Broken homes

In the article 'Broken Homes' Andrew Mackenzie looks at the work 'Valhalla' by artist Cullum Morton, which was exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Mackenzie discusses Valhalla in relation to its visual appearance of ruins and something lost. Describing the work, along with Babylonia and Tomorrows Land as fertile with meaning and 'increasingly non-linear’, suggesting an evolving maturity in Morton’s practice. He also remarks that Morton’s works have grown spatially, discussing what that has done to the way in which the audience is able to digest the work and the new possibilities of working directly with the concepts of interior/exterior, public/private and the 'framing of experience'.

Mackenzie talks of Morton’s Valhalla as an exploration of ‘the battlefield’, he points out however that it is not one of the ‘obvious kind’. Making apparent his caution of falling into the contemporary predisposition to ‘mythologize today’s destruction’ and remarks that any association of this kind is liable to only take away from the work something that is otherwise very poignant. He also suggests that any implication of a historical model associated with ‘terror’ and the ‘climate of fear’ fractures the calamitous continuity of history. Where as he states that Morton’s ancient title ‘Valhalla’ (Hall of the Slain) does not ask for this disruption, instead it subtly asks for a state of conscious recognition.

By steering away from the limitations of an association to terror and destruction he is able to explore the more deeply subtle aspects of the work.

Mackenzie suggest the consideration of Valhalla as ‘the story of a broken home… where the everyday drama of thwarted domesticity plays out’ and its relation, as a subject, to the domains of public/private life.

The house itself (as it’s original) is tied to a particular time in Morton’s childhood, which has since been torn down. So from this came the beginning of a work about the politics of the home and the public/private. Morton engages the audience through the uses of sound design, filmic references, advertising and the like in order to bring together a familiarity of post-modern conditions. The sheer size of Valhalla is also a reference of its own fiction and helps resist the romantic notion of biography. Mackenzie mentions that for Morton public and private life are inextricable from ‘the question of habitation’. You can see this questioning of the gap or erosion of public and private space in Morton’s exaggerated contrast between the ‘cool spotless white’ interior and the decaying walls of the exterior. Mackenzie also bring up Mary Jane Jacob’s ‘The death and life of Great American Cities’ 1961 to further shed light on these notions of the public and the private and the ‘impoverishment of public space’.

Mackenzie pronounces Morton’s Valhalla as an exemplification of both the tendencies of history's continuing relation to decay/destruction, while also referencing contemporary conditions of ownership, development and the internalization and wearing of public/private life.