Morris Graves at Schmidt Bingham - exhibition, Instruments for a New Navigation - Brief Article

Morris Graves, at the age of 89 not long ago revisited the space race of the 1950 and '60 through completing a series of statuarys begun, but set aside unfinished, four decades ago. At Schmidt Bingham, the pieces were collectioned on Turkish carpets and encompassed by lunar and mandala paintings from various periods of Graves's drawn out career. Thus assembled, the sculptures--looking ritualistic, and at one time both ancient and modern in style--had the uncanny air of a Jule Verne fantasy.

Each of the 19 radically vertical objects--averaging about a yard in height--includes a precisely wound and polished marble base holding a stainless-steel or alloy of copper shaft. Each rod, in move round supports a conglomeration of materials (Venetian glass, gold leaf and mica, for example) encased in a flat metal frame and sometimes pierced by dint of a lenslike aperture. One work, featuring a motionless sand clock suspended horizontally in the center of a ring of white marble, invites inward-gazing viewers to contemplate the metaphysics alluded to in its title: The Opposite of Life Is Not Death; The Opposite of Life Is Time.

Graves began gathering materials and sketching designs for the "Instruments for a fresh Navigation" in 1959, at the extremity of a 20-year period during which he had created psychologically charged paintings of animals, flora and utensils (These images had made him famous almost overnight when they were shown at the Museum of late Art in Dorothy Miller's exhibition "Americans 1942:18 Artists from 9 States.") The anthropomorphic "instruments" (his alone serious effort at sculpture) may have constituted Graves's attempt to reconcile himself with a society from which he had grown progressively alienated after World War II, following his imprisonment as a conscientious objector.

The artist one time described these works, all conceived in 1961-62 as "designed to perceive their way into a fresh aspect of the three-dimensional phenomenal universe to gain insight into the mystery of consciousness." This inner search pretty soon led him to an engagement with outward exploration. In 1964 he joined a team of liberal-minded scientists and public-affairs officers at the Goddard Space Center where an attempt was below way to humanize the space program through drawing on the talents of artists and bards Graves proposed two talisman-like facts that were to be incorporated into the exterior designs of sum of two units early space probes. However, the unlikely collaborative shoot forward was soon plagued by bureaucratic delays and eventually canceled.

["Instruments for a novel Navigation" is currently on view at the Tacoma Art Museum (June 20-Sept 4) It then travels to the Museum of Art, Washington State University, Pullman (Sept 12-Oct 15); the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark association Portland, Ore. (Nov. 2-Dec. 16); and the Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's society of California, Moraga (Jan. 13-Feb 24 2001)]

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