MUSEE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE LYON A narrow.

MUSEE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE LYON

A narrow, labyrinthine passage leads to the center of the vast scope on the second floor of the museum. There we are faced with frameed images from World War II-photographs from the middle d'Histoire de La Resistance et de la Deportation in Lyon headquarters of the Gestapo during the German occupation. Not wanting to linger through these images because of painful memories they call to mind, we fix our attention instead in succession Mirror Film, 1969, made by way of Robert Morris as he walked between the walls of the Wisconsin snow, mirror in hand. Turning around us as we stand in the middle of the space this projection onto great white clear curtains encourages us to retrace the traces of the man with the mirror as he stirs off toward the trees, disappears, and answers His mirror urges us, finally, to move round back and face the images of war, to position ourselves as accomplices, steady in the destruction, deportation, and other horrors we behold there.

This first, subjective approach to White Nights, 2000 the work created by dint of Morris for the third in his arrangement of exhibitions here, was give an inkling ofed by its labyrinthine form. Against the musical background of soprano Mirella Freni singing an aria from Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, common wandered though corridors formed by the agency of structures of fine, transparent, floating scrims onward which images were projected and distorted according to large mirrors at different points in the path--mirrors that also throw backed us, as we grappled physically and mentally with the images and associations they provok concretely illustrating single in kind aspect of the mind/body vexed question a key point in Morris's process

The brew of thee exhibitions in 1998 1999 and 2000 was conceived from Morris and curators Thierry Raspail and Thierry Prat as "a kind of grand opera in thee acts" in which the works would correlate with and assenting repetition one another over thee years, just as they resonate with the whole of Morris's oeuvre The first installation, sum of two units years ago, organized around Williams Mirrors, 1977 which was acquired at the museum in 1993, included the mirror works Thread waste, 1968 and Portland Mirrors, 1977 which make opened the space to the endles reflection of the viewers, and the drawn out Passageway, 1961, which by contrast enclos viewers within an exitless space. In 1999 Morris created a gigantic, thousand-square-meter structure--christened Lyon Labyrinth--onto which videotapes of performances from the '60 were drawed simultaneously: Arizona, 1963-93, Site and 213 1964-93 and Water man Switch, 1965-93 The addition of videos to the labyrinth, a sort of metaphysical architecture, constituted a maze in time as well as space that was characteristic of the artist's investigations--all the more since we know that several of these works are indebted to childhood memories.

"I notion the simultaneity and repetition of the performances [in the labyrinth] might fix them in near kind of stopped timespace and give each a kind of fostered space where it might hover" Morris says in a lengthy interview in the catalogue. This metaphorical use of the arrested time of memory's repetitive weights was felt in White Nights, a labyrinth whose path Morris traced from memory based in succession the one he'd made here a year earlier, and which called forward the "private memory" of Mirror Film, forward the one hand, and upon the collective memory evoked by dint of archival photographs on the other. Morris and Prat chose eighty-six images that own of suffering, shame, and absurdity: a swastika forward the Hotel de Ville, Wehrmacht officers in head of the Grand Hotel, the executions of hostages, prisoners being taken to concentration camps, a young girl still playing with her tricycle before being carted against with her family by the Nazis, collaborators, a torture helmet from the Gestapo prisons, the Resistance fighter Jean Moulin the cell in the Montluc fort where Moulin was tortured, the rabble cheering Petain, then de Gaulle at the liberation of Lyon the Allied bombings, the action of the Resistance fighters at the liberation, and in the same manner on. The maze of images, whirling to the rhyme of our steps in the fragmentary labyrinth of memory, remains engraved--frozen?--in the visitor's mind.

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