Morgan Fisher: ( ), ( ), ( ), ( )
Maureen Paley is pleased to announce the first solo presentation by Morgan Fisher at the gallery. His film ( ) will be projected for four days in the second of two screening weeks the gallery has organised this year. The film will be on show continually on each day of the screening during gallery opening hours from 11am – 6pm.
Morgan Fisher ( ), 2003
16mm film, color and black and white, silent, 24 frames per second, 21 minutes
Director: Morgan Fisher
Morgan Fisher reflects on ( ) :
( ) benefits from multiple viewings. The film is unusual in that its construction makes it very difficult to remember, a fact that repeated viewings will make clear. A second viewing of the film will almost certainly accord only somewhat with the viewer’s memory of the first, and the same will be the case for the relation between the second viewing and the third.
One of the things that ( ) raises is how memory organizes our experience of a film when the film is seemingly without an organizing principle, at least one that is visible and that we are familiar with.
( ) consists only of inserts, a kind of shot in feature films, such as a close-up of a wristwatch, that conveys information essential to the story. The shots in ( ), extracted from their stories, are organized according to a rule, a model I had found in the work of, for example, Sol LeWitt and that I find enormously powerful. But unlike the work I know that follows a rule, the rule that constructed ( ) is invisible, and because the rule is indifferent to what is in the shots, the juxtapositions that the rule produces are the result of chance. The viewer cannot have the remotest sense of what will happen next. Chance is one of the operations of Surrealism, but it is also an operation in non-composition, a more inclusive term for methods that offer an alternative to the authorial ego, and it is non-composition that plays a role in most of my work, be it film, painting, drawing or sculpture.
Previous solo exhibitions include: Conversations, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA, 2012; The Frame and Beyond, Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria, 2012; Films and Paintings and In Between and Nearby Raven Row, London, 2011; Translations, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, 2011; Portikus Looks at Itself, Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, 2009; Standard Gauge: Film Works by Morgan Fisher, 1968-2003, Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2006; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, 2006; Standard Gauge: The Films of Morgan Fisher, Tate Modern, London, 2005.
Morgan Fisher. Writings was published in 2012 by Generali Foundation, Vienna, Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach and Walter König, Cologne.