‘The Role of the Plumber’ a Sculpture by the Artist Richard Morritt
“It lets me play with the notion of authenticity,” “I explore what it means to negate something or to do something non-productive”
“I’m trying to equate that interference with the idea of chance and to give that extra layer of randomness a sort of spiritual significance.”
Rather than collapsing into the unified body of the spectator or deferring to that of the artist,this work demonstrates a distributed corporeality carried out through a multimedia network of production and consumption.
Mr. Morritt’s syncretic work investigates ethnic and cultural identity, the effects of postcolonialism, and the processes of hybridization at work in contemporary society. With exuberance the artist explores the ever increasing role of the plumber in society.
Combined with the work’s forthright subject matter, this deliberate and simple linearity creates a subtle sense of nostalgia and moreover suggestively questions the increasingly complicated relationship between technology, images, and the culture they reflect compounding poetic juxtapositions that are at once absorbing and elusive, warmly autobiographical and coolly distant.
Such reliance on exuberant hues and minimal, if ambiguous, planar relationships might suggest naiveté; but here the charged colors invite us to find more subtle formal links among the elements of the composition. Morritt deploys stark, if not unsettling, eruptions of both hot and cold colors in a single space. The juxtaposition excites, because we cannot be certain if the cool colors are pushing the warm colors forward or vice versa—a surprising reversal of tonal convention.
Fuelled always by a ‘hysteric whimsy’ that productively fails to seize Morritt’s mannered subject in a uniformity that might be recognizable to the self-identifying techniques routinely unquestioned by contemporary culture. This Piece is supremely able to raise questions about the relationships between “art” and its immediate environment .
Man’s role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary.
Margaret Mead
(except Photographer/art critics and Plumber/ sociological artists are wonderful).
Makes me feel undervalued and unappreciated.
The prose just reeks of Uncle Ricky’s rare talents
silly forgot the i in ubiquitous
Oh dear ! now we have to know if Bob wrote the quote unsolicited accompanying text unquote or ahem the lovely but rather non ubquitous crm?
as the artist i was moved to tears by the unsolicited
accompanying text: how gratifying it is to have ones
work both understood and explicated by a kindred spirit
Yeah, what Joan said!
You failed to mention the significant conceptual commmentary on the roles of man and woman in today’s pre-apocalyptical society. The erect prominent and clearly undersized male support is still able to penetrate the soft and forthcoming female roll, but as the roll ages, it diminishes in size and usefulness until the core that has supported it and provided access as well as purpose to the male, is tossed into the trash.
Or conversely Gobbledygook.
Really, I do say, technology will not appreciate the Artist’s eruptions- be they hot nor cold.
I hope that after that feathery, phonological hyperdeclaration Monsieur Morritt used some of that toilet tissue!
‘upcycling’ at it’s best
At it’s VERY best Margo,shades of Jerry Pethick..I just had to come back and have a second look and read…too funny!
Art Speak at its most obfuscating best
Duchamp roll over ?
I am….Speechless !!