Sarah Morris: White cube.
Archer, Michael
Tommie Smith and John Carlos changed my life. Beamed in monochrome
from Mexico City to a white boy in the nowhere provinces of England in
1968, the athletes' silent gesture of graceful resistance under
pressure--raising their fists in a black power salute at the Olympic
medal ceremony--spoke loudly of the power of images to signify
politically, economically, and ideologically. The Olympics matter. Four
years later, everyone's eyes were on Munich when a hooded member of
the Palestinian Black September group peered over the balcony of an
apartment in the athletes' village. Inside were eleven Israeli
hostages, all of whom would be dead by the end of the day. This incident
is the subject of Sarah Morris's latest film, 1972, 2008. It
features an extensive interview with Georg Sieber, the head psychologist
of the Olympic Police at the time. Over the course of a number of
sessions shot in a car and in his study, Sieber offers a description and
analysis of the event that differs markedly from the widely accepted
account. A large model of Pinocchio stands behind his desk throughout,
the unchanging length of its nose suggesting, perhaps, that what we are
hearing is the truth.
But Sieber insists that the desire for historical truth, for
certainty about what really happened, can never be satisfied. All we
have are varied points of view, experiences, and narratives. His own
compelling version, delivered in an urbane, evenhanded style, is
contextualized by Morris with police surveillance footage of
demonstrators, archival photographs of the 1972 games, and panoramic
shots of the Munich Olympic Stadium. Sieber (who had once been a member
of the socialist German Student's Federation) and his colleagues in
the police had developed a range of possible scenarios to prepare
security forces for every conceivable problem. The Palestinian attack
was "Scenario 26," and in its initial stages it played out
pretty much as predicted. Very soon, though, Israel assumed operational
control and Sieber, realizing he was now both impotent and irrelevant,
resigned, went home, and watched the tragedy unfold on television.
1972 was shown in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics as part of
Morris's exhibition "Lesser Panda." Alongside it were
paintings from two concurrent series, one based on the Olympic rings and
the other on origami patterns. Hitherto each of the canvases in the
"Rings" series, 2006-, has referenced a particular past
Olympiad. Here, in the eight-panel 2028 [Rings], 2008, which wraps
itself around two walls of the ground-floor gallery, the artist is
looking ahead. Taking its cue from the manically proliferating fabric of
the Chinese capital, with its system of concentric ring roads, 2028
[Rings] plunders the past--Balla's Futurism, Constructivist design,
Stella's "Protractor" paintings, Warhol's
flowers--for the forms with which to exponentially extend this frenzy
into a contested future. A sense of portent is also a feature of the
"Origami" paintings, 2006-, whose grids form the crease
patterns used in the folding of various creatures. One thinks of Gaff,
the character played by Edward James Olmos in Blade Runner (1982),
leaving his sinister origami calling cards. Stella resonates here, too,
this time as the painter of concentric squares and mitered mazes,
generating complexity and dynamic spatiality out of unremitting
flatness. In Falcon [Origami], 2007, and Swan [Origami], 2007, for
example, zones of intensity and openness, of compression and release,
lay out instructions that, while in themselves traditional, map an
outcome whose shape is not obvious in the present. What is sure is that
as it evolves it will be complicated, and we will be implicated.
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