. The objects of which they are made extend, but also resist, identification with the sculptor\u2019s action\u2009\u2014\u2009because in a sense, they have their own. They raise the question: to whom, exactly, do the actions on Serra\u2019s verb list belong\u2009\u2014\u2009the materials or the sculptor? Who, or what, produces them\u2009\u2014\u2009the sculptor\u2019s will or the latent potential of the materials emerging through encounter with a hand or two? The answer is complex; Serra\u2019s list, I think, slightly favours the sense in which the sculptor actively imposes form onto a passive material. Murphy\u2019s noun-objects, on the other hand, sustain the murky uncertainty of this encounter, asserting themselves as self-possessed possessions, with their own singularity and potential (much like us).<\/p>\n\n\n\n By and large, Murphy\u2019s raw materials are commodities, whose production only minimally involved human hands: factory labourers attending to machines in smooth, streamlined production regimes. Murphy\u2019s own productions are not nearly so streamlined; like Thomas Hirschhorn and many other like-minded contemporary artists, his works harbour no pretension of being \u201cwell made.\u201d These artists actively denounce the importance attached to high-quality manufacture\u2009\u2014\u2009a tradition nearly as old as mass production itself. As early as 1854, British art critic John Ruskin argued that, \u201cthe demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - John Ruskin, On the Nature of Gothic Architecture: True Functions of the Workman in Art<\/em> (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1854), 13.<\/span> Ruskin saw around him a culture obsessed with finery and polish, and lamented the loss of free, imperfect craftsmanship in which manufacture served as a vehicle for thought. It was inhumane, he believed, for factory workers to slavishly follow others\u2019 designs; glass bead manufacturers, for instance, did not \u201chave the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty: and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 11.<\/span> Ruskin conveys streamlined design\u2019s bad conscience in a way that is, of course, deeply felt in our own time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the messiness of The Shape of Days<\/em> is rhetorically staged as the artist\u2019s messiness (a sculptural messiness added to the once-clean, commodified object) then these works ask us to rethink the conceptions of skill on which notions of the \u201cwell made\u201d are based. For Murphy\u2019s \u201cskilled\u201d labour presents itself as slapdash compared to the sleek finitude of the commodity. This is the point: Murphy cuts through, or cuts off, the finished quality of slavishly-made everyday objects and renders them enigmatic\u2009\u2014\u2009even as he demystifies skilled production by using processes (twisting wire, cutting plastic bags) that, presumably, just about anyone could do. \u201cUn-designing\u201d manufactured objects, his sculptural activities dismantle utility, carefully plucking use value from the equation. Lobbing paint on a spool of thread removes its potential to be unwound and sewn (to unwind and sew?); cutting out chunks from a plastic bag removes its ability to hold anything. Subtracting use value, Murphy retrofits these objects with analogical propensities, staging a return of thought to manufacture. Yet this staging also issues a refrain, a repeated myth of art\u2019s purposive purposelessness. Modern art has asserted itself, again and again, as counter to rationalized, industrialized production. The point is not a \u201cpoint\u201d at all; it points to the need to sustain the staging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For all their exuberance, Murphy\u2019s sculptures are crammed into single file. Compared with many of his past works\u2009\u2014\u2009such as R\u00e9parations <\/em>(1999) and Le Songe V\u00e9g\u00e9tal <\/em>(2005), in which loosely built structures sprawled about freely\u2009\u2014\u2009this installation feels constrained, confined to linearity. The jostling, overfull line becomes an architectural marker, a way to highlight the details of the room and make us feel the uncanny vastness of its dimly lit, empty centre. Even the lighting tracks and the hum of the ventilation system seem brought into focus by the way in which Murphy has lined the space. Akin, in a sense, to a Robert Irwin installation, a large part of Murphy\u2019s act is in framing emptiness, bringing into focus the space\u2019s tacit call to our feeling, its subtle, fleeting atmospheres. Yet unlike Irwin, Murphy\u2019s act is also abundant, present, overfull. His gesture references decoration\u2009\u2014\u2009relief panels, friezes and wallpaper borders\u2009\u2014\u2009even if the works\u2019 roughness contradicts decoration\u2019s rote association with exactness, prettiness, polish. As Beatriz Colomina points out, modern architectural discourse was shot through with a hatred of the decorative.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Architecture as Mass Media<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).<\/span> (The architect Adolf Loos even inflected his hatred of decoration with homophobia, denouncing it as degenerate, effeminate, homosexual). Though often overlooked, decoration can radically challenge the aggressively exclusive \u201cneutrality\u201d of modern space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Epitomized perhaps by the white cube, modern interiors are designed to be both aggressively \u201cneutral\u201d and conspicuously vacuous. As Norman Bryson argues, their vacuity espouses a particular attitude toward the overabundance of commodities. Whereas the Victorian home, proliferating with shelves and cubbies, sought to absorb as much of the excess as it could, the modern interior ekes out a quietness, a temporary reprieve from excess against which certain carefully chosen trinkets can stand out in high relief.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Norman Bryson, \u201cAbundance,\u201d in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still-Life Painting <\/em>(London: Reaktion Books, 1990): 97\u2013135.<\/span> Putting these dialectics into high focus, Murphy playfully links two categorical exclusions of modern space\u2009\u2014\u2009decoration and trash\u2009\u2014\u2009and refashions them as probes into the very \u201cneutrality\u201d which surrounds them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet the constrained, linear format also reads as a linear progression, drawing out questions about how time is represented in space. Walking along the walls, we might imagine a temporal progression between assemblages; they seem to represent a progression of days (as if each unit stood in for a day) in a direct equation of the artist\u2019s labour with represented time. Yet within each individual unit, a cacophony of temporality spills forth. Cuttings, stackings, and coatings fold time, inflecting the time of looking with the imagined, reconstructed time of the objects\u2019 making. The tension between the linear representation of time and this other, more unwieldy sense of temporality recalls Henri Bergson\u2019s early twentieth-century writings on duration. Whereas, Bergson argued, we are accustomed to measuring time in regular units, these are only abstractions placed overtop our experience of duration: the completely heterogeneous, and completely singular, experience of the rhythmic flux and flow of qualities. To quantify time was to misrepresent it, falsely lending it the illusion of regularity: a regularity that undoes the richness, the unpredictability, the thickness of duration.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will<\/em> (London: Elibron Classics, 2005).<\/span> Murphy\u2019s work suspends us between the representation of time as quantity, and its experience as rhythmic, multifaceted, and durational. In so doing, it challenges us to consider the historical and cultural specificity of our understanding of time. Writing as he did, in the early twentieth century, Bergson\u2019s work stood counter to Taylorism\u2009\u2014\u2009the streamlined, scientific management of workers\u2019 minute motions on the factory line, meant to maximize efficiency and profit. Murphy\u2019s line of productions plays with expectations of regular outcomes and standardized units of time\u2009\u2014\u2009yet his works undo these expectations with their lilting, exuberant irregularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Breaking down objects, Murphy refashions them as probes into the media in which the very experience of sculpture is suspended: production, architectural space, and time. Carrying strong stylistic ties to Modernity, his work intelligently challenges us to think about the pressing contemporaneity of the modern relationship between production and skill. It also acknowledges and challenges the rational, modern concepts of time and architectural space against which art\u2009\u2014\u2009which espouses anti-rational production\u2009\u2014\u2009 can become framed as<\/em> art. Murphy stages the artist\u2019s activity as un-designing, de-rationalizing the object, and in so doing, enunciating the space in which one presents oneself. Yet for all its reflexive panache, for all its anti-rationalism, this work is quite aware that the dichotomy between rational and anti-rational productions is also modern; it doesn\u2019t solve this, but rather holds up the paradox, stretches it and smiles. These works sustain their serious inquiry with lightness, playfulness, and humour\u2009\u2014\u2009the childlike exuberance of not quite knowing where one is or what to do, but being there, acting there anyway.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO05_Rosamond_Murphy_La-Forme-des-jours-scaled.jpg\")
photos : Pascal Grandmaison, permission de l’artiste |
courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/74_DO05_Rosamond_Murphy_La-Forme-des-jours-2-scaled.jpg\")
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photo : \u00a9 Richard-Max Tremblay\u2009\/ SODRAC (2011)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n