Empty Spaces and Filled Meanings: Christoph Morlinghaus @ Roebling Hall – By Denise McMorrow

Seeping through the surfaces of Christoph Morlinghaus’ impeccably crafted photographs is a profound and infectious irony that reveals, rather than creates, the uncanny presence of mortal consciousness inherent in the fissures of our built environment.

Empty Spaces and Filled Meanings: Christoph Morlinghaus @ Roebling Hall

By Denise McMorrow

 

 

 

 

 

Seeping through the surfaces of Christoph Morlinghaus’ impeccably crafted photographs is a profound and infectious irony that reveals, rather than creates, the uncanny presence of mortal consciousness inherent in the fissures of our built environment. The eleven large C-Prints that comprise Morlinghaus’ first New York show at Roebling Hall couple a calculated formalism with a stunning monumentality often characteristic of the new school of German and American photography. At its best though, Morlinghaus’ work transcends what has become the overuse of large format photography to translate impressively massive industrial, man-made, or in some way unnatural sites into the altogether facile, impressively massive images of the same.

Unlike the vast but hidden excesses of places like Edward Burtinsky’s quarries or landfills, Morlinghaus’ chosen locales are places we inhabit. They are known and recognizable as belonging within the boundaries of everyday contemporary urban experience: the IG Farben Building in Frankfurt, now used as a University cafeteria, the Duomo in Florence, or Sunset Boulevard in LA. Yet, many of Morlinghaus’ subjects have an eerie heterotopic feel deriving as much in spirit from the meticulously exact descriptions of Die Neue Sachlinchkeit as from Bauhaus formalism. Using protracted exposures and a large format, every minute surface detail asserts a sharpened resolve, resulting in a grand visual gestalt that is quite different from one’s lived experience of space. This hyper-real level of detail, and the fact that all of Morlinghaus’ photographs are unpopulated by humans (save the one entitled Erica, LA), initially call into question the veracity of the images. While there has been no digital removal of human beings, it is as if humans have vanished and left behind only the disembodied shells of our built environment, the strange decaying remnants of our aspirations. The only figure in the show is a solitary man in dark sunglasses who casts an enigmatic smile at the viewer from where he sits on a balcony behind the huge steel grid fa�ade on the Erica Courtney (apartment?) building. He is such an oddity within the world Morlinghaus seems drawn to capture that he assumes a kind of ghost-like, highly uncanny quality – like one of David Lynch’s or Saramago’s familiar strangers.

The most interesting and arresting images are of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK, which, since 2001, has been closed and under threat of demolition by the port authority. Envisioned in the early 60s as ultra-futuristic, the orphaned terminal now looks utterly theatrical, dated, and, in the case of one of the photographs of the airport bar entitled TWA (cocktails) a bit like the purple interior of Austin Power’s Jumbo Jet. Yet, as in TWA (brown hall), Morlinghaus’ patient and considered composition emphasizes the astonishing elegance of the building’s curving forms. Martha Rosler’s photographs of airport spaces come to mind, but Morlinghaus’ images resist a critical, analytical, or even timeless interpretation of the space. The perfectly centered iconic clock suspended from the ceiling reads 8:10—exactly the time when the picture was taken. The possible symbolism of the glowing, highly connotative terminal hallway with its plunging vanishing point gives way to the minutely described stains on the carpet, the assertion of a particular temporal reality. Built in the wake of Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp, TWA was considered one of the first examples of symbolic, Post-Modern architecture in America, embodying a multiplicity of suggested rather than explicit meanings in its overriding aviary metaphor.

TWA’s pivotal metaphorical sophistication is thrown into relief by Morlinghaus’ image of Sunset Boulevard uncharacteristically and eerily devoid of people on an early morning just after rain. The preponderance of signs working on what is now the mainstream currency of highly subconscious, associative semiotics in fact makes TWA look extremely literal.

The pristine images of the Volkswagen Plant and the TV Studio are more expected, forgettable equations of cold subject matter with the precision of the medium. Whether or not it is Morlinghaus’ intention to comment on time and its implications in terms of our mortality, his work is most interesting when decay is present in its extreme but unexaggerated detail. It is when Morlinghaus directs his formal eye, which benefits from lacking nostalgic sentimentalism, narrative overtures, and technical manipulation, toward the variously eroding edifices of cultural optimism that he succeeds in allowing the contingency of time and the strange layers that comprise the familiar to become part of the content. Ultimately, Morlinghaus’ intuition asks the inquisitive viewer why it is we build (and dwell) in the first place.