Callum Morton with One to One, at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Picture: Rodger Cummins AGHOST train, with its staple of flaming skulls and lurid colour scheme, hardly seems a fit for the Heide Museum of Modern Art. But Callum Morton's new print, one of several new works that appear as part of In Memoriam, Heide's extensive new survey of the Melbourne artist's work, is just that.
Occupying a nook of the Heide III gallery, Morton's Ghost Train, Bulleen recasts architect David McGlashan's design for Heide II - the ruin-like building that John and Sunday Reed commissioned as their second house on the property in 1963 - as a garish theme park ride.
Though the 45-year-old describes the print as a ''moment of silliness'' among the collection of new and old works that comprise In Memoriam, it is not without basis. ''On the surface, Heide is a place that is just filled with ghost stories and they continue to return because they're never properly buried,'' he says. ''And Heide trades off that unresolvedness.''
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In a career spanning two decades - which has included representing Australia at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 - Morton's work has used and subverted modernist architecture and the idea of the ruin to explore both personal and wider cultural histories, ambitions and failures. His architectural replicas, typified by shifts in scale, context and camouflage, entice a second reading, a renewed engagement with the structures we take as a given. Many, including Heide Deputy Director and Senior Curator Linda Michael, have described such works as ''tombs''.''Callum manages to achieve something quite fantastic,'' says Michael. ''He makes you really look at something twice, even if you think you know it well.''
He can make the strange seem oddly familiar. Valhalla, which Morton made for Venice and later appeared on the Arts Centre forecourt in 2009, is a burnt-out replica of his modernist family home, designed by his architect father in the 1970s and subsequently destroyed. On entering the smoking, ravaged building, an eerily pristine three-quarter scale corporate lobby revealed itself. The iconography might be personal, but the familiar commercial interior, combined with the distortions of scale, have an unsettling effect on the viewer, like a recalled nightmare.
Morton's recent sculpture In the Pines - a replica of a Le Pine Funerals sign commissioned by TarraWarra Museum of Art in 2008 - perches at the foot of the main car park and, according to Michael, has already prompted much confusion and many a harried visit to the information desk. In one darkened end of the gallery space, meanwhile, Morton's 1999 work International Style depicts a model replica of legendary modernist architect Mies van der Rohe's famed Farnsworth House glowing against a soundtrack of voices, clinking glasses and conversation, only for gunshots and screams to suddenly ring out.
With its ghosts, memories and murders, the spectre of memorial is hard to escape in the new Heide survey, which also includes new site-specific works.
In Monument #28: Vortex, a cream-brick shopfront reveals a cavernous rock tunnel leading out from the centre of Heide III into the gardens. In his other new works Morton replicates a pair of Heide II's walls and its upstairs fireplace on a one-to-one scale, effectively morphing from an architectural feature to a sculpture. Despite the fact that it's identical, it seems completely divergent in character, again taking on an almost tomb-like guise.
''The idea of making a house, like the Reeds did, that was a sculpture at the same time and a ruin in the landscape made it particularly interesting to me,'' says Morton. ''It's such a complicated story … the Reeds' contest of ideas, [the] battle with these rumours around the personal stories, the sort of voyeurism.''
That said, In Memoriam is also self-referential . ''The title is just as much about my neurosis about having a retrospective and being forced to reflect on my career,'' says Morton with a laugh.
''Justin Paton writes in the essay … that I'm the first artist to kill himself off in his own retrospective.''
In Memoriam runs at Heide Museum of Modern Art until October 16.
http://heide.com.au
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/taking-a-shrine-to-heide-20110719-1hmyb.html#ixzz1Scqy0DrQ
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