Callum Morton
March 2013
As the set designer for the Australian premiere of Other Desert Cities, Melbourne artist Callum Morton finds himself knee-deep in the artistic process
Callum Morton believes little shocks are important. He’s referring to that feeling or sensation when spatial experience doesn’t quite match what one perceives. Take Valhalla for instance, the often-discussed three-quarter scale work commissioned as part of Australia’s representation at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Luckily for locals, it was reprised for the 2009 Melbourne Festival. Placed on the forecourt of the Arts Centre on St Kilda Road, the now infamous, smouldering ruin (that continues to inspire all manner of interpretations), easily achieved Morton’s idea of little shocks. Moving from exterior to interior, that is, stepping over the threshold, there was a moment of confusion, a jarring that extended from body to mind, and in fact connected the two within some strange, ‘displaced space’. It was real but it was dreamlike too, or maybe just part of the parallel universe Morton is known to create.
Yet in 2011, it happened again. In Memorium – part overview of Morton’s almost 20-year career, and part site-specific instillation – was an exhibition that saw a mini “Callum’s World” created at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Calling upon the great Morton themes – such as the interplay between public and private, the notion of the memorial, and how space is experienced in built environments – In Memorium was fraught with little shocks. “The audience that attends one of my large gallery instillations,” Morton says, “are the actors, and I’m controlling the atmosphere.”
It seems apt then, that Morton is working with the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) on their latest production, Other Desert Cities. It is his official debut as a set designer (in Sam Strong’s directorial debut for the company), and Morton – not surprisingly – is able to discuss these experiences as he offers insights into his creative practice.
Other Desert Cities by American playwright and screenwriter, Jon Robin Baitz, is a tightly plotted, contemporary American play about an affluent family in crisis. A critically acclaimed off-Broadway and Broadway hit, the Australian premiere stars Robyn Nevin (family matriarch, Polly Wyeth), John Gaden (Polly’s husband, Lyman), Sacha Horler (troubled daughter, Brooke), Ian Meadows (son, Trip), and Sue Jones (Polly’s sister, Silda). “I think everybody is excited to be working on this production,” Morton says, “and I have been fascinated by the process of getting the play ready for performance.”
When we meet in a small room located on the first floor of MTC headquarters in Southbank, it is a particularly hot day in Melbourne. Morton, dressed in black, hair short, muscles defined, sits comfortably on one end of a black chaise lounge. Windows to his left reveal open-plan office space: high ceilings, warm colours, familiar posters – Red, Constellations, The Other Place. Out of view, is a red-velvet lips couch – plush and shapely, and more interestingly, black stairs, at one-third scale, offering alternative access to the reception area at street level. Morton, who is fascinated with scale and notions of the strange, loves this design quirk. “At first, I didn’t realise it was here,” he says later, pausing at the very top of the miniature stairs. Morton looks down, lingers. He is the captivated audience.
“I think it’s kind of interesting how putting something in a space that is slightly beguiling or is a little bit strange, how that maybe changes the way people think about art or practice,” he says. It’s the “little shocks”, the misrecognition, he reiterates, that help reorient people’s relationship to the space in which they inhabit. For Morton, context is crucial, for it enables him to introduce what might have otherwise remained concealed.
In Other Desert Cities, what is real is often hidden, and there’s an almost biological process that takes place throughout the play that sees a mannered, constrained world transgressed by human mess and activity. Said Baitz in a 2010 interview in New York: “Rather than… moral inevitability, I think the only inevitability that I’m aware of is the shock of coming face to face with the person you didn’t think you were. And it’s in every play I’ve ever written.”
Such close proximity to human experience is a main attractor for Morton. He was always interested in the play, he says. He likes its themes, especially its preoccupation with how public and private space is defined (and breached), the idea of ‘the home’ as monument, and aesthetically, the play’s setting – the desert resort city of Palm Springs, known for its Mid-Century Modern architecture, an aesthetic he is very familiar with.
Morton, who has lived in LA, immediately thought of two architects known for their desert buildings: Richard Neutra (and his Kauffman House), and Albert Frey (known for his desert house designs). With these structures in mind, Morton pictured a place where Other Desert Cities might happen, and a process of negotiation began, with the Frey and Kauffman houses initially forming the basis of the set design – an open-plan living space, ordered and functional, with large glass windows, and the presence of water. The area – exploring the idea of a “fetishized modernism” – would also be infused with the “golden or ochre light of the desert”.
“The design went through a number of iterations,” he says, “and was changed from a specific place… a specific building, to a tomb… a kind of family tomb… As the play progresses, the room becomes more defined, it remains mannered and precise but the lives of the characters unravel.”
Morton pauses. He remembers a moment in the play when Lyman – who is looking out of a window – talks of the desert “as a landscape of erasure” and “of a kind of absence” – an expanse, Morton suggests, offering relief from the pain of loss, from the family secret that occupies hidden spaces in the mind of each character.
Morton, who was born in Montréal, Canada in 1965, was two years old when his parents returned to Melbourne to live. The 60s, however, had been an eventful time for Morton’s parents. His father was a young architect, and like many young architects of that period, worked in Europe. While in Montréal, Morton’s father worked with renowned Australian modernist architect, John Andrews. “Then there was Expo 67,” Morton says. “My dad worked with Moshe Safdie on Habitat, which was featured there, as was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.”
It was an exciting time in the world of architecture. Safdie’s Habitat, considered revolutionary, attempted to offer pre-fabricated, low-cost, multi-level urban living. Morton presented a rather disturbing interpretation of the famous structure in his 1:5 scale model, also entitled Habitat (2003). In fact, many know Morton thanks to his many reinterpretations of signature (and mythological) buildings.
Morton studied architecture and urban planning for two years at RMIT. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at Victoria College, Melbourne (1988), and a Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at RMIT in 1999. Represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Morton, whose work is held in various public and private collections around Australia, is also a Professor of Fine Art at MADA (Monash Art Design and Architecture), a sort of “laboratory for visual culture”.
While Morton insists he is not an architect, he is, nonetheless, influenced by his father’s occupation. But it was his grandmother’s dedication to painting that he remembers most fondly. “I learned how to paint in her back shed,” he says. “I guess she was a mentor to me because I’d always regarded art practice as kind of magical.”
Morton says there is an important connection between what is outside and what is inside in Other Desert Cities – and for him, it is glass that creates that surface, that connection. “I feel there’s a kind of complication around the materiality of glass,” he concludes. “Particularly in Modernity. You know, that idea, say, in Mies van de Rohe or Philip Johnson where you’re inside a glass house, looking out over the landscape – in this case, it’s the desert. And during the day, you’re a kind of master of your domain, but at night, when the lights come on, you only see your own reflection… and the landscape no longer retreats, it almost comes to the surface of the glass.”
In a way it echoes a comment made by Indian-born British sculptor, Anish Kapoor: “I feel I’m not trying to say something,” he said, “but to let it occur.” Let’s hope the audience will be reflected in that glass surface at various moments too.
Other Desert Cities shows at Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, until April 17.
Image 2:
Melbourne Theatre Company’s Other Desert Cities.
Photo: Jeff Busby
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