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| Installation view, courtesy of the artist. |
These fragile objects have their own history where they’re found, cared for, broken, lost and found again. if they didn’t clutter your childhood home, they do now. All that’s left to imagine is the tiffany flatware cut from foam core. This capacity to create symbol, incite dream is stunning.
Like Beckett’s characters’ musings, perhaps only a broken-off suggestion can be tied to a truth and therefore moral in the artistic sense that mastery precedes morality and even grace, present by its lack, will forego pity.
In fact, the glowing playing field is so level here, hierarchically nothing, that this frozen dance becomes a just-so performance. These cardboard ballerinas showed up like this, they wanted to, and like good dancers, they place themselves at the risk of falling. They’re already imperfect, broken.
This show is a version, the narrative abstract enough to show just the tilt of the pieces’ shoulders with everything angled in relation to one another, all speaking to one another. This monochrome low-relief mumbling is in the service of greater expressiveness. This sequined torso is holding its’ breath.
- William Renschler
Matt Morris. Recipes During Wartime at the U-turn Art Space, Brighton district (Central Ave. between Kindel and Freeman), Cincinnati, OH. Gallery hours Saturday 12-4 and by appointment. Through Feb. 27, 2010.
[William Renschler also wrote a belated perspective of Matt Morris' show at Renschler's Aisle Gallery location. We offer it here as a link to this piece for those who especially enjoy Renschler's writings.]
