Artist:
Sarah Morris (born 1967 in Sevenoaks, England; lives and works in New York City, USA).

Materials:
HD digital color video; 35 minutes 48 seconds.

Description:
“The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Curator and architect. Architect and architect. “Points on a Line” directed by artist Sarah Morris, documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism.

“Morris’s film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.”
—”Points on a Line,” Sarah Morris website.

“Points on a Line begins in Connecticut at the Glass House, ends in Illinois at the Farnsworth House, and makes a series of important detours along the way. Mies’s and Johnson’s respective personas and architectural practices intersect in New York—the film’s midpoint—at the Seagram Building, Mies’s whiskey-colored skyscraper where Johnson was enlisted to design the Four Seasons restaurant and bar. Scenes of power lunches and the service industry that keeps business running as usual comingle in Johnson’s interior designs. The images provide a glimpse into how the Four Seasons at the Seagram Building has been used as a prominent site for the cultivation of corporate lifestyles since the years when Johnson was its most frequent visitor. The interpersonal relationship between Mies and Johnson is implied here; their lingering presence is merely suggested as Morris’s camera opts, instead, to fixate on the flow of the building’s contemporary life.”
—Aram Moyashedi, “Looking Glass,” Artforum, October 4, 2010.