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"View Slideshow\n\nTo make her series of impressionistic films exploring modern metropolises from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles to Beijing, Sarah Morris has wheedled her way into some pretty unusual places\u2014including President Clinton\u2019s Cabinet Room and Fermilab\u2019s massive particle accelerator outside Chicago\u2014and has charmed the likes of Brad Pitt and Chinese despots into submission. \u201CIf you make them feel embarrassed about saying no to the idea of art,\u201D Morris says from her studio in Manhattan\u2019s Chelsea neighborhood one chilly morning, \u201Cyou can successfully get into any situation.\u201D\n\nWell, almost. While making her latest film, Chicago, slated to premiere at Capitain Petzel gallery in Berlin next month, she came up against the Queen of All Media. \u201COprah was, I have to say, more difficult to deal with than the Chinese government,\u201D says Morris, who has dark, intelligent eyes and a deep voice. Clearly Winfrey was not compliant. The artist will only hint that she got what she needed.\n\nMorris has forged an international practice encompassing both film and painting. She comes to architecture, her primary subject, less from the aesthetic standpoint one might expect and more from a psychological and political perspective; her work subtly mines architecture\u2019s inextricable links to power\u2014to corporations and governments, not to mention the inevitably enormous egos behind its creation in the first place. She is also curious about what she calls the cinematic qualities of the built world, or \u201Chow we read ourselves moving through it, how we read others moving through it.\u201D Her own phobia of public spaces does not inhibit her fascination with how buildings\u2014and even Vegas-style lighting and other distractions\u2014can lure people in. \u201CYou see that Chase bank uses this now,\u201D she says. \u201CIt looks like a casino as you go into the ATM.\u201D\n\nHer paintings, as well as site-specific installations like one she did at New York City\u2019s Lever House in 2006, are abstract and boldly graphic. After \u201Cbuilding\u201D templates of thickly outlined geometric patterns on her computer, Morris plays with colors, plugging in shades of glossy household paints. \u201CIt\u2019s actually quite Zen, even though I\u2019m not,\u201D she says of her paint-by-numbers method, which is similar to that of her onetime boss Jeff Koons.\n\nSometimes Morris\u2019s canvases are inspired by her films\u2014the John Hancock building, featured in Chicago, is a jumping-off point for new work\u2014and sometimes not, as with her recent paintings riffing on the brilliantly functional paper clip. \u201CI like choosing a form that\u2019s so everyday, that\u2019s had such a role in bureaucracy,\u201D she says. \u201CIt seems very antiquated, but it\u2019s still such a beautiful thing. Before the paper clip [people] used to use pins, but that, of course, became very bloody.\u201D\n\nMorris discovered this factoid during the course of her typically copious research. In preparation for Points on a Line, her 2010 film on the intertwined careers of architects Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Morris delved into the making of Mies\u2019s Farnsworth House and Johnson\u2019s Glass House. She welcomed the chance to study Mies, the modernist master whose decision in 1938 to immigrate to the U.S. from Nazi Germany, she says, \u201Caffected the image and the physical reality of America, of how our country looks, how corporations are built, what public space looks like.\u201D Johnson and Mies\u2019s professional relationship\u2014which Morris compares with that of curator and artist, or student and mentor\u2014also provided rich fodder.\n\nLike most of her films, Points on a Line is dialogue-free and plays out in a sequence of exquisitely framed, nearly still images and abbreviated action: the wall-to-wall curtains being drawn at Farnsworth; aging businessmen lunching at Manhattan\u2019s Four Seasons restaurant, which is a Johnson interior in a Mies building. (Artist Liam Gillick, Morris\u2019s husband, composed the music in segments, which she then arranged into a soundtrack, as is their routine.) While clearly enamored of Mies, Morris is ambivalent about Johnson. \u201CIt was interesting to me how many people don\u2019t view him as a serious architect,\u201D she says. \u201CHe is in some ways a more interesting character than Mies. More compromised, less talented, but maybe more interesting.\u201D\n\nCombing the mainstream for material may be Morris\u2019s forte, but she has no interest in joining it. She has turned down Hollywood offers: \u201CThe little I understand about it slightly scares me.\u201D And horror films aren\u2019t her thing.\n\nClick here to see an extended slide show of Sarah Morris\u2019s work."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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