This is my body pentecostal, five pointed, dismembered, disjunct, re-membered and consumed like imaginary tea because the colors of the occasion are always just two and one is always shining. The diamonds on the harlequin’s outfit, and scattered to be found transformed and wanting-- the imp(eror)’s serious clothes, and onstage everyone’s voices, undulating, carried like perfume, something one just touches to keep aloft.
The harlequin, the figure that wears (shows) the new adopted-family structure. The ur-parents have vacated the upstairs halls, dancing. It’s champagne in thimbles down here, other things sparkling, the perfect(ly) (usable) square is given you to play with: it’s a uniform (with lipstick from childhood.) The teacher’s gaze is now a yellow threadbare trapezoid: vagabond.
We begin in costume. Someone dresses us, then we dress ourselves. “Roast potatoes for” as Gertrude would say. Not a thing, a gesture. Non sequiturs that revivify and allow us to hear this just beginning: “they may be born Walter and become Hub, in such a way they are not like a noun. A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time.” *
The “language” pinned in carefully-spaced waves in the form of smudged and drawn-upon tissues and their accompanying 21st century bric-a-brac is a foreign one, thereby creating what is nearly a purely aesthetic experience. There seems to be no familiar and predetermined way to assimilate this. It’s a broken heart.
Everything we may have thought to have left behind is now found here: the moon exacts the price of non-loss, that pale-green feathery light made for growing stems that bend from the weight of their own beauty. “For the place I really have got to get to is a place I must already be at now.”*
- William Renschler
Matt Morris, 'Paris Well With' at the Aisle Gallery, 424 Findlay Street 3rd Floor, Cincinnati, OH. Through Dec. 20.
Please also visit Dania Elliot's video interview of Matt Morris here.
In Photo: exhibition view courtesy of the artist.
* Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America.
