Sarah Morris’s art is touted for its allusions to and interpretations of the urban environment. With deft mimcry of the grids found in cityscapes, her Midtown series of paintings (1998-99) recall the green-glass-windowed facades of a Gordon Bunshaft building. She followed these up with the series Los Angeles (2005-06), in which her Mondrian-like abstractions were more frantically paced and garishly colored, referencing architectural icons in Los Angeles.
The pieces riff on the chaos and colors of urbanity, but they leave the viewer wondering how they critique it. Pretty and superficial, much of Morris’s work fills the same role in popular culture that a Hollywood starlet or a soulless skyscraper does. But with her latest installation, Robert Towne (named after the famed scriptwriter of Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, and other classics of the 1960s and ’70s), Morris may be finally making her long-vaunted commentary on architecture.
Located on the underside of the Lever House’s atrium ceiling, this 19,744-square-foot installation of brightly colored house paint gives new life to an unused space along Park Avenue’s sea of gray suits and black streets. Here Morris’s Technicolor mural—aptly applied to one of Bunshaft’s most celebrated works—offers an alternative reality to the muted tones of Midtown. Like many of the other pieces funded by the city’s Public Art Fund, such as Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center or Sarah Sze’s Corner Plot near Central Park, Robert Towne greets its viewers unexpectedly. For the dozens who lunch, smoke, and talk in the Lever House’s outdoor space, the painting is mesmerizing, yet inexplicable; pulsing and exciting, but directionless. Named after a director whose films are ruthlessly real, Morris’s installation is likewise in-your-face and confrontational.
At the very least, the piece speaks to the many missed opportunities to enhance public space with art. It continues the dialogue that the Lever House started almost 60 years ago, when the building redefined how architects could merge architectural behemoths with human-scaled courtyards. Robert Towne offers a utopian vision where the grid is replaced by a maze; where swathes of energetic hues replace neutral ones; and where people walk while looking up instead of at their feet.