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One can plunge into Morley's peculiar oeuvre with a painting that presents his dislocations at full stretch: Age of Catastrophe, 1976. It shows an accident that never happened. A liner on the Atlantic run is warping out of port. Its hull is literally "warped," the perspective skewed and twisty. An airliner seems to have crashed on it, an old Pan Am Constellation of the sort that went out of service decades ago. But the scale is all wrong: the plane is too big for the boat, and it looks more like an effigy stuck to the painting. In fact, Morley did paint it from a tin airplane, picked from his vast collection of models and toys. A U-boat, suspended beneath the painted sea on painted sticks, is also done from a toy. As a document of catastrophe, the scene is far from believable, but its curious power as an image comes partly from the sheer blatancy of its fiction. The fact that the plane, the liner and the sub are sso toylike carries one back to the I mock battles of the nursery, to the child's delight in constructing harmless miniature wrecks that dis charge the aggressions of child? hood. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." So the real subject of Morley's painting is not so much the death of people or the destruction of machinery as the general, "ineradicable ground of adult violence in the infant psyche.
The paint on the canvas looks sluggish and frozen, like cake icing. (In the early '60s, Morley did put the pigment on with icing nozzles.) Its dull turbulence parodies the violence implicit in expressionist paint handling. The heavy brush stroke is no longer an index of earnestness; it quotes strong feeling without necessarily endorsing it. Morley's blend of coolness and violence has some of the hypnotic impact of early Warhol. But it is far more complicated and nuanced, and it is free from overtones of chic.
Instead of accepting the glossy impact and impersonality of mass media at face value, Morley rants against them. That is the main difference between him and the Pop artists with whom he was associated in the 1960s. It was not obvious at once. When he first emerged as a painter, it was with images that looked utterly deadpan: paintings of ocean liners, enlarged from postcards and publicity brochures. But their method was peculiarly systematic, a parody of system, in fact. Squaring the postcard image up to canvas size, Morley would work on it patch by patch, sometimes upside down, stippling away so that each bit of water or hull looked abstract to him, as patterns do when they are isolated and magnified. What counted was not so much the liner as the process of painting it, a concretion of gratuitous labor. If Canaletto had been exposed to minimalism and to early Warhol, he might have come up looking like early Morley. In reproduction, of course, the paintings become postcards again. But on canvas they have a disconcerting air; above their anonymous imagery the paint is beginning to assert itself, its texture and weight anxiously at odds with the bland scenes of middle-class pleasure they describe.