A piece written after attending Matt Morris’ opening at U-turn

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.]

Belated remarks, perhaps concerning Matt Morris’ opening

 [editor's note: it is generally not appropriate to have a gallerist review their own shows.  We make an exception to this belated posting, since it occurs after the show and also our delight in Renschler's cryptic and enlightening experience of a body of work.  This has been linked retroactively in February to Renschler's review of Morris' show at the Uturn Art Space.]
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.              

“Getting nowhere”, some thoughts upon seeing Michael Wilson’s photographs at Iris Bookstore

Editor's note: We enjoy Bill Renschler's cryptic approach to criticism and invite you to explore it also as an example of a unique approach to responding to art.

—no thing: situations and flattened pictorial space arising from the triangle like in a Japanese print. Because the artist is totally present in the image, the image contains
him. To define the lyric: you had to be there, that’s all, oh and you couldn’t have any ideas and one must rehearse (prepare for the death (of the idea)) one's craft beforehand.

—harlequin-wise non-perspective space is divided, triangulated and both balanced and spilling: the dark and light found to be interpenetrating thereby becoming a vehicle, a still from a flattened parade, a frieze this frozen wheel now moves us. The narration has been compressed: we are now nowhere. We moved that far.

—through participating in the tension set up at the poles, the opposites (some are actual poles, others the arms of a triangle, some are pairs, things repeated) we’re allowed a secular glimpse of the eternal because again, we’re getting nowhere.

—from the delicate electricity of the bitter-sweet to the standoffish tension of a white part and a black part, just there, balanced and alive, we may see how the world snaps together. These images are relatively small, so their tonal-range springs are wound tight. The images were a gift given to the restless, the solitarily vigilant, the well-prepared.

—in beauty: guilelessness and loss of innocence. Having been moved, having stumbled upon an “image” (a “place” where we’re involved in the reconciliation of the polar world), we can see our limits, we’re free to do that. The pairings within the image are absurd and it’s a brave and humorous act that places them before us: the same one that allows us to see them in ourselves.
- William Renschler

Michael Wilson, 'Photographs From and For...Heads Bowed Eyes Closed, No One Looking Around' at the Iris Book Cafe, 1331 Main St. at Woodward, Cincinnati, OH 45202. Phone: 513.381.2665. Through August 7, 2009.
Photo: Wilson, Michael. Untitled, Newport, KY, 1984.