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The surfaces of Keith Morrison\u2019s paintings give unto a big, broad world of teaming events. That world is both outside and in \u2013 memory and observed happenstance, symbol and material fact, self and not-self. The breadth is related to Morrison\u2019s own cultural bearings, accumulated by him \u2013 some willingly, some not \u2013 from near and far. Morrison hails from Jamaica and has lived since 1959 in American cities \u2013 Chicago, Nashville, Washington, and lately, San Francisco. Not least of all, Morrison carried with him a composite, and purposely selective, painting culture that in itself symbolizes his overall, piquant sense of identity as mixture. In the paintings all such discontinuous matters are ordered by the way of syntactic views that permit abrupt shifts in space and scale. They show imaginary land \u2013 or cityscapes \u2013 and occasionally, still-life arrangements \u2013 within which each thing sensibly, if uneasily, find a place I relation to others.<\/p>\n
Morrison began as a painter of reductivist abstraction. He looked for ways to, as he has said, \u201ccondense messages into pure shapes\u201d Clear, flat shapes, the lingua franca of the 1960\u2019s, he soon realized, couldn\u2019t carry the density of messages he was after, so he proceeded to flesh it out. How far has Morrison come\u00a0 from the containment of minimalism may be signaled by the simple fact that all the works in\u00a0 the present show are oil paintings, and whatever else may go into them, Morrison handles oil paint ecstatically. The ecstasy is contagious: in sheer body heat, the \u201cwhatever else\u201d \u2013 even the most outrageous satire or cautionary tale \u2013 is tricked out like a bacchanal.<\/p>\n
Ecstasy thrives at the rim of chaos. Or, better, reverse those terms: a chaos bred of cultural confusion has become so familiar that Morrison\u2019s sensibility can dance within it, dervish fashion. All that exists here is on dangerous, or anyway shaky, ground. Posed along an incline plane, shapes \u2013 a regular repertory company of slave dolls, Nigerian ibeji figures, and assorted land and sea animals \u2013 register that any second the floor might slip away from under them. There is in fact, very little \u201cfloor\u201d as such: most of Morrison\u2019s feverish tableaux are set on, or include, bodies of water or else the juices in which all manner of stuff gets stirred, provisionally held in place by the universal pot or skillet. Where solid footing does occur it is likely to be that of an alleyway or, in the audacious zap or Red Sea<\/em>, boundless sand. (Around the stewpots, of course, stretched only miles of burning coals).<\/p>\n It is always either high noon or nighttime in Morrison\u2019s places; shadows, when they are cast, tend to lie flat and squat below. This wide-open lighting system in the pictures is what aligns their narratives with those of the so-called \u201cmagic realism: of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other contemporary Central American writers: it proclaims supranatural occurrence as the norm within persuasive fictive space. Practically, however, the pictures\u2019 light owes its existence and continuity to the choices and moves of an expert colorist. (Watch how, in the overall glare of CyberCity<\/em>, Morrison\u2019s reverberant secondaries \u2013 orange, green, and violet \u2013 make with edgy, optical pops and clicks). A spangled snake will wind across a color area \u2013 hideous and enchanting in its languor. A parrot presides at the center of the disjunct creation, a self-appointed cosmic orator. If, as Morrison says, actual human figures would be \u201ctoo literal\u201d here, the dolls and figures are so invested with secrets they permit no ordinary social contact. Like the places they inhabit, they are plainly psychic emanations \u2013 to be approached warily.<\/p>\n Bill Berkson ____<\/p>\n About the author (from Wikipedia<\/em>)<\/strong><\/p>\n William Craig Berkson<\/strong>\u00a0(August 30, 1939 \u2013 June 16, 2016) was an American poet, critic, and teacher who was active in the art and literary worlds from his early twenties on. In the 1960\u2019s\u00a0 Berkson was an editorial associate at\u00a0ARTnews<\/a>, guest editor at the\u00a0Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, an associate producer of a program on art for\u00a0public television<\/a>, and taught literature and writing workshops at the New School for Social Research and\u00a0Yale University<\/a>. After moving to\u00a0the San Francisco Bay Area\u00a0in 1970, Berkson began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and magazines under the Big Sky imprint and taught regularly in the California Poets in the Schools program.<\/p>\n Berkson is the author of some twenty collections and pamphlets of poetry\u2014including most recently\u00a0Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Expect Delays<\/em>, both from Coffee House Press. His poems have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies and have been translated into French, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Italian, German and Spanish.\u00a0Les Parties du Corps<\/em>, a selection of his poetry translated into French, appeared from Joca Seria, Nantes, in 2011. Other recent books are\u00a0)What\u2019s Your Idea of a Good Time?<\/em>:\u00a0Letters & Interviews 1977-1985<\/em>\u00a0with Bernadette Mayer;BILL\u00a0with drawings by Colter Jacobsen;\u00a0<\/em>Ted Berrigan\u00a0with George Schneeman;\u00a0<\/em>Not an Exit\u00a0with L\u00e9onie Guyer and\u00a0<\/em>Repeat After Me\u00a0with John Zurier.<\/em><\/p>\n Beside the aforementioned collaborations, he executed extensive projects with visual artists\u00a0Philip Guston<\/a>,\u00a0Alex Katz<\/a>,\u00a0Joe Brainard<\/a>, Lynn O\u2019Hare and\u00a0Greg Irons<\/a>, as well as with the poets\u00a0Frank O\u2019Hara<\/a>,\u00a0Larry Fagin<\/a>,\u00a0Ron Padgett<\/a>,\u00a0Anne Waldman<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Bernadette Mayer<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the mid-1980s, Berkson resumed writing art criticism on a regular basis, contributing monthly reviews and articles to\u00a0Artforum<\/a><\/em>\u00a0from 1985 to 1991; he became a corresponding editor for\u00a0Art in America<\/a>\u00a0in 1988 and contributing editor for artcritical.com and has also written frequently for such magazines as Aperture,\u00a0Modern Painters<\/a>,\u00a0Art on Paper<\/a>\u00a0and others. In 1984, he began teaching art history and literature and organizing the public lectures program at the\u00a0San Francisco Art Institute<\/a>, where he also served as interim dean in 1990 and Director of Letters and Science from 1993 to 1998. He retired from SFAI in 2008 and later held the position of Professor Emeritus. During the same period, he was also on the visiting faculty of Naropa Institute,\u00a0California College of Arts and Crafts<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mills College<\/a>. Berkson continued until the end of his life to lecture widely in colleges and universities. He published three collections of art criticism, to date, the last being\u00a0For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More<\/em>.<\/p>\n As a sometime\u00a0curator<\/a>, he organized or co-curated such exhibitions as\u00a0Ronald Bladen<\/a>: Early and Late (SFMoMA), Albert York (Mills College<\/a>), Why Painting I & II (Susan Cummins Gallery), Homage to George Herriman (Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery), Facing Eden: 100 years of Northern California Landscape Art (M.H. de Young Museum), George Schneeman (CUE Foundation), Gordon Cook: Out There (Nelson Gallery,\u00a0University of California, Davis<\/a>), George Schneeman in Italy (Instituto di Cultura Italiano, San Francisco), and, with Ron Padgett, A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George Schneeman (Poets House, New York).<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dancing with Chaos: Art of Keith Morrison The surfaces of Keith Morrison\u2019s paintings give unto a big, broad world of teaming events. That world is both outside and in \u2013 memory and observed happenstance, symbol and material fact, self and not-self. The breadth is related to Morrison\u2019s own cultural bearings, accumulated by him \u2013 some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":28976,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"\n Dancing with Chaos: Art of Keith Morrison The surfaces of Keith Morrison\u2019s paintings give unto a big,\nbroad world of teaming events. That world is both outside and in \u2013 memory and\nobserved happenstance, symbol and material fact, self and not-self. The breadth\nis related to Morrison\u2019s own cultural bearings, accumulated by him \u2013 some\nwillingly, some not \u2013 from near and far. Morrison hails from Jamaica and has\nlived since 1959 in American cities \u2013 Chicago, Nashville, Washington, and\nlately, San Francisco. Not least of all, Morrison carried with him a composite,\nand purposely selective, painting culture that in itself symbolizes his\noverall, piquant sense of identity as mixture. In the paintings all such\ndiscontinuous matters are ordered by the way of syntactic views that permit\nabrupt shifts in space and scale. They show imaginary land \u2013 or cityscapes \u2013\nand occasionally, still-life arrangements \u2013 within which each thing sensibly,\nif uneasily, find a place I relation to others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Morrison began as a painter of reductivist abstraction. He\nlooked for ways to, as he has said, \u201ccondense messages into pure shapes\u201d Clear,\nflat shapes, the lingua franca of the 1960\u2019s, he soon realized, couldn\u2019t carry\nthe density of messages he was after, so he proceeded to flesh it out. How far\nhas Morrison come from the containment\nof minimalism may be signaled by the simple fact that all the works in the present show are oil paintings, and\nwhatever else may go into them, Morrison \nhandles oil paint ecstatically. The ecstasy is contagious: in sheer body\nheat, the \u201cwhatever else\u201d \u2013 even the most outrageous satire or cautionary tale\n\u2013 is tricked out like a bacchanal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecstasy thrives at the rim of chaos. Or, better, reverse\nthose terms: a chaos bred of cultural confusion has become so familiar that\nMorrison\u2019s sensibility can dance within it, dervish fashion. All that exists\nhere is on dangerous, or anyway shaky, ground. Posed along an incline plane,\nshapes \u2013 a regular repertory company of slave dolls, Nigerian ibeji figures,\nand assorted land and sea animals \u2013 register that any second the floor might\nslip away from under them. There is in fact, very little \u201cfloor\u201d as such: most\nof Morrison\u2019s feverish tableaux are set on, or include, bodies of water or else\nthe juices in which all manner of stuff gets stirred, provisionally held in place\nby the universal pot or skillet. Where solid footing does occur it is likely to\nbe that of an alleyway or, in the audacious zap or Red Sea<\/em>, boundless sand. (Around the stewpots, of course, stretched\nonly miles of burning coals).<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is always either high noon or nighttime in Morrison\u2019s\nplaces; shadows, when they are cast, tend to lie flat and squat below. This\nwide-open lighting system in the pictures is what aligns their narratives with\nthose of the so-called \u201cmagic realism: of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other\ncontemporary Central American writers: it proclaims supranatural occurrence as\nthe norm within persuasive fictive space. Practically, however, the pictures\u2019\nlight owes its existence and continuity to the choices and moves of an expert\ncolorist. (Watch how, in the overall glare of CyberCity<\/em>, Morrison\u2019s reverberant secondaries \u2013 orange, green, and\nviolet \u2013 make with edgy, optical pops and clicks). A spangled snake will wind\nacross a color area \u2013 hideous and enchanting in its languor. A parrot presides\nat the center of the disjunct creation, a self-appointed cosmic orator. If, as\nMorrison says, actual human figures would be \u201ctoo literal\u201d here, the dolls and\nfigures are so invested with secrets they permit no ordinary social contact.\nLike the places they inhabit, they are plainly psychic emanations \u2013 to be\napproached warily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bill Berkson About the author\n(from Wikipedia<\/em>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n William Craig Berkson<\/strong> (August 30, 1939 \u2013 June 16, 2016) was an American poet,\ncritic, and teacher who was active in the art and literary worlds from his\nearly twenties on. In the 1960\u2019s Berkson\nwas an editorial associate at ARTnews<\/a>, guest editor at the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, an associate producer of a program on art for public\ntelevision<\/a>, and taught literature and writing\nworkshops at the New School for Social Research and Yale University<\/a>. After\nmoving to the San Francisco Bay Area in\n1970, Berkson began editing and publishing a series of poetry books and\nmagazines under the Big Sky imprint and taught regularly in the California\nPoets in the Schools program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Berkson\nis the author of some twenty collections and pamphlets of poetry\u2014including most\nrecently Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems<\/em> and Expect\nDelays<\/em>, both from Coffee House Press. His poems have also appeared in many\nmagazines and anthologies and have been translated into French, Russian,\nHungarian, Dutch, Czechoslovakian, Romanian, Italian, German and Spanish. Les\nParties du Corps<\/em>, a selection of his poetry translated into French,\nappeared from Joca Seria, Nantes, in 2011. Other recent books are )What\u2019s\nYour Idea of a Good Time?<\/em>: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985<\/em> with\nBernadette Mayer;BILL with drawings by Colter Jacobsen; <\/em>Ted\nBerrigan with George Schneeman; <\/em>Not an Exit with\nL\u00e9onie Guyer and <\/em>Repeat After Me with John Zurier.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Beside\nthe aforementioned collaborations, he executed extensive projects with visual\nartists Philip\nGuston<\/a>, Alex Katz<\/a>, Joe Brainard<\/a>, Lynn O\u2019Hare and Greg Irons<\/a>, as well as with the\npoets Frank\nO\u2019Hara<\/a>, Larry Fagin<\/a>, Ron Padgett<\/a>, Anne Waldman<\/a> and Bernadette Mayer<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\nthe mid-1980s, Berkson resumed writing art criticism on a regular basis, contributing\nmonthly reviews and articles to Artforum<\/a><\/em> from\n1985 to 1991; he became a corresponding editor for Art in America<\/a> in 1988 and\ncontributing editor for artcritical.com and has also written frequently for\nsuch magazines as Aperture, Modern Painters<\/a>, Art on Paper<\/a> and others. In\n1984, he began teaching art history and literature and organizing the public\nlectures program at the San Francisco Art Institute<\/a>, where he also served\nas interim dean in 1990 and Director of Letters and Science from 1993 to 1998.\nHe retired from SFAI in 2008 and later held the position of Professor Emeritus.\nDuring the same period, he was also on the visiting faculty of Naropa\nInstitute, California College of Arts and Crafts<\/a> and Mills College<\/a>. Berkson continued\nuntil the end of his life to lecture widely in colleges and universities. He\npublished three collections of art criticism, to date, the last being For\nthe Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More<\/em>.\n\nAs a sometime curator<\/a>, he organized or\nco-curated such exhibitions as Ronald\nBladen<\/a>: Early and Late (SFMoMA), Albert York (Mills\nCollege<\/a>), Why Painting I & II (Susan Cummins Gallery), Homage to George\nHerriman (Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery), Facing Eden: 100 years of Northern\nCalifornia Landscape Art (M.H. de Young Museum), George Schneeman (CUE\nFoundation), Gordon Cook: Out There (Nelson Gallery, University of California,\nDavis<\/a>), George Schneeman in Italy (Instituto di Cultura Italiano, San\nFrancisco), and, with Ron Padgett, A Painter and His Poets: The Art of George\nSchneeman (Poets House, New York).\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-29407","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29407"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29417,"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29407\/revisions\/29417"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithmorrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
December 17, 1995
Reprinted, Bomani Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 1996.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>By Bill Berkson<\/p>\n\n\n\n
December 17, 1995
Reprinted, Bomani Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\n