The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Christine Morrow conceived an alter-ego, Eve Klein, for a series of works produced during 1996. These objects exuded the melancholy, carnivalesque air of a deserted amusement park. This strange mixture, which may be characterised as contemplative satire or pensive light-heartedness, is characteristic of much of Morrow's work. There is an unwillingness in this work to commit wholly to an ideological position, and yet the satirist in Morrow will not fully abdicate ideological responsibility.
Morrow's is a feminising practice which remains sceptical about adopting an authorised reference point as a base for her critique: she may turn many so-called modernist phallocentric approaches upside down, but what makes her best works interesting is their skepticism of the alternative. Eve Klein gainsays both Yves Klein and Eva Hess. Regarding the latter, Eve is not so certain whether a feminising art can adequately consist of gashes and holes, scratches and blobs, deliquescence and drips; Eve rejects the notion that the counter measure to modernist reduction is the abject- the formless, the visceral, all that is forgotten because it is too hard to name or to hold on to. 'No', says Eve, ' for how can we forget that it is girls who are supposed to be the tidy and clean ones, not boys'? Traditionally, part of a middle-class woman's social education has been to learn to establish cleanliness and order- in other words, form. Those who see in Morrow's work simply a feminising of modernist metaphors deny her insight that there is a part of 'womanhood' --or at least the way that womanhood is made to be- a part sometimes characterised as aggression, that has no truck with the abject, the transient, the masses... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline