Finding the Fun in Failure: Callum Morton’s Deconstruction of Construction
Feather Treloar
Installation view of nightshifts, Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2023. Featuring Callum Morton, Farnshaven, Illinois 2001, International Style 1999 and Brent Harris, Swamp 4 & 7 2000. Michael Buxton Collection, the University of Melbourne Art Collection. Courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery. Photography by Christian Capurro.
We pan down to the illustrious city of Goldglow, and the house of one of our player characters. My character, Thaelia—the mystical elven warrior woman equivalent to Spock from Star Trek—is demonstrating her telekinetic control over her new spear, in order to instil confidence in her party members. My Dungeon Master tells me to roll the 20-sided die to see if I succeed. I roll, and…
I have rolled the lowest result. The dreaded natural 1.
My spear crashes into the kettle of our adventuring party’s host and Paladin, Captain Dorian Davies, who is forced to watch in horror as the handle of the kettle—a gift from his wife—flies across the room.
When faced with a natural 1, D&D players are given a challenge: how will I react? It can be embarrassing. Hilarity ensues. Slapstick Is inevitable. But D&D is still a game, and we are playing to have fun. So how do we have fun in these moments? how do we find the fun in failure?
Callum Morton is a Canadian artist whose work helps us answer this question, as he frames his installations primarily around the failures of architecture. Two such pieces include a model and a digital print, both of which are inspired by the notorious modernist fiasco that is the Edith Farnsworth house. Commissioned by Dr Edith Farnsworth, the house was intended by its namesake to be a weekend retreat from the pressures of her working city life as a scientist. The first house to be designed primarily out of glass, Farnsworth wanted to be as closely connected to nature as possible, to have her glass house be a site for healing, spirituality and privacy.
It is this intention that Callum Morton depicts in his model of the Farnsworth house, which he simply titles International Style. Named after the modernist style of architecture behind the original house, Morton assembles his work through white automotive paint, giving the model an aesthetic that is at once metallic and angelic, highlighting both the purity and artificiality of something so simply white. However, in contrast to the house itself, Morton does not use glass in his piece. Instead, he represents the house’s walls with white strips, leaving gaps just small enough for me to want to try and peek inside, to no success. Given the model’s size, colour, and central position in the Buxton Contemporary gallery room in which it is installed, it is difficult not to see the model as important; majestic. The other pieces surrounding it involve black-and-white film, or the natural browns and beiges of nature. They depict art that is beautiful but muted; dulled by its depiction of the everyday. They are not as purified, as opulent, as the model standing tall in the middle of the room, brimming with an international style.
Given the beauty of this piece, you might be wondering what about it depicts failure. Indeed, it is not International Style on its own that depicts failure, but rather its relationship to Morton’s second artwork inspired by the Farnsworth house. Together, they tell the glass house’s full story, as the second artwork transforms International Style …
...into a 7-Eleven.
In Buxton Contemporary’s didactic panel, it explains that Edith Farnsworth had commissioned the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to make her glass house concept a reality. However, in the pursuit of ‘aesthetic perfection’, Farnsworth neglected the inclusion of ‘basic functional necessities for living’, such as ventilation, storage, or any form of privacy. Realising she had essentially commissioned a glorified hot glass box—architectural flaws Rohe didn’t bring to her attention—the two engaged in legal disputes that resulted in them never speaking again. It is this scandalous context that captured Morton’s attention.
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery’s ‘About’ page for Callum Morton describes his exploration of the built environment as ‘drawing on notions of history, absence, drama and humour’. His work’s comedy often has an edge to it, such as his installation Hotel: a sculpture big enough to look like a genuine hotel in the distance, but upon closer inspection lacks any entrance or windows on the first floor. Numerous reports have come in from people mistaking the installation for a real hotel, and attempting to call in reservations.
The Farnsworth house dispute would therefore be a natural target for a creative process like Morton’s. He, through his work, has appointed himself as a sort of Grim Reaper, who ferries only the souls of architectural experiments into the afterlife. Morton, mort, mortality—it’s even in the man’s name! The digital print he constructs, turning his model of the Farnsworth house into a 7-Eleven, is the result. It is called Farnshaven, Illinois.
The aesthetic of the two pieces are so vastly different, you could be forgiven for believing they were made by different artists. Farnshaven, Illinois depicts the model’s visage painted over in retina-grabbing shades of red, yellow and dark green, before layering this new model on the backdrop of a dark, suburban, forest road. With the final touch of the convenience store’s titular logo, standing proud atop a neighbouring street sign, the transformation is complete.
My initial response to this print is humour. Many of the pieces within the Nightshifts exhibition of Buxton Contemporary tend to be more abstract or conceptual in nature, so to see something so specifically definable and consuming as a brand in an otherwise relaxed space was an amusing contrast. Galleries are normally devoid of the attention-seeking strategic designs of advertisements. It’s even in the works’ names: International Style is vague but commands a playful respect, monumental in its internationalism and beautifully fun in its style. It evokes, draws out, these grander concepts. Farnshaven, Illinois, on the other hand, is blunt in the nature of the proper nouns that comprise it. I find the way in which Farnsworth’s name has been warped in the print’s title particularly interesting. The worth has been shaven, before the remains have been thoughtlessly installed next to some forest in a random American state. There is no room for interpretation, for it to be anything else other than what it is: a place that feels out of place. Where elements of International Style felt sacred, Farnshaven, Illinois feels blasphemous. Commercialism in a gallery. A place out of place. A 7-Eleven in the woods.
Connecting to nature is a very human desire, and coexisting inside it can be seen as admirable. However, to try to insert a city lifestyle into such untapped wildlife would require care, an intricate understanding of both the urban and the sylvan. Farnsworth and Rohe underestimated their understanding of these worlds—as well as their mutual understanding of each other—while they worked on the glass house together. As I researched this background, I found myself disturbed by the sheer amount of articles, ‘About’ pages, and other resources that speculated whether Farnsworth and Rohe’s dynamic turned so bitter because they could have been romantically involved. Perhaps incensed by the drama of the situation, journalists flocked to theorising about a romantic falling-out (entirely unsubstantiated) as if they were piranhas swarming a bleeding target. I am reminded of International Style’s panes that prevented me from looking inside: the panels prevent an artist’s curiosity, my desire to interpret, theorise, and understand. I wonder if Morton is alluding to a darker side of the art world: instead of curiosity, is he using these panes to call out an invasion of privacy? The inherent voyeurism that comes with peering behind the veil of a famous creation?
There is another side to these works: the almost cruel moulding of an idea that is quite objectively the first of its kind, the first glass house, into something that has been so endlessly built and rebuilt for the sake of convenience as a 7-Eleven branch. To twist a passion project, a building that International Style demonstrates inspires art, into a type of architecture designed to be entered and left without a second thought. A natural 1 in a game of Dungeons and Dragons is so incidental, so impersonal. But Farnsworth’s commission was a vision, in part prompted by her entire career. How easy can it be to find fun in your own failure if that failure is all you’re known for?
It makes me think of my own work: how would I feel if I poured my heart and soul into a manuscript, and it turned out that not only was it poorly received, not only was it made fun of, but another famous artist had turned it into a 7-Eleven via parody? Would I be able to laugh at my failure then, as its convenience-store-colour-scheme stared back at me and made me the subject of its own analysis? I would like to think yes (as I type this I am being confronted by the all-consuming urge to find one of my abandoned manuscripts and edit it to make it all about 7-Eleven), but I won’t know until I get a large enough audience for someone to try. Even if it may be cruel, such is the work of a Grim Reaper like Morton, no matter how extremely specific the souls they ferry. Perhaps buildings aren’t the only kind of constructs Morton deconstructs, but also the conceptual, human constructions of curiosities, expectations and dreams.
This all brings us back to my central question that Morton’s works prompted me to ask: how do we find fun in failure? How do we derive entertainment from the misfortune of others? Do we revel in the schadenfreude of it all? When actually reading the history of Edith Farnsworth without the comedic release-of-tension of Morton’s 7-Eleven print, the events seem rather sad, deserving of sympathy. The fact that Farnsworth’s house and its disaster saddled her with the very invasions of privacy, the speculations of her internal life, that she was hoping to avoid reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. A tragedy that we have become complicit in.
However, the far greater overarching feeling throughout all of these questions is that I have enjoyed learning about the context behind these pieces, and how it has made me find fun in the fable of Farnsworth’s failure. I enjoy the questions it prompts for me, despite their confronting nature. It reminds me of the natural 1s of a Dungeons and Dragons game. How much the plot gets derailed but can still be taken as an opportunity to immortalise an entertaining tale, to explore a theme, and how natural 1s allow players like me to explore our characters’ flaws.
In my case, I answered my natural 1 with the explanation that Thaelia meant to destroy the kettle with her spear, taking off only the handle to demonstrate her precision. Given her Spock-ness, she simply didn’t register that poor Dorian’s property could have memories and emotional value attached to them, simply blinking at everyone’s shocked expressions. I enjoyed myself by turning this misfortune into an opportunity to develop my character further.
Perhaps we find the fun in failure by thinking of failures as stories. They are less Farnsworth houses, or failed life goals, and more common, human and impersonal as a natural 1, or a 7-Eleven. Shakespeare wrote tragedies as well as histories and comedies.
Failing can be embarrassing, as shown by Farnshaven, Illinois, but the intentions behind them can still be worth depicting as beautiful, represented by International Style. The story can be at once humorous and tragic. Good and bad. We may think of our own failures as something just as worthy of an artist’s muse as success.
For Morton makes art out of both.