Highlights from The Morris Kitsch Archive

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present Ornament and Crime, an exhibition organized by Lauren F. Adams comprised of artworks by Stephanie Syjuco, David Mabb, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Susanne Slavick. The exhibition contends with the Adolf Loos essay from 1913 of the same name—a provocative and supremacist philosophy of how ornament and decoration impairs modern society, not only through wasted labor but also by embodying that which is degenerate or unsophisticated. Unlike Loos, the artists included in this exhibition engage ornament not as mere style or form, but as a platform to debate the political and social concerns of our time.

Together, the works in this exhibition are actively defying what Loos described as the greatness of the modern age, “freedom from ornament.” Instead, these works seek to illuminate the weight of history, resuscitating or borrowing archival patterns in an effort to elucidate contemporary notions about political order, social hierarchies, and constructed authenticity. Existing between homage and critique, the artworks in the exhibition utilize ornament as a sort of trojan horse — acting as subversive cover to reveal disruptive or terrible truths.

David Mabb presents Highlights from the Morris Kitsch Archive, a selection from a collection that contains over 500 images, largely drawn from the Internet, of commercial objects decorated with 19th century William Morris patterns. Isolating aesthetic history as a commodity, Mabb’s archive clarifies the tension between Morris’ utopian ideals of fine craft and pre-industrial labor roles and capitalism’s post-industrial consumption endgame. In Mabb’s words, the trace of Morris in the 21st century “has acted as a form of iconoclasm, undermining the integrity of Morris’s design and production, obscuring their utopian and therefore critical potential; it leaves no evidence of Morris’s politics, whilst appearing to celebrate him.”