Porter Magazine - Yablonsky - Sarah Morris

Whether she’s creating futuristic graphics on the subway, walking Beijing’s corridors of power or filming table talk at the White House, American artist Sarah Morris is the ultimate international trespasser. Here, Linda Yablonsky charts the journey of the woman who never takes no for an answer Photography by Jason Schmidt[br] Fashion editor Lilli Millhiser

Makeup Kristi Matamoros at Frank Reps. Hair Joe Martino at The Wall Group. Shot on location on April 20, 2017

In The Moment

Sarah in her studio in Long Island City in front of two of her new paintings, Science and Technology 2017 (left) and Eagle 2017 (right), wears dress by Balenciaga, $2,400; shoes by Aquazzura, $650; earrings by Area, $85; tights by Falke, $36

Sarah in her studio in Long Island Cityin front of two of her new paintings, Science and Technology 2017 (left) and Eagle 2017 (right), wears dress by Balenciaga, £1,715; shoes by Aquazzura, £503; earrings by Area, £66; tights by Falke, £18

S

Sarah wears roll-neck

by The Row, $1,390; diamond and white gold earrings by Ana Khouri, $28,560

Sarah wears roll-neck

by The Row, £1,250; diamond and white gold earrings by Ana Khouri, £22,098

“The eye is constantly trespassing. To be a good artist you have to be a trespasser”

arah Morris is a no-frills kind of person. Here is an artist who goes in for the strong and pure – like the trademark bright, glossy red she applies to her lips and the intense black, red or white of her clothes. Both quickly announce the entrance of this art-world star whose work has become a global phenomenon. Widely celebrated by museums and collectors for the bold graphics of her paintings and the thrumming dazzle of her 14 films, she’s an expert on the functions of color, both aesthetic and psychological.

Laid out on white work tables in her industrial, white-on-white studio (20 times larger than the shabby 42nd Street cubicle where she started out) in Long Island City, New York – where the name on the door reads Parallax Corporation, after The Parallax View, a paranoiac, 1974 thriller directed by Alan Pakula, whom she holds in high esteem – are paint chips delineating every shade of the palette she’s chosen for the massively scaled, abstract murals she’s currently preparing for Florida’s Fort Lauderdale airport, the Miami Beach Convention Center and subway stations in New York and Toronto. “I have a lot of energy,” Morris, 49, says, with admirable understatement, as she greets me dressed in a Charlie Brown T-shirt and black jeans.

In 2016 alone, Morris had four solo exhibitions (in Turkey, Austria, Belgium and Paris), and contributed to 10 group shows in as many cities, at home and abroad. In 2017 there are almost too many to count. When Morris is filming, her shot list will run to 150 different locations – all captured by a single camera – in the space of a few days. Yet she still makes time to date. Her new boyfriend is Tolga Albayrak, the roving impresario behind social events at art fairs around the world. “It’s going well,” she says, with typical economy in her confident, no-nonsense way.

In the studio are paintings she has created for Finite and Infinite Games that are the core of a solo exhibition opening this month at the Capitain Petzel Gallery in Berlin. As in all of her paintings, they’re distinguished by kaleidoscopic graphics – intersecting diagonals, over-lapping arcs and checkerboard squares that together suggest flattened or stretched Rubik’s Cubes. More to the point, they channel the architectural plans, traffic patterns, underground interiors, industrial conduits, street lights, assembly lines, car parks and stadium spectacles pictured in her adrenaline-fueled films. “They’re not easy to do,” she says of the paintings, which she begins by drawing on a computer before mapping their coordinates, point by point, on canvases 10 times larger. “You could even define making art as problem-solving in real time,” she reflects. “With film, it’s more obvious what the problems are. You need to get certain equipment or permission to shoot what’s there. To make paintings, you have an image in your mind and then you have to will it into being.”

Remarkably, Morris did not study art or its history. At Brown University in Rhode Island, she majored in political philosophy and semiotics – the study of signs, which indeed inform her work today. Basically, it blends Mondrian with the aesthetics of Blade Runner and The Matrix in virtual-power structures that mirror corporate networks in the real world.

Born in England, she was still an infant when her parents moved to Barrington, Rhode Island. “My parents were people who talked back to the TV – but critically,” she’s quick to add, “not in a crazy way.” Her British-born father was a scientist. Her American mother took her to museums and collected fabrics, with which she made all of her daughter’s clothes. “We had an

attic that was almost like a studio,” Morris says. “A whole section would be a pile of velvets. Another was all tweeds. We’d choose a design or a pattern together. It was super fun.” As a girl, she made drawings just for fun. “A family friend made a big deal of them,” she says. “But my mother didn’t like them. I don’t remember it, but apparently one was called Purple Mom.” Morris had no idea she would be an artist, but, from the age of three, she knew she would go to New York City.

At nearby Brown, she became interested in filmmaking and it never left her mind. In 1989, after a year at Cambridge University, she was accepted into the cross-disciplinary Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, where she made her first paintings. They consisted of single words – Hell, Liar, Guilty – that she took from stories in The New York Times and painted in single colors on white canvas.

“They seemed impenetrable,” says the New York gallerist Friedrich Petzel, who was among the first to see them in her 42nd Street studio. “A short time later,” he recalls, “she was invited to show at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. She exhibited large, semi-abstract paintings of Manhattan building façades and Midtown, which the museum commissioned. I was attracted to both, and invited her to do a show in my gallery.”

Morris and Petzel were part of a new generation of artists and dealers who arrived on the scene in the early 1990s – Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rita Ackermann, among them.

Morris and Ackermann became roommates in a rundown East Village building where they held pop-up exhibitions and parties.

During a single week in 1993, their apartment was robbed and a neighbor set the building on fire. “We sat on the hood of a Trans Am and watched for hours,” Morris says, free to laugh about it now.

For four years, she paid her studio rent by working part-time for Jeff Koons as his first-ever assistant. (Today, she employs a half-dozen of her own assistants, in addition to the six-person crew she assembles for film shoots.) In 1996 she moved to London, where she was taken up by Jay Jopling’s now blue-chip gallery White Cube, a hotbed of Young British Artists who were making the city a primary place for provocative new art. “London was just beginning to be very international,” Morris says. “I was probably one of the few people White Cube represented who wasn’t British. Now it’s normal.”

On a visit back home, she went to a dinner cooked by Tiravanija, a fellow artist friend from the Whitney program, at the home of dealer Anton Kern. Artist Liam Gillick opened the door. Their relationship began that night. They married in Miami, where they were collaborating on a work for a hotel owned by the collectors Don and Mera Rubell. They returned to London and stayed until the birth of their son Orson in 2002. The couple, whose collaboration began before their marriage, divorced five years ago, but they’ve continued working together.

“Sarah’s got an amazing intelligence and intensity, and that doesn’t go away,” says Gillick. “Working side by side is a powerful thing.” Gillick contributed the music for her most recent work Strange Magic, a commission for the 2014 opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, which aimed to show consumers of LVMH luxury goods what they never see – the distillation of flowers to make Dior perfumes, the bottling of champagne – to elicit the symbols of French nationalism. LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, she says, loved it.

Her meeting with Gillick coincided with a time during the late 1990s and early noughties that signaled Morris was on her way to the international acclaim she enjoys today. If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, she can feel hugely complimented

by Echo Morris, a film by the artist Anna Gaskell. Though Morris is the subject, it so exactly replicates the style and trajectory of Strange Magic that it’s hard to tell if Gaskell meant it as savage parody or sincere homage to a friend. (She’s not saying.) Most of all, however, it is a first-hand account of what it takes to be a successful female artist in the world today.

It’s ironic that an artist intent on exposing the oppressive influence of corporate architecture on public behavior would join forces with the capitalist institutions she treats with suspicion. Their hidden impact on daily life is plainly visible in her filmed portraits of cities from Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. to Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Beijing. None are scripted or feature actors. Her ‘characters’ are anonymous pedestrians, commercial signage, skyscrapers, stadiums, roadways and checkout counters – points on a map for her restless, fly-on-thewall camera. “It’s about moving very, very fast and getting inside a moment,” she says, speaking just as rapidly and with the same clarity she gives to her art. There’s never any hesitation in her.

When Morris pursues an idea, she doesn’t ask permission.

That’s been her strategy since 1998, when she shot Midtown, her first foray into non-linear filmmaking. With the television news crew she hired, Morris poked around the neighborhood just outside what was then her tiny studio near Times Square without seeking any official consent. It was on that fateful day that she stumbled onto what would become the underlying principle of a career that has given her prominence across the globe: bronze plaques embedded in sidewalks before office towers that read, “Private Property: Crossing and Use Subject to Revocable Permission of the Owner and at Risk of User.”

Few New Yorkers know these warning signs exist, but smudging the line between private and public has been a major focus of Morris’s art. “The eye is constantly trespassing,” she explains. “To be a good artist, you have to be a trespasser.” That idea has taken Morris into places off-limits to most other mortals – like the airport control tower in Abu Dhabi, where she shot her latest film, and the Cabinet Room of the White House. That was the location of a fascinating scene in Capital, her film about Washington in 2000, when Bill Clinton was President. “We literally had the camera on the table,” Morris recalls of that very tense shoot, for which she had just 20 minutes to prepare.

“Clinton was drinking coffee out of a paper cup, which I thought was hilarious.”

“Sarah’s work is all about access,” says Gillick. Indeed, negotiating for the access she needs to make her films can take up to five years. Each requires many trips and countless meetings. But no project, perhaps, has been as intense or complex than the lengthy run-up to Beijing, which she made with a small, mobile crew during the 2008 Olympics. But first she had to persuade both the International Olympic Committee and officials of the Chinese government, accustomed to earning millions from commercial advertisers and television networks, that her art would be of lasting value, even though she shot most of it outside the stadium, focusing on Chinese people excluded from the games.

For some time, the answer to every entreaty was, “No.” Having learned the rules of transgressing private space from the

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In front of Annual Solar Eclipse (Rio) 2014 (left) and Rose Origami 2014 (right) wearing coat by Balmain. $9,237; shoes

by Aquazzura, $650; earrings, her own

At the Shell Gas Station on Northern Boulevard near her studio in Long Island City, Sarah wears coat by Stella McCartney, £1,215; shoes by Aquazzura, £503; tights by Falke, £18; sunglasses, stylist’s own

At the Shell Gas Station on Northern Boulevard near her studio in Long Island City, Sarah wears coat by Stella McCartney, $1,735; shoes by Aquazzura, $650; tights by Falke, $36; sunglasses, stylist’s own

In front of Annual Solar Eclipse (Rio) 2014 (left) and Rose Origami 2014 (right) wearing coat by Balmain, £5,198; shoes

by Aquazzura, £503; earrings, her own

television news crew she hired to shoot Midtown, that didn’t deter her. Nonetheless, she prepared for the worst by shooting her next film, completed in 2012, on the carnival in Rio. Finally, she got the go-ahead for Beijing.

“I don’t know how ‘no’ became ‘yes’,” she says, “but I remember it was April Fool’s Day and I thought it was a joke.

I love it,” she adds, “when a no becomes a yes!”

Her powers of persuasion must be supreme. She’s heard ‘yes’ again and again, though sometimes she benefits from good timing. That’s how she came to live in a unique, twobedroom penthouse in Manhattan that was designed, and formerly inhabited, by the modernist American architect Paul Rudolph. She was on the point of signing a lease in another building altogether when she learned that the famous penthouse was suddenly on the market. “I sometimes think I’m very lucky,” Morris concedes, “like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – like something just landed on me and only my shoes were left.”

The apartment, a rental, retains all of its original features, including a melamine catwalk that runs along a mezzanine library over the double-height living room, cantilevered windows overlooking the East River, marble tile floors and an eccentric mix of fluorescent and incandescent lights. Though Rudolph remodeled the landmarked 1930 building in the 1960s, it still looks futuristic. Morris brought furniture by Mies van der Rohe, Aero Saarinen and Florence Knoll – minimalist designs that echo a personal style that dispenses with patterns.

In a discrete space separated by a wall from the area where paintings headed for Berlin are in progress, Morris is studying architectural models for her three new, ginormous public projects: a ceramic mural for an exterior wall of the convention center in Miami; an interior wall of glass tiles for an elevated subway station near her studio; a ceramic tile wall for a station in Toronto; and a ceramic mural for the Fort Lauderdale airport. “I’m becoming like Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” she jokes. Not for one moment do I believe her.