Spring and All: new work by Jeff Morris.
Plexiglas is such that it aspires toward perfection: it is made to think it can be so, perfect in form and being, ever and always. And that is essentially its undoing, because that which has the potential to be perfect must be perfect in every way, and so it must endure. Endurance is a form of perfection, or at least a long-distance training exercise for the afterlife. It is as the writer Joe Wenderoth describes the serious Christians, looking toward eternity. “It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” he warns them, or us, or perhaps the clear plastic shields of bus shelters and drive-thru windows. For Plexiglas does nothing so well as endure, and we, taking advantage of that attribute, subject it to elements and chance, and without fail, defeat its aspirations.
In other words, by the time the material comes to the artist Jeff Morris, it has done its time in service to the community, and in return, it has been scratched, cracked, scrawled upon, and generally made to suffer the indignities of everyday use. Morris, in turn, takes it upon himself to disavow the degradation his material has borne. He does not stoop to assignations of mundaneness and preciousness, the recovery of the overlooked or the elevation of the undervalued. He is not interested in heightened awareness. Instead he wants to make an object that is wholly itself. Morris does not erase the meaning of one system — the everyday — to impose another — art — so much as allow the material to yield to it. As a result, the Plexi doesn’t yearn for its lost potential. It is ready to be itself, reborn in a new sum of parts.
The results of Morris’ resurrections are small-scale sculptures of clear, thick slabs accented by thin sheets of colored plastic used for garbage or newspaper bags. He pokes a thin wire covered in beads through a small plane of Plexiglas, and props it in the corner. It is held up by its own weight, but sags awkwardly, like a plant stem uprooted or tired of standing upright. For another, Morris upturns a U-shaped channel onto its end, and stretches three layers of green film across the top to hang down like banners. He alters a clear piece of Plexi — salvaged from a shattered bus shelter after a car accident — simply by bending it into an acute angle. He upturns another scrap to form a jagged bowl with a swarm of frenetic wire tentacles waving out from and around it. Finally, he takes a L-shaped piece, clean and clear, and adds a misshapen piece of yellow plastic film to its base, creating a grotesque shadow spilling from its edges, undermining its order, hinting at some prior incarnation, some violent past, in which the scars are visible but their origins unknown.
Installed in proximity to each other, Morris’ sculptures nevertheless remain discrete, self-contained, as if stubbornly refusing to partake of their environment or allow the viewer to consider anything but their physical attributes. They are not recognizable as objects with identity, but as objects adhering to an internal, self-constructed logic, so that the appropriate question the viewer might ask is not “What is it?” or even “What does it mean?” so much as “What does it owe to itself in order to be real?”
The same inquiry is applicable to the drawings, which are entirely composed of straight lines of varying thickness and pressure, laid down with a ruler. Taken individually, each line keeps going until it stops. Then the next begins. And slowly, the lines become form the way words collect and combine, until both line and shape — words and text — are simultaneously visible, unrepentantly relying upon each other to make sense. The question of why one word should be here on this page is not raised when it is followed by another and combined into the coherence of a sentence. Similarly, Morris’s line are so stringently lines that one apprehends shape and texture and illusions of depth by recognizing how the lines stand together, where they come apart, or where they stop.
The spaces in between the lines are therefore just as important, the interruptions akin to moments in which the drawing is allowed to clarify its shape, its purpose, itself. Both Morris’ drawings and sculptures bear an affinity with the poetry of William Carlos Williams, in which the gaps between words are where the images are realized, and the reader can recognize the distance that has been crossed from one thought to another. For example, in The Locust Tree in Flower (second version), bareness yields to form as both object and image.
Among
of
green
stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again
As with Morris’ sculptures, there is a prior life referred to in the poem’s title, but without reading the first version, one is unaware of what the latter is missing. The reader has been spared the season’s loss, the sweet-scented flowers overlooked, quickly shed, and little mourned, the way spring’s sharp freshness yields so readily to summer’s blast of heat and daze and lulling forgetfulness. Like Williams, Morris seems aware that we do not ache in spring the way we ache in fall, when every day we come closer to life shutting down and closing itself off. Perhaps that is why his greens — which can’t quite shrug off their origins as garbage bags and therefore their association with containment or confinement — are the greens of winter, when things are expected to die. But winter is also the moment to look forward and wait for things to return as they need to. Therefore, if anything, Morris turns us towards a moment of anticipation and perhaps even awareness of what endures.
Patricia Maloney
October 2008
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