#paul morrison

[lisamarie-vee]

[antirelation]

Susan Sontag distinguishes between the poetics of cancer, which “is first of all a disease of the body’s geography,” and AIDS, which “depends upon constructing a temporal sequence of events.” Yet if the latter evinces a “natural” or “proper” affinity, as Lessing might say, with the temporal art of narrative, it is for reasons that are fully ideological, not simply prognostic or epidemiological. The cultural function of AIDS has been to stabilize, through a specifically narrative or novelistic logic, the “truth” of gay identity as death or death wish. Every gay man living with AIDS is Dorian Gray come again, and the pandemic realizes the promise of Wilde’s novel, of the novelistic itself. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily,” and the final fulfillment of the ethical distinction is written on the face. AIDS is somatic outing, the final, fully legible spectacle of a hitherto occluded depravity. Or if not somatic outing, then ersatz heterosexuality, virtual normality: every gay man is threatened with the face he deserves, but for that reason alone the pandemic provides the occasion for reflecting on the errors of their ways, the lethal wages of their sins. Better, it turns out, a belated complicity with the poetics of bourgeois spiritualization than a commitment to the pleasures that bring death.

Paul Morrison, from End Pleasure

[b-oovies]

Poucas Cinzas: Salvador Dalí, 2008.

aqui apenas legendado.

[psikonauti]

Paul Morrison (British, b. 1966)

Untitled 10 from Calathidium, 2006

Screenprint

[yama-bato]

Paul Morrison (b. 1966)

Paul Morrison , b.1966 Rising Sun acrylic on canvas

[sirgawin]

I think sometimes we just have to risk it. Live the way we feel. And you know it, it might not turn out well. Sometimes it doesn’t turn out well at all. But we have to try. We have to keep on trying. Otherwise, we just become puppets. All painted smiles outside, while inside nothing but sawdust.

Little Ashes (2008) dir. Paul Morrison

[fashionbooksmilano]

Black Medick

by Paul Morrison ,  Edited by Kurt Vanbelleghem.

Imschoot, Ghent 2004 , 61 pages, 21 x 16 cm,  Limited edition of 1000 copies. Full-bleed color and black-and-white images. ISBN 9077362134

euro 60,00 n/a

email if you want to buy :[email protected]

Publisher Imschoot uitgevers describes Paul Morrison’s Black Medick as “A bible of natural phenomena and botanical inspiration.” Morrison’s book is bound in leatherette with pages colored about the edges; as is the case with a few of Imschoot’s editions, Black Medick directly mimics the physical form of a Bible – bookmark and all. However, this is a wordless book that extols the endless beauty and variety of something as simple as a common garden weed. Black Medick confronts its subject not at its botanical root, but at its representational root: the photographic pixel. The pixel thus becomes a tense limit of expression, communication, and understanding – and a back lot gone to seed or a reedy shoreline are the scenes of the miracles it depicts.

With every page filled with Paul Morrison’s appropriated landscapes and enlarged floral studies, this small and glossy book is visually interesting yet curious in the strange juxtapositions of colour and black & white images. A British painter known for his conceptual landscapes, Black Medick is like a picture scrapbook for this interesting artist.

29/01/21

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[jus-morbo]