Artist Richard Allen Morris Goes Beyond the Neat, Logical

In the narrative unfoldings of art history, the artist is expected to follow an evolutionary course. His route is said to begin with technical training and the imitation of masters, and to culminate in a mature and well-defined style of his own.

Richard Allen Morris, whose work from the last three decades is on view at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, is living proof that an artist’s energies cannot always be contained in such a neat and logical order, and that growth and spirit can subsist easily outside such a framework.

Morris has resisted the typical career path of contemporary artists. Despite having lived in San Diego for more than 30 years, producing work of a broad scope and generally high quality, Morris has had very little exposure here or elsewhere. Thus, this show, titled “A Sense of Place,” feels much like an unearthing, an excavation through the strata of several decades of artistic work and into the artist’s own scrambling, rambling mind.

Uncovered in this dig are layers of meanings, methods and vocabularies, sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping. In Morris’ 1968 “Late Cave Painting,” for instance, repeating images of the cartoon caveman Fred Flintstone hover in a field of painterly brushwork; high art meets low art while making clever reference to the earliest origins of pictorial expression. Morris’ warehouse of a mind shelters a plethora of images, ideas and techniques that the artist snatches from storage for regeneration and revision. The principles of assemblage and collage dominate in Morris’ oeuvre , each work representing a variety of diverse sources.

Morris is a recycler who gives fresh meaning to secondhand materials. As David Antin writes in the exhibition brochure, Morris works with “despised surfaces or neglected ones. Or humble or servile ones. Castaways (selected) for cheering up.”

Many of Morris’ constructions--like Rauschenberg’s combine paintings--make diary references to the artist’s daily life. “Studio Sweeps” of 1962 is a chest-high pillar of junk--old socks, scraps and rags that have been retained and monumentalized. Another work consists of 48 paint tube boxes, loosely painted and aligned in grid fashion on the wall. Morris even recycles his own paintings, tearing the used canvases into strips and wrapping them around wooden planks to form new works.

Morris extracts elements from his personal environment, from popular culture and from earlier art with equal aplomb and self-reflexive humor. The paint tube boxes hanging on the wall are coated on the outside with the substance they are meant to contain on the inside. In the Pop-meets-Abstract-Expressionism scenario of “Wet Paint” (1962), Morris staples an actual, functional paper sign onto the center of the canvas and answers it with a frame of painterly swirls and sloshes.

In his more recent “Dutch Boy” (1986), he overlays a childlike drawing of a boy’s face onto a web of horizontal and vertical lines straight from the work of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Morris’ most recent work here, the 1987 “Broken Grid Paintings,” target the hungry art market itself by demonstrating how, with factory-like efficiency, an artist can make 20 paintings from a single large, smeared and dabbed canvas.

So deeply ensconced are works like these in a dialogue with the art world that many are satisfying only as art world in-jokes. In refreshing contrast, and in testimony to the artist’s versatility, the show also includes works of pure formal elegance. The painted lumber constructions (1968-73), especially, inject a note of restraint and simplicity into the surrounding chaotic energy. Made of long, slender beams painted white with black edges, the constructions set up powerfully simple interactions of line, weight and balance. One floor piece features two stacks of planks fanning out from a central axis like a gently collapsed rib cage.

Morris’ black and white “House Drawings” (1971) possess a similar eloquence and immediacy. The structures pictured within are wonderfully reduced and refined, their walls animate and breathing. The playful, caricature-like spirit evident here is epitomized in Morris’ gun drawings and constructions, which render a psychologically loaded subject benign and non-threatening.

In his drawings, the objects of deadly force look bloated and toy-like. The guns pieced together of wood, cloth, rope, magazine pages and miscellaneous trinkets become objects of imaginative construction rather than mindless destruction.

Sophistication and naivete mingle here as in most of Morris’ work, united by an overriding sense of wit. Like a diary crammed with notations, comments and responses, this show represents a spirited ongoing dialogue and Morris’ abundant energy to pursue it. Laid bare here in multiple manifestations, Morris’ mind proves to be a versatile and fertile place, though one whose products could always stand a bit more editing before entering the public domain.

“A Sense of Place,” organized in collaboration with the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, continues through March 27. A second show of Morris’ work opens April 16 at the La Jolla Museum’s downtown annex.