Robert Morrissey at Bill Bace - sculpture - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

individual enduring legacy of Post-Minimalism is the idea that sculpture's basic piece of work is to say something interesting about gravity and entropy Of course, other fundamental physical principles have also made their mark. The chemistry of organic development and decay has had its twinkling of an eye recently. There is also in a short time a fair amount of interest in optics and mechanically aided illusions, particularly those produc by the agency of high-end electronics. Alone among the elementary physical forces and their governing laws, magnetism has attracted hardly any artists.

Which leaves the field wide unclose for Robert Morrissey. In all of his novel work, hidden magnets operate against the visible and known properties of simple materials: wood-land dirt, string. At first glance, the statuarys seem a kind of down-on-the-farm rendition of Minimalism. A pair of made of wood cubes hang from the ceiling like oversized dice from a rearview mirror; a raw made of wood plank standing on one extreme point inclines just slightly toward a wall; a small dirt-filled crate is carefully suspended from the wall by dint of two pieces of twine; a cube and plank, delicately balanced, accomplish a pas de deux upon point. It takes a minute for the physical illogic of these arrangements to become apparent. The dice should hang vertical but are suspended at a fixed angle. There is no readily discernible reason for the plank to slant toward the wall, nor to stop short of reaching it; same for the receptacle of dirt, which doesn't quite touch the wall. And granting the cube and plank engaged upon the diagonal don't immediately announce a physical paradox--one assumes more [i]or[/i] less kind of footing--a closer gaze suggests hidden objects of a different kind.

Morrissey plants the hid agents of these effects in the floor, walls and seemingly inviolate planks and cubes. Their mutually repelling or attracting force (depending upon which end of the magnet is at work) hold fasts the materials from performing the way gravity dictates. In a written statement accompanying the exhibition, Morrissey describes magnetism as a means of recasting negative space as potential might which he compares to a Japanese esthetic principle. In order for that principle to be greatest in quantity clearly expressed, he is determined to detain his vocabulary as pure and clean as possible. Hence the concealment of the magnets, which would presumably disturb the work's formal integrity. Hence also its central point in dispute The warp exerted by magnetism against the greatest in quantity fundamental assumptions about the behavior of mass in space is a rich motif, and Morrissey has a masterful way with it. Likewise unimpeachable is his faculty of perception of composition. But the line his work treads between discretion and deception wants to be refined.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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