David McCarthy
Professor, History of Art
Rhodes College

Greely Myatt
Lapses to Kill

Though perhaps anecdotal, the story of how Greely Myatt selected the title for this solo exhibition provides a useful model for approaching the objects gathered here.¹ Lapses to Kill is certainly more evocative than the name of a recent Jimmy Buffet album, License to Chill (2004), but whether misheard or misread, Myatt's sage editorial revision provides a corollary for his studio practice. In transforming a verbal cliche into a statement of intent, Myatt demonstrates that his art is predicated on the possibility that so much in our environments can benefit from the sharpening of vision offered by artists. The simple yet daunting charge Myatt gives himself is to get back to work.

Getting back to work means continuing a project he has pursued for several years. As well known for his interest in reflecting on the history of modern art as for his ability to cull inspiration from the vernacular environment, Myatt's most recent output grows from earlier exhibitions and installations. Viewers will note several signature motifs, among them spent light bulbs, speech balloons, and embedded zippers. Obviously these specific motifs reference a tradition of quotation, perhaps most notably the 1960s mining of popular culture by Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, and the Pop artists in general. In this sense Myatt acknowledges and honors preceding generations, whose example legitimized the appropriation and assimilation of innumerable found materials. Equally evident is his suggestion that such materials need to be wedded to manual skill, a skill developed over years of diligent apprenticeship. This dual axis, of announcing his debts and paying his dues, is a reminder that an affirmation of art's fundamental transformative power remains Myatt's goal.

From the available evidence it is clear that this transformation encompasses labor, materials, and an engaging range of objects. Take, for instance, the pervasive evidence of the artist's hand. Whether combining the curving necks of gourds with found wooden handles, screwing light bulbs into bent tie wire, weaving together cut up bits of signs and other pieces of recycled wood, selectively erasing narrative content from comics, or embedding zippers within plaster and then sanding down the surface to expose underlying color, Myatt shares the process through which he enacts change. Certainly this reveals his considerable talent in working various materials, but also it insists that the process of making is an inextricable part of each work's meaning.

In Mitote and Talking the variation on a basic theme-the combination of the organic (gourds) and the machine-tooled (several kinds of wooden handles) in the former, and the field of assembled speech balloons in the latter-provides an opportunity to showcase his skill in joining wood. There is little that is precious about his skill because in the end its not so much the joinery as it is the effect achieved that resonates. In fact, the assembly talks about its own creation, as Myatt clearly wants it too. Mitote is a Toltec word connoting chaos and disorder, often that of too many voices heard at the same time. Talking continues the emphasis on a crowd's noise, but as with Mitote, attention to individual inflections, discernable in the colors, textures, and associations of found materials, enables individual voices to stand out from the group, even if only momentarily.

The materials-particularly the wood and newspaper-come with their previous lives still echoing in the present. The various broom handles, scavenged and reclaimed bits of wood, and clipped pages from the Sunday comics have the patina that comes with use, and thereby suggest lives already lived, at least once. When recombined and situated within a new context, these histories commence another life. Both honored and reworked, these materials, and their associations, are not fully subsumed to Myatt's voice, but instead are accepted as important sources that continue to shape his making and thinking.

But in the end, it is the objects that do the talking. The constant play between the found and the crafted, between the thing itself and the traditions it acknowledges, and between Myatt's voice and those he selectively references is sufficient to make of any specific piece a rewarding experience for viewers. As much as Myatt professes in I Gotta Learn How to Talk that he needs to master the craft of verbal deflection, the ensemble of comics carefully edited to one frame and then painted over with gesso to isolate a single speech balloon provide a hilarious riposte to the litany of comments and questions directed toward artists: "Okay, that's one idea," "All right then! Build it your way!," "Whatcha Designing Now?," "Now what?," and "What is it?" These endless quotations are but a hook anchoring viewers before a field of carefully arranged rectangles of paper, the whole arranged into a grid framed by a black steel speech balloon that, in its doubling of the balloon motif, begins to reveal an interior dialog about the experience of laboring alone in the studio. Or consider too the reworking of that great romantic trope, the beam of light striking the forehead to connote inspiration, later simplified in cartoons to the single bulb coming on to make the point literal. Shades and Shades and Shamrocks are composed mostly of spent light bulbs. Good in their time, their time has nonetheless passed. When arranged in a cluster and illuminated with either a single or several bulbs, their carcasses are reanimated in a new life that elegantly surpasses whatever mundane service they may have provided previously. Their collective mass is contained by and contrasted with the individual strands of wire that pull the ensemble together and then offer an ecstatic release of linear energy above. The effect neatly summarizes so much of Myatt's aesthetic in emphasizing the regenerative power of art.

By now it should be evident that the title of this exhibition, like all such verbal framing, is merely a point of embarkation for the encounter with art. In part a deflection (like the appropriated cartoon speech), and in part an admission that the nature of all such work is that it must go on, the lapses to kill are a confirmation of Myatt's ongoing commitment to his craft. They are also a license-better yet a responsibility-reminding his viewers that they need to continue the process of engagement by taking the time to accept the challenges and rewards this work provides.

¹ Conversation with author, 18 April 2006, Memphis, Tennessee.