Sleep, eat and go with François Morelli
Multidisciplinary artist strips everyday actions to their essence
This image, courtesy of François Morelli, is part of a tour he did with the sculpture on his back.
When François Morelli tied two pieces of canvas around his feet and traversed the city of Montreal by foot, bus and metro in 1974, he knew it was art. Morelli was then a student at Concordia University.
“The mechanical action of the body was central to performance/body live art” in the art world at that time, explained the Studio Arts professor. He presented works spanning 30 years of his career at a lecture at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) on Jan.18.
Morelli has presented in solo exhibits, collective exhibits and as performance pieces in such cities as Bogotá, Palermo and Lethbridge, Alberta. His materials of choice have included photographs, stamp and stencil works, soup, mattress sculptures and, more often than not, the accompanying gestures and performances.
“The gesture is linked to the process,” he explained, “and to a certain extent, to the ritual.” The Montreal native graduated with a BFA at Concordia in 1975, and then completed a MFA at Rutgers University in 1983. He worked as a professor in New York City until 1991. Then he returned to Quebec, first teaching at Université du Québec à Trois Rivières until 1996 and then at Concordia.
The lecture, entitled “Dormir, Manger, Marcher,” was part of the Defiant Imagination lecture series presented by Concordia, the MMFA and the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Arts. “I chose three essential gestures from daily life,” explained the artist, “Eating, sleeping, and walking.” The gestures may be simple, but for Morelli, their symbolism has always been complex and engaged.
In 1983 he staged a narrative performance, Minamata à Alma, which illustrated the effects of mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan. The performance took place in Alma, QC where Alcan had dumped mercury into the local water system for years and “there was more mercury in the fish than in a thermometer.”
As the Iraq war began in 2003, Morelli presented Blood Bath, Soup Bath in a former American can factory as part of the Espaces Emergents event. “I filled up the bath with tomato sauce and basil and bathed,” Morelli explained.
The gesture was a war protest, and an opportunity to juxtapose commercial enterprise against family enterprise. His wife and son cooked and canned the soup for audience members, who could take the cans home and give donations to a soup kitchen in exchange.
Audience participation has often been part of Morelli’s performances. In 2005 he put up posters in several French towns advertising an exchange of his art for a meal. He participated in 22 such exchanges, making stencil and stamp murals in homes across France as part of the Home Wall Drawing project.
“The project was wonderful, because it was accessible to anyone” Morelli explained. He will present a new exhibit featuring marionettes on the theme of ventriloquism later this year at La Biennale du Havre in Le Havre, France.