Oldřich Morys

A characteristic feature for the installations and performances of Oldřich Morys, a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, is the combination of paraphrases on pataphysical constructivism, using readymade principles, performance of Flux as well as work with materials in the Neo-data or Arte Povera style. Equally important position in his post-conceptual DYI implementations belongs to the aesthetics of postproduction with an inclination to tactile qualities at the expense of visual qualities, everydayness at the expense of pop-culture and hybridity at the expense of cleanliness.

In this sense his thesis work Ordinary Things Obyčejné věci (2011) can be perceived as the breaking point. It was precisely in this work that he evaluated his existing realizations that originated in the studio of non-figural sculpture at FAVU VUT and where he, at the same time, elaborated on the contours of his future direction. He often works with the specifics of a place and the appropriation of its social or utilitarian functions together with other attributes, which, using interference, manipulation and interconnection into new concepts, he shifts from the sphere of the unimportant and overlooked to new constellations with a joint aspect of frequent topics of surveying or determinative of a given space and its population in the sense of distinctive sign and together with that also the constant effort to subversively act against aesthetical and other predictions and subsequent definitions. In his “occupational” installation Ordinary Things he used the environment of a school studio. By blocking its entrances he made this relatively public space into a private, intimate zone, which the viewers were allowed to look into in a limited way. Whoever wanted to find out what is taking place inside, or rather what is located inside, he/she had to agree to play the artist’s game and search for a few previously determined peepholes, with the help of which it was possible to isolatedly get a glimpse of something, however without the possibility to connect these visual shreds into one meaningful verifiable whole.

He uses hybrid derivatives of original marginal utilities (broom, nail, pallet, book, etc.) also in his installations and performances (Part of a Drawing [Součástí kresby], 2014, Degrees of Insight [Stupně vhledu], 2012). He creates some sort of post-conceptual spatial puzzles filled with handyman vital instability. Often the objects used are held together by something like “a good word” – they are bound by the pressure or friction of varied materials, such as shoe laces or lined up cubes of sugar. It is no wonder then that even a basic architectonic trabeated system is “turned upside down”, when the artist unclasped the pillars as the supporting elements in a horizontal in a way for them to (senselessly) support the actual vertical of the walls instead of the ceiling, or when the legs of a chair go through several stories and reach to several metres and due to the string used as reinforcement they lose their stability. Other participants that Morys’ work directly or vicariously touches in (Neighbour [Soused], 2012) unintentionally participated on the outcome of some of his installations.

In Morys’ realizations we can also detect reminiscences to Zen and its principles (Berg, 2012, Hard Ballet [Těžký balet] 2014), when material and spatial configurations often function in the sense of Zen koans in which the answer once again poses the question, and so on until infinity, until reason does not capitulate and does not accept absurdity as the basic principle of the world.