Robert Morris 9780262316507, 0262316501, 9781299773264, 1299773265, 9781461937135, 1461937132

Citation preview

Robe rt Mo rris

October files George Baker,Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Annette Michelson, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson Eva Hesse, edited by Mignon Nixon Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph James Coleman, edited by George Baker Cindy Sherman, edited by Johanna Burton Roy Lichtenstein, edited by Graham Bader Gabriel Orozco, edited by Yve-Alain Bois Gerhard Richter, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Richard Hamilton, edited by Hal Foster Dan Graham, edited by Alex Kitnick John Cage, edited by Julia Robinson Claes Oldenburg, edited by Nadja Rottner Louise Lawler, edited by Helen Molesworth with Taylor Walsh Robert Morris, edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson

Robe rt Mo rris

edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson

essays, an interview, and a roundtable by Robert Morris, Annette Michelson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Martha Buskirk, Branden W. Joseph, Jon Bird, and Julia Bryan-Wilson

OCTOBER FILES 15

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Bembo and Stone Sans by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robert Morris / edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson.   pages  cm—(October files) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01940-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-262-51961-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Morris, Robert, 1931–.—Criticism and interpretation.  I. Bryan-Wilson, Julia, editor of compilation.  II. Morris, Robert, 1931–. Notes on dance.  III. Title. N6537.M654R63  2013 709.2—dc23 2012050543  

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Contents

Series Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Robert Morris 

Notes on Dance (1965)

Annette Michelson 

Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of T ransgression



(1969)

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh 

A Conversation with Robert Morris in 1985



(1994)

Rosalind Krauss 

T he Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in S eries



(1994)

Rosalind Krauss,

T he Reception of the S ixties (1994)

1

7

51

65 111

Denis Hollier, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Martha Buskirk, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh  Branden W. Joseph 

Robert Morris and John Cage: Reconstructing a



Dialogue (1997)

137

Jon Bird 



Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 T ate



Gallery Retrospective (1999)

Julia Bryan-Wilson 

Robert Morris’s Art S trike (2009)

Index

209

153 177

Series Preface

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar period that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature, which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather, it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its own right, on its own terms and with its own implications. To this end we feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elaborate different methods of criticism in order to elucidate different aspects of the art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one another as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art to political context and historical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time. The Editors of OCTOBER

Acknowledgments

Robert Morris’s “Notes on Dance” was originally published in the Tulane Drama Review (winter 1965). Annette Michelson’s essay “Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression” is reprinted from the exhibition catalog Robert Morris (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969). Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s conversation with Morris first appeared within “Three Conversations in 1985” (October 70 [fall 1994]), a series of artists’ interviews with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Morris. Given this volume’s monographic focus, only the Morris portion is reprinted here. “The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series,” by Rosalind Krauss, was included in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994). The dialogue between Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Martha Buskirk, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was printed in the pages of October 69 (summer 1994), part of a flurry of scholarship on Morris in that year. Branden W. Joseph’s “Robert Morris and John Cage: Reconstructing a Dialogue” is a slightly modified version of an article that originally appeared in October 81 (summer 1997). “Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective,” by Jon Bird, was published in Rewriting Conceptual Art, edited by Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). Julia BryanWilson’s “Robert Morris’s Art Strike” is a heavily excerpted version of an article that first appeared in Art Bulletin (summer 2007), and later, in a different form, in Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

x

Acknowledgments

This volume focuses on the first decade or so of Morris’s career, and as such traces some of his involvements with dance, minimal sculpture, process work, and conceptualism. With publication dates that span from 1965 to 2009, these texts also demonstrate how Morris’s early work has been mapped by scholars of different generations. I initially conceived of this project after hunting down a copy of the 1969 catalog in which Annette Michelson’s influential essay appears, only to find in frustration that it was missing, having been ripped out by a covetous reader. Here it appears in its complete form, reprinted for the first time. I am very grateful to all the authors for allowing me to include their texts. Occasional small typographical and formatting changes have been made for the sake of consistency. In addition, I would like to thank Robert Morris for his decades-long engagement with questions of form, process, and matter—not least the matter of writing; I am pleased to be able to reprint a piece of his that has not been included in previous anthologies of Morris’s texts. Massive gratitude goes to Roger Conover for his support; Adam Lehner for his patience; Rachel Churner and Judith Feldmann for their copyediting and manuscript assistance; Yasuyo Iguchi for her design work; and Johanna Burton, George Baker, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty for their encouragement at various stages of this process. Linda Fitzgerald and John McChesney-Young deserve much praise for their wizardly skills with financial issues regarding image rights. Rosalind Krauss showed incredible generosity toward me by sharing her original images of Morris’s work; many of them appear here in print for the first time. Completing this project would not have been possible without the indispensable hard work, diligence, and good spirits of Molly Everett; my deepest appreciation goes to her. Archival help and image assistance came from many quarters, including Tammy Carter at the Center for Creative Photography, Simone Forti, Castelli Gallery, Ronald Pledge of Contact Press Images, Artists Rights Society, Sonnabend Gallery, Sprueth Magers, and the Tate Gallery Archives. Finally, huge thanks to Mel Y. Chen for ongoing inspiration and care.

Notes on Dance Robert Morris

My involvement in theatre has been with the body in motion. However changed or reduced the motion might have been or however elaborate the means used might have been, the focus was this movement. In retrospect this seems a constant value which was preserved. From the beginning I wanted to avoid the pulled-up, turned-out, antigravitational qualities that not only give a body definition and role as “dancer” but qualify and delimit the movement available to it. The challenge was to find alternative movement. I was not the first to attempt such alternatives. Simone Whitman, together with others, had already explored the possibilities inherent in a situation of “rules” or gamelike structures which required the performer to respond to cues which might, for example, indicate changes in height or spatial position. A fair degree of complexity of these rules and cues effectively blocked the dancer’s performing “set” and reduced him to frantically attempting to respond to cues—reduced him from performance to action. In 1961 Simone Whitman held a concert in a loft in New York. This concert involved the use of such devices as a 45° inclined plane about eight feet square with several ropes coming from the top of it. Performers were allowed to climb up the plane, pass between each other and rest when tired—all by means of the ropes. Here the rules were simple and did not constitute a game situation but rather indicated a task while the device, the inclined plane, structured the actions. (This single example does not do justice to the implications this seemingly simple concert held.) Here focused clearly for the first

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time were two distinct means by which new actions could be implemented: rules or tasks and devices (she termed them “constructions”) or objects. While possibilities for generating movement by task situations or devices had become clearly established, it was essentially an indirect method in both cases. Movement had not been approached directly but had resulted, willy-nilly, from going about getting this or that task accomplished—moving over a dominating eccentric surface, etc. By the use of objects which could be manipulated I found a situation which did not dominate my actions nor subvert my performance. In fact the decision to employ objects came out of considerations of specific problems involving space and time. For me, the focus of a set of specific problems involving time, space, alternate forms of a unit, etc., provided the necessary structure.1 While dance technique and chance methods were both irrelevant to me I would never have denied the value, necessity even, of perpetuating structural systems. But for my purposes the

Simone Forti, Slant Board, performance at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1982. Originally performed in 1961, New York. Prop by Robert Morris. Image provided by the artist and The Box, Los Angeles.

Robert Morris, Arizona, 1964. Reconstruction featuring Andrew Ludke, Television Studio, Hunter College, New York, 1993. Image provided by Sonnabend Gallery. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

need for such systems was for syntactical rather than methodological bases. My efforts were bound up with the didactic and demonstrative and were not concerned with the establishment of a set of tools by which works could be generated. The objects I used held no inherent interest for me but were means for dealing with specific problems. For example, the establishment of an inverse ratio between movement, space, and duration was implemented by the use of a T-like form which I could adjust and move away from, adjust again and move away from, and so on, until the sequence of movements according to the ratio had been completed. Or again, the establishment of a focus shifting between the egocentric and the exocentric could be accomplished by swinging overhead in a fully lighted room a small light at the end of a cord. The lights in the room fade as the cord is slowly let out until finally, in total darkness, only the moving point of light is visible as it revolves in the large space above the heads of the audience. Both of the above instances occurred in Arizona, the first dance I made.

Notes on Dance

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An element of the work as persistent as the use of objects is the coexistence of the static and the mobile—e.g., a sequence of ten Muybridge slides of a nude man lifting a stone followed by a similar movement by a nude male performer executed in the same space and illuminated by the beam of the slide projector (Waterman Switch); or the rotation of the upper torso through 90° over a five-minute period—the movement itself being imperceptible—accompanied by a taped description of strenuous movements (Arizona); or a taped verbal description of actions which occur at a remove in time (Waterman Switch); or the illumination of a runner with stroboscopic-type light which, because of the briefness of the illumination, gives a static image (Check). In one form or another, the static coexisting with the mobile occurs in every work. Time, insofar as considerations of length are concerned, has seemed irrelevant. Since the movement situations were primarily those of either demonstration or exposition, time was not an element of usage but a necessary condition; less a focus than a context. Only at those points where there was no movement did time function as an isolated, observable focus—i.e., durations of stillness were not used as punctuations for the movement but in the attempt to make duration itself palpable. Space, like time, was reduced to context, necessity; at most a way of anchoring the work, riveting it to a maximum frontality. In Site a triangular spatial situation occurs with an immobile female nude reclining against a white rectangle upstage, right of center, a white box downstage right (a visible source for a sound which varies hardly more than the nude), and a performer downstage left manipulating a white rectangular board and moving within an area of a few square feet. The extreme slow-motion element in Arizona came from experiencing the dancer’s movements being soaked up, dissipated, in a concert given in an enormous skating rink in Washington, D.C. It was apparent that only the smallest movements kept their weight or mass in such a large, nonrectangular space. A consideration in Arizona was to make movements which would keep their focus in any space—a case of spatial opposition rather than cooperation or exploration. In Check space was used centrifugally, the movement occurring largely at the periphery of the audience. For all its apparent scale, Check made use primarily of the factors of distance and interruption; the space remained relatively unpunctured. Check bears further elaboration, for in several ways, other than the inside-out spatial situation, it was purposely antithetical to my previous

Robert Morris, Site, performance with Carolee Schneemann, 1964. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Hans Namuth. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate.

  works. It had no central focus, climax, dramatic intensity, continuity of action; it did not involve skill in performance, nor did it even demand continuous attention from an audience. In a room some 100 by 300 feet (the central gallery at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm) 700 to 800 chairs were placed at random in the center area leaving aisles around the perimeter. Various actions by individual performers occurred in these aisles. Forty other performers, men, women, and children, “wandered” through the entire space; totally at random and as individuals. Upon a signal the forty assembled into two respective groups for simple, simultaneous actions. They again dispersed upon a signal to resume wandering, talking, observing as a kind of proto-audience: i.e., they occupied a zone somewhere between performers and audience. The 700 in the audience were free to sit or stand as they chose. Due to the space and numbers of people no performed action was visible to the entire audience. (This work was later performed in a space approximately one-third of the size of the Moderna Museet and failed totally as the actions did not have a

Notes on Dance

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chance to “disappear.”) The actions occurred cyclically with the exception of one which endured throughout. I have made a total of five dances: Arizona, a solo of 20 minutes; 21.3, a solo of 10 minutes; Site, a duet of 17 minutes; Waterman Switch, a trio of 20 minutes; and Check for over 40 performers which lasted 30 minutes. Each work attempted to solve what was at the time seen as a problem or set of problems. To qualify and clarify “problem solving” as a process of thought appropriate to making dances would require elaborations beyond the scope of this article. Rather an attempt has been made to indicate how the problematic has served as syntax. It seems irrelevant that what was seen as a particular problem often remains a distant and unimmediate element in a performance; the structure of some musical scores is unapparent in performance. Much about the work has not been dealt with: the quality of performers’ actions, uses of sound, certain persistent imagery. These considerations also lie beyond the scope of this article. I have only attempted to touch on what seemed the foremost concerns that underlay whatever imagery, objects, etc., were employed. Note

1.  Quite a lot has been written lately about the so-called “new dance.” Some of it is good, most is bad. But there is undeniably a need for a criticism devoted to focusing the problematic and the viable in the recent dance activity. Such writing would require the development of a vocabulary which could articulate the constructs of a functioning group. It might be possible to proceed by locating what a given group regards as its necessary questions together with its replies: its concrete actions. Only by the articulation of this dialogue can any coherent tradition be traced, even a recent tradition. And it would be revealed, I am sure, just as it has been revealed in the other arts when carefully observed, that dance like the other disciplines is no less involved in a dialogue of self-criticism.

 

Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression Annette Michelson

I

There is, however, nothing more wholesome for us than to find problems that quite transcend our powers and I must say, too, that it imparts a delicious sense of being cradled in the waters of the deep—a feeling I always have at sea. —Charles Sanders Peirce Robert Morris has moved, in a decade, from the making of objects to modification of temperature and terrain, passing, through a series of parallel strategies, from the scenic space of theatre into that of landscape as Theatre of Operations. The central interest and importance of these movements—in several senses and at most points transgressive—is assured by the manner in which their departures, shifts of emphasis and direction, extensions and contractions of scale, have sharpened and revised the categories of sculptural process, thereby redefining and extending the arena of aesthetic discourse. Developing, sustaining a focus upon the irreducibly concrete qualities of sensory experience, they renew the terms in which we understand and reflect upon the modalities of making and perceiving. An enterprise of this kind is critical in each sense we commonly attach to the word, and in one other; its fullest comprehension commands recognition of the singular resolution with which a sculptor has assumed the philosophical task which, in a culture not committed on

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the whole to speculative thought, devolves with a particular stringency upon its artists. Saying so much as this, one confronts again, if ever so tentatively, the tension between notions of art and ideation as preserved in the contradictions of our critical language. Historical and critical tradition have most generally assumed the existence of philosophical constructs at work “behind” the artwork, and never more persistently than in this century, when the radical transformation of a pictorial space through which the figure has been articulated, has relaxed the iconographer’s hold upon painting and sculpture alike. The modernist aspiration to autonomy and immediacy working through a pervasive abstraction, has elicited a critical literature of considerable refinement, uniquely proficient in its readings of pictorial and sculptural form. That proficiency is, however, largely, though subtly, subverted by an ancient and tenacious Idealism. The evidence of the subversion is nowhere clearer than in the intellectual climate that presided over the development of cubism and expressionism and extends into the aesthetics and criticism of our own recent past. The contradictions at work in the semantic ambiguity, the exacerbated rhetoric of the pioneers of pictorial abstraction, and the tensions rehearsed in the writings of Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, testify to the tenacity of the syndrome bequeathed us by antiquity. Those contradictions are not, of course, confined to the plastic arts; they traverse our culture. “A fictional technique,” in the view of one major critic of the postwar period, “always refers back to the novelist’s metaphysics. The critic’s task is to define the latter before evaluating the former.”1 And such, on the whole, was the procedure adopted by the criticism of abstract expressionism. The shadow of priority, the fissure introduced between form and idea, through the prepositional phrase of Sartre’s first quoted sentence must ultimately, however, grow suspect to a critical enterprise founded on a modernist, post-symbolist allegiance to the primacy of the Imagination and the apprehension-in-immediacy of its works. Like criticism, Art does provide its own occasional evidences of the fissure, proposes strategies for its perpetuation. An ultimate and hilarious instance is that travesty of the central Mallarméan Metaphors produced by the Paris of the ’50s in Klein International Blue and The Exhibition of the Void. Desperate reifications of L’Azur and La Notion Pure, their

acceptance, however uneasy, revealed the profound resistance of the society which engendered modernism, to its radicalism. The double pages of Un Coup de Des, Mallarmé’s supreme effort, question, as it were, the primacy of the word as symbolic sign, enlisting the white surface of the paper in the effort to make meaning palpable, directly perceptible through the apprehension of the space and silence which are its ground and which sustain it on the page and in the ear and in the mind. The word, itself, the supreme semantic sign, aspires here to a concreteness, an immediacy of presence greater than any purely linguistic concept would seem to afford.2 That same aspiration to concreteness and immediacy which generates the abstract forms of contemporary art is directed at erasing the fissure between form and idea. It is, however, now suggested that “whenever we use the notion of form—if only in order to criticize another concept of form—we are forced to resort to the assumption of a source of meaning. And the source or medium of this assumption is necessarily the language of metaphysics.”3 That language has been, as well, the language of our art criticism, and its presuppositions the source of its proliferating claims for art as “saying,” “expressing,” “embodying,” “bodying forth,” “incarnating,” “hypostasizing,” “symbolizing,” “dramatizing,” when it is not “figuring,” “presenting,” or “representing.” It was in order to dispel or to attenuate the persistent implication of the “referent,” the reality assumed as prior to the created reality of the work of art, that the term of “formal statement,” so constantly in use throughout the American criticism of the ’40s and ’50s, was devised. Assuming somewhat less than had been assumed by such a term as “significant form,” it was the invention of a generation dedicated to the proposition that the burden of discourse and reference had been lifted from the artist, as from the writer. Actually, it had been shifted. The formal “statement,” speaking of art alone, confronts us once again with the shadow of the “subject.” We have proceeded, as through a hall of mirrors, toward the aesthetic Utopia of a self-referring system of signs, constructed on a single level of articulation, looking backward all the while through our language, to the “subject.” The work of Robert Morris came to maturity and into some general public recognition as immediately problematic in this regard. That is to say, it posed certain critical problems in a fresh manner and with a particular sharpness and urgency. Eluding the critical grasp, the

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descriptive and analytic techniques, the readings of sympathetic and sophisticated critics, it united, for one moment and in one common cause at least, others long established as different, indeed antithetical, in their methods, aims, allegiances. This sculpture—and that of certain of his contemporaries—began, from roughly 1964 on, to present in its unity of contour and innocence of textural and structural accident a resistance to prevailing critical techniques founded on notions of aesthetic metaphor, gesture, or statement. If you asked yourself, “What is the ‘statement’ made by or in or through, a form, a sculpture, such as Cloud,” you were led to the conclusion that it was saying, as in a celebrated phrase and if anything at all, “itself.” Now, a “statement” of this sort appears modest when compared with the claims made for the expressive and formal “statements” of the ’50s. It was also, apparently, overwhelmingly intimidating in its effect. Sculptures such as Slab which seemed to declare, as it were, with John Cage, “I have nothing to say

Installation view of Robert Morris solo show, Green Gallery, New York, December 1964–January 1965. Left to right: Untitled (Table), Untitled (Corner Beam), Untitled (Floor Beam), Untitled (Corner Piece), Untitled (Cloud). © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

and I am saying it,” were “saying” at the very least, “I am that I am.” “Statements” of this sort, which brook neither denial nor debate, we term apodictic. Criticism’s response to this apodicticity was a crisis. The symptoms were roughly the following: 1.  A general and immediate proliferation of new epithets 2.  Attempts to find historical, formal precedents which might facilitate analysis 3.  A growing literature about the problematic nature of available critical vocabulary, procedure, standards Artists responded with: 1.  A growing personal concern and active involvement with critical practice 2.  Serious attempts to redefine the limits of criticism 3. A correlative attempt to reform critical language and descriptive terms Thus, by the winter of 1966, one felt obliged to point out that all but a very few of the artists exhibiting in the important exhibition 10 × 10, held in the Dwan Gallery, were currently involved in the writing of criticism,4 and to suggest that one current preoccupation of criticism is the accurate definition of the complex relationships obtaining between the efforts of younger painters and sculptors on the one hand and what would, on the other, seem to be their Constructivist and Neo-Plasticist precedents. A literature of critical distinctions is developing with a rapidity which both symptomatizes and heightens the urgency of the problem. … There is a very particular sense in which the compositional dynamics of American sculpture and painting invoke historical precedents, only to bracket or negate them in the interest of fresh departures.5 The situation prevailing, then, from 1965 on, was by no means unprecedented. To see it, however, as one more seasonal episode in an accelerating history of stylistic innovation would be to underestimate its

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importance, to misjudge its nature. It elicited a hesitant, but significant, thrust toward a redefinition of the limits of critical discourse. Following cues offered by articulate artists, the critical scene contracted as in shock, responding to the strictness of new work with an open avowal of malaise. That malaise was not unmixed with sympathy; it generated a season of well-intentioned debate on the aesthetic use of “boredom,” and the stylistics of “negation.” The situation evoked—and in remarkably minute detail—the following description written by that exceptionally perceptive critic, T. E. Hulme, a half-century before: You get at the present moment … a most extraordinary confusion in art; a complete breaking away from tradition. So confusing is it that most people lump it altogether as one movement and are unaware that it is in fact composed of a great many distinct and even contradictory elements, being a complex movement of parts that are merely reactionary, parts that are dead, and with one part only containing the possibility of development. When I speak of a new complex geometrical art then, I am not thinking of the whole movement. I am speaking of one element which seems to be gradually hardening out, and separating itself from the others. … Before dealing actually with this work, I ought to qualify what I have said a little. I have put the matter in a rather too ponderous way by talking about the new general attitude. That is perhaps dealing with the matter on the wrong plane. It would have been quite possible for this change to come about without the artists themselves being conscious of this change of general attitude towards the world at all. When I say “conscious,” I mean conscious in this formulated and literary fashion. The change of attitude would have taken place, but it might only have manifested itself in a certain change of sensibility in the artist, and in so far as he expresses himself in words, in a certain change of vocabulary. The change of attitude betrays itself by changes in the epithets that a man uses, perhaps disjointedly, to express his admiration for the work he admires. Most of us cannot state our position, and we use adjectives which in themselves do not explain what we mean, but which, for a group for a certain time, by a kind of tacit convention become the “porters” or “bearers” of the complex new attitude which we all recognize that we have in company, but which we cannot describe or

analyze. At the present time you get this change shown in the value given to certain adjectives. Instead of epithets like graceful, beautiful, etc., you get epithets like austere, mechanical, clearcut and bare, used to express admiration. Putting on one side all this talk of a “new attitude” of which the artist in some cases may not be conscious at all, what is the nature of the new sensibility which betrays itself in this change of epithets? Putting it at its lowest terms, namely that a man was unconscious of any change of aim, but only felt that he preferred certain shapes, certain forms, etc., and that his work was molded by that change of sensibility, what is the nature of that change of sensibility at the present moment? Expressed generally, there seems to be a desire for austerity and bareness, a striving towards structure and away from the messiness and confusion of natural things. Take a concrete matter like the use of line and surface. In all art since the Renaissance, the lines used are what may be called vital lines. … In the new art … there is rather a desire to avoid those lines and surfaces which look pleasing and organic, and to use lines which are clean, clear-cut and mechanical. You will find artists expressing admiration for engineer’s drawings, where the lines are clean, the curves all geometrical, and the color, laid on to show the shape of a cylinder for example, gradated absolutely. You will find a sculptor disliking the pleasing kind of patina that comes in time on an old bronze and expressing admiration for the hard clean surface of a piston rod. If we take this to be in fact the new sensibility, and regard it as the culmination of the process of breaking up and transformation in art that has been proceeding since the impressionists, it seems to me that the history of the last twenty years becomes more intelligible. It suddenly enables one to look at the matter in a new light. Put the matter in an a priori way. Admitting the premise that a new direction is gradually defining itself, what would you expect to happen? As a help to this reconstruction, recall what was said about the relation between the various geometrical arts of the past at the beginning of the last part of my paper to the effect that there are always certain common elements, but also that each period has its own specific qualities. This new art, towards which things were working, was bound, then to have certain elements in common with past geometric archaic arts, but at the same time as an art

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springing up today, it would necessarily exhibit certain original and peculiar qualities due to that fact. Consider then the beginning of the movement. No man at the beginning of a movement of this kind can have any clear conception of its final culmination—that would be to anticipate the result of a process of creation.6 Hulme’s observations had been, perhaps, not wholly unremarked—or so one would assume from the statement made, in a text of 1965, that “as T. E. Hulme put it, the problem is to keep from discussing the new art with a vocabulary derived from the old position.”7 The implications, however, were not taken seriously into account, not used. Thus, in a later passage of that same text, Miss Rose remarks that “the art I have been talking about is obviously a negative art of denial and renunciation.”8 One is immediately led to suggest that it was rather being described in terms of one observer’s sense of that of which she felt momentarily deprived. Consider, however, the following adjectives: “nonrelational,” “unanalyzable,” “indescribable,” “undifferentiated,” “incomparable,” and “unintellectual.” They are culled from the critical literature of the time, used by critics from 1966 on. Their source lies in statements made by artists. Thus Judd on the manner in which his work reflects an “antirationalistic” point of view: “The parts are unrelational.” This has been preceded by a statement made by Stella: “The other thing is that the European geometric painters really strive for what I call relational painting. The basis of their whole idea is balance. You do something in one corner and you balance it with something in the other corner. Now the new painting is being characterized as symmetrical. Ken Noland has put things in the center and I’ll use a symmetrical pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It’s nonrelational. In the newer American painting we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn’t important. We’re not trying to jockey everything around.” Judd: “You see, the big problem is that nothing that is not absolutely plain begins to have parts in some way. The thing is to be able to work and do different things, and yet not break up the wholeness that a piece has.”9 Consider now the following statements, descriptive of a state of consciousness: “About (it) little can be affirmed; many of the predicates

we can attach to it are negative. It is incomparable, non-relational, undifferentiated, indescribable and unintellectual.” That description is extracted, not from the art-critical literature of the ’60s, but from an account of the notion of “epistemological firstness” as defined by the first among our philosophers, Charles Sanders Peirce.10 It continues in the following manner: “Firstness is somehow absolutely present. It is a purely monadic state of feeling and somehow immediate, without its immediacy being derived by reflection from what is not immediate. It is fresh, free, vivid, original, spontaneous.” This quality of immediate, concrete, simple apprehension Peirce proposed as the first focus of an investigation of the most general conditions of experience, of knowing and perceiving, as he set about marking off the limits of his phenomenology. Imagine, if you please, a consciousness in which there is no comparison, no relation, no recognized multiplicity (since parts would be other than the whole), no change, no imagination of any modification of what is positively there, no reflexion—nothing but a simple positive character. Such a consciousness might be just an odor, say a smell of attar; or it might be one infinite dead ache; it might be the hearing of a piercing eternal whistle. In short, any simple and positive quality would be something which our description fits that it is such as it is quite regardless of anything else. If we imagine that feeling retains its positive character but absolutely loses all relation (and thereby all vividness, which is only the sense of shock), it no longer is exactly what we call feeling. It is a mere sense of quality. … An idea of a feeling is such as it is within itself, without any elements or relations. One shade of red does not in itself resemble another shade of red. Indeed, when we speak of a shade of red, it is already not the idea of the feeling of which we are speaking but of a cluster of such ideas.11 Firstness, then, is “a sense of quality rather than a perception.” Noncognitive, it is “absolutely present,” as painting and sculpture, modernist and of “quality,” properly apprehended, are said to be. Consider, now, the motion of the work of art as

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continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single, infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it. (Here it is worth noting that the concept of interest implies temporality in the form of continuing attention directed at the object, whereas the concept of conviction does not.) I want to claim that it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre. In fact, I am tempted far beyond my knowledge to suggest that, faced with the need to defeat theatre, it is above all to the condition of painting and sculpture—the condition, that is, of existing in, indeed of secreting or constituting, a continuous and perpetual present— that the other contemporary modernist arts, most notably poetry and music, aspire.12 It is as though one’s experience of the latter (modernist painting and sculpture) has no duration—not because one in fact experiences a picture by Noland or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.13 That which leaps to the eye is the manner in which both “firstness” as epistemological category and “presentness” as aesthetic value, preserve, for a secular age, the attributes of that logically pre-existent, absolute and timeless, real Presence called into question by modernism. “Examine the mutations of things,” says St. Augustine, “and thou wilt everywhere find ‘has been’ and ‘will be.’ Think on God and thou wilt find ‘is’ where ‘has been’ and ‘will be’ cannot be.” Absolute presentness being the attribute of Divinity, to experience “the work in all its depth and fullness” as within “a single, infinitely brief instant” is to dwell in Presence, in “conviction” as in Revelation. Modernism seen thus assumes the aspect of a Reformation, bequeathing, in its prescriptiveness, its preoccupation with a canon, its identification of aesthetic decisions with moral choices, a repertory of Calvinist themes of sin and redemption for our contemporary rehearsal. It is, I think, a prime quality of Morris’s work that it offers, through a series of exploratory enterprises, the terms of a sharpened definition of

the nature of the sculptural experience, and that it does so in a manner wholly consistent with a commitment to the secularist impulse and thrust of modernism. I mean by this to suggest its mixture of modesty and ambition. Staking out areas of intensive exploration of the qualities of shape, scale, size, placing, weight, mass, opacity and transparency, visibility and obscurity, this work urges reflection on the present, concrete options of sculpture, as on the general terms and conditions of its perception. Cognitive in its fullest effect, then, rather than “meaningful,” its comprehension not only demands time; it elicits the acknowledgment of temporality as the cognition or medium of human cognition and aesthetic experience. The nature of this enterprise has impelled the revision of traditionally defended boundaries and conventions or distinctions, both specifically sculptural and more generally formal or aesthetic. I wish, then, very briefly to consider some of the historical sources of that revision in the most general terms before proceeding to define, through an examination of a few central works on exhibition, the nature of the sculptural achievement. Of those sources, the most openly and generally acknowledged has been a tradition of transgression culminating in the convergent efforts of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Never, I should think, has the transgressive aspect of that tradition been so dramatically evident as on a summer evening of 1966 when, in a festival performance of Stravinsky’s Histoire D’un Soldat whose inspired casting constituted in itself a “critical performance” of distinction, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and John Cage, accompanied by a chamber orchestra under the direction of Lukas Foss and acting respectively as Narrator, Soldier, and Devil, offered the witty and affectionate homage of Musical America to the most vivacious of Old Masters. This tale of the Fiddler-Soldier Tempted (it is a sort of pocket or buffo-Faust) was rendered with a dimension of ironic aptness, assuming the aspects of an aesthetic parable through Copland’s professional blandness, Carter’s earnest accents, and the enveloping, equivocal, disquieting charm of Cage. It was Cage as Devil who evoked, of course, beyond the framework of the narrative, the temptation, the ambush lurking beneath the trapdoor of musical history. One was reminded that this particular “Devil’s” only direct musical predecessor had been the composer known as “The Sorcerer of Bayreuth.” Like Wagner’s, Cage’s presence and influence pervade the thinking of his time, extending beyond the musical context into the dance, the art and theatre of

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younger contemporaries. And like Wagner’s, his work is philosophically inspired. Like Wagner’s, too, it attacks, through a process of distension, the notion of wholly separable formal modes. Extending the transgressive tactics of the Gesamtkunstwerk, questioning the distinction between sound and silence, between sound and music, distending music into spectacle, distending spectacle in turn beyond the limits of the theatre walls, Cage pushes, through a succession of transgressive tactics, toward a point of no return, a reflective limit at which the very notion of Composition is reversed. Seizing upon Duchamp’s strategies of Framing and of Chance, he has extended them to encompass the ambience and flow of consciousness, converting the Composer into Listener absorbed in the contemplation of that Vast Found Object, that impenetrable ritualistic spectacle, the World. That Duchamp’s strategies of Framing and of Chance took root, were “radicalized” and systematized in this country is no accident. The premises of that systematization are revealed in the aspiration of our most articulate nineteenth-century intellectuals, “accepting the Universe,” as they struggled toward secularism. Thus Emerson in 1840: “There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe, all is system and gradation. There are no fixtures in the universe. All is fluid and volatile. Succession, division, parts, particles—this is the condition, this is the tragedy of man. All things cohere and unite. Man studies the parts, strives to tear the part from its connection…”14 (Here is a precedent form Cage’s desire to “avoid a polar situation,” his pleading for a situation that “must be Yes-and-No not either-or.”)15 There is higher work for Art and the artist. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side. Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance of particular arts. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature and destroy its separate and contrasted existence.16 One moves in America, with the nostalgia of ecstasy everywhere present, between Orthodoxy and Latitudinarianism. Both are redemptive in their claims; both are limited by the inability to absorb temporality. For

Emerson’s extempore performances (“spontaneous,” “impromptu,” “arising out of the moment,” “instantaneous”) articulate the Christian dream of timelessness, that version of “presentness” which Transcendentalism derives from its Romantic origins and bequeaths to its Surrealist descendants. Questioning, reinterpreting, reevaluating achievements of the recent past, Morris enlists an “exquisite satisfaction that is just this thing very concrete and very much there that is what is happening”17 in the service of a rigorous redefinition of the general range of possible sculptural experience. From the making of a drawing to the designing of an “ecological” project the dimension of temporality is acknowledged, used, through record or allusion, when not built into the structural perception of the work. The passage from the scenic space of Theatre to the landscape space of the Theatre of Operations lies through a Theatre of Consciousness whose dimensions are articulated by structures perceived in time. II

The metaphor is a mirror reflecting one image in another … these mirrors are things, and language, the limit from which they are perceived. —Philippe Sollers In 1965 Morris exhibited a group of sculptures at the Green Gallery in New York. They constituted a threshold in the development of his work, initiating a radical reevaluation of the presuppositions and aspirations that had informed much of the best sculpture—and criticism—of the recent past. Among the pieces on view was a group of four cubes, measuring three feet by three feet by three feet and set six feet apart. Their surfaces were entirely mirrored. To describe, to account for that which they presented to view, is to relate the terms of a contradiction; each object was dissolved even as it was defined, through reflection. Somewhere in the oscillation between the terms of the contradiction, during the reflective movement of its apprehension, within the space of equivocation, a fact was posited, a form was located. Real cubes were described by the virtual, inaccessible, intangible space of their

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), 1965. 1971 refabrication: Plexiglas mirrors on wood, four units, each 21 × 21 × 21 inches. Photo courtesy of Sprueth Magers Berlin London. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

mirrored surfaces. Those surfaces, in describing forms, posited facts as problematic, elicited Reflection. The physical space of a perception was perceived as the mental space of paradox, a location issuing in Speculation. This catoptric strategy assumes a central place in our consideration of Morris’s enterprise for the following reasons: 1.  It takes account of, uses, renders visible the manner in which the reflective process is grounded in, inseparable from, the radically engaging physicality of the work, a structure which in this instance visibly (virtually) absorbs the spectator. 2.  It constitutes a particularly brilliant instance of the manner in which Morris undertook to question the aesthetic convention, the distinction obtaining, in traditional aesthetics and criticism of sculpture, between a “real” or operational space—that of the beholder—and a “virtual” space, self-enclosed, optical, assumed to be that of sculpture.

3.  It is a strategy. That is to say, it is a work conceived as part of a continuum, initiating in a particularly engaging manner, the exploration of an area of sculptural enterprise, a mode of sculptural thinking. It is designed as part of a continuing developing action and experience. To see it as such means accepting the consequences of that solidly established contemporary tradition in which the artist’s work defines, in its development, a field of investigation, a range of sculptural options and modes. The strict morphology and the continually cross-referring variational quality of Morris’s early sculpture are to be seen not as embodying or essentializing sculptural ideas or categories, but as proposing a patient investigation, profoundly innovative in its sharpness and intensity of focus, of the conditions for a reconsideration of sculptural processes, a redefinition of its parameters. They resulted from a questioning of assumptions that, determining a contemporary sculptural style, had acquired the status of a sculptural ontology. Recognizing this, one understands the nature of and reasons for, the critical crisis induced by his work, the asperity of criticism it elicited, the character of the rhetoric revived in debate. Questioning the distinction, the boundary instituted by traditional aesthetics between virtual and real space, the work was in reality—the reality of this particular aesthetic context—transgressive. Demanding an attentiveness in time for its apprehension, it impelled, as well, a shift of emphasis in notions of value, as of gratification. It is the consistency and clarity of its logic, the variety and amplitude of its development, the intellectual trajectory described by that development which gives pleasure. That clarity and consistency, the steadiness and assurance of that trajectory, and, above all, the manner in which our notion of what sculpture may be, is extended—these are the gauge of a “quality,” defined as “concrete reasonableness.” The strategies adopted for this redefinition, then, involved most immediately the use of strongly unitary forms, of highly ordered relatively simple shapes (cubes, slabs, cylinders, irregular polyhedrons), the elimination of color and of textural accident. Working first in plywood painted gray, Morris later turned to fiberglass, preferring its durability and, above all, its malleability, the fact that, unlike lumber, it possessed no prior built-in form of its own. (As we shall see, that quality of malleability will retain Morris’s interest throughout his work.)

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The predominant focus of his early work is on the “simple,” assertive sculptural shape, the strong gestalt as a body occupying space, on the modes of that occupancy and of its perception. A slab descending from a ceiling to eye level or slightly raised from the gallery ground may intrude, as it were, through placing, on a space not actually occupied by it (as in Cloud). Our sense of the situation oscillates between our view of its particularity, of its volume, clearly precisely defined, its regularity of surface articulated in, filling, just that space—no more—and another view or sense, of a fact “quasi-physical” in nature, our sense that its placing gives it a hold or possession over the empty space directly below it. That real space below is “really” empty; it is, however, “virtually” occupied. Not wholly inaccessible, it is nevertheless subtracted, as it were, from our space. The kind of feeling involved is contingent upon, but not entirely coincident with, what we term an “objective fact”; it coincides with our sense of the “object,” eliciting an awareness whose dimensions and coordinates define the field of investigation proper to topological psychology.18 Positing a virtual boundary, the placing and presence of the slab intensifies our sense of our real space—and of what a boundary is. Consider the Corner Piece. Perceived as a plane, it is the broadest side of a triangle, obtruding ultimately into a primary sense of available space. The plane stands in the way of, on our way to, the corner. Subverting and intruding upon the angle, it forces recognition of that angle. Now, the space enveloping and sustaining the apprehension of these structures is a space common to object and beholder. The corner of the Corner Piece is the corner of the gallery space in which we stand, in which we are enclosed. That space subtracted from us by a slab is real; one might stand in it. It hovers over an area of floor on which one might stand. The space absorbed, reflected by the mirrored cubes is that of the gallery in which we now stand, perceiving ourselves as standing—and as perceiving. In these instances, then, the central focus of attention is the manner of the solicitation—through placing, scale, unity of shape, volume, the nature of materials and of the spectator’s sensed relationship of the self as a perceiving, corporeal presence, to the object in question: the sense of copresence. The convention or fiction sustaining the sculpture and criticism of a preceding generation had been the notion of a space that was the medium of a predominantly visual and synthetic perception, which is to say, it posited a sculpture that, addressing itself to the eye, elicited a

Foreground: Robert Morris, Two Columns, 1961. Painted plywood, destroyed. Refabricated 1973: painted aluminum, two units, each 96 × 24 × 24 inches. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Background: Robert Morris, Untitled (Corner Piece), 1964. Painted plywood, 78 inches high, 108 inches wide. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection. Photo courtesy of Sprueth Magers Berlin London. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

reading, a synthetic recomposing, creating, projecting a synthesized virtual space, distinct from that of nonaesthetic experience, the development and maintaining of this distinction (whose value, like that of all conventions or fictions of its kind) is to be measured by the interest of the art for which it served as a working hypothesis, by its usefulness within a given historical framework) seems, indeed, to have animated the development of the very finest of post-cubist sculpture. It is, however, in the nature of aesthetic assumptions and of working hypotheses to be limited and particular in value, and the evolution of Morris’s work from approximately 1963 on points to an awareness of this. III

The things of the mind which are not comprehended through the senses are vain and beget invisible truths, only. —Leonardo da Vinci

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Suggesting that this distinction and its consequences did not define the limits of contemporary enterprise, Morris’s work implied that the sculptural style in question represented one option among others, that it did not by any means exhaust the possibilities of sculptural renewal, that it perpetuated, in fact, certain assumptions that demanded to be questioned in the interest of that renewal’s continuity. It is the nature of virtual space to be entirely distinct from the space in which we live and act.19 It is, then, not an operational space, nor the space of experience, but of vision. The sculptor conceives of the work and the world of his imagination as spatial in terms of three-dimensional volumes; the actual existence of a sculpture is conditioned by its relation to its surrounding space. But “space” in that sense must not be understood as a physical, geometrical, or philosophical concept. Neither the geometrical concept of three-dimensional space nor the physicist’s theory of four-dimensional unity of space-time is applicable. These are derived from abstract thought. “Virtual space is self-contained, a total system, entirely independent, not a local area in actual space. Sculptural form is a powerful abstraction from actual objects, and the three-dimensional space which we construe by means of them through touch and sight. It makes its own construction in three dimensions, namely the semblance of kinetic sight.”20 Sculpture creates “the primary illusion,” a visual space that is “not a space of direct vision; for volume is really given originally to touch, both haptic touch and contact limited to bodily movement, and the business of sculpture is to translate its data into entirely visual terms, i.e., to make tactual space visible.”21 Confronting sculptures such as those by Robert Morris, the beholder perceives an object whose mass and volume, whose scale and structure are, in their compactness and clarity, perceived as providing not a focus for a synthetic reading, but as being copresent with himself. Attention to the simplicity of its structure, to its qualities, directs him back, as it were, upon the quality of his perception. The inner rehearsal of its modes, of the aspects and parameters of that perception, conduces to an experience of a reflective nature. Every aspect of that experience— the “reduction” on which it is posited, its reflexiveness, the manner in which it illuminates the nature of our feeling and knowing through an object, a spatial situation, suggests an aesthetic analogy to the posture and method of phenomenological inquiry, as it is familiar to us in the tradition of contemporary philosophy. It is the commitment to the exact

particularity of experience, to the experience of a sculptural object as inextricably involved with the sense of self and of that space which is their common dwelling, which characterizes these strategies as radical. Morris’s questioning of a self-contained system of virtual space is impelled by a recognition of the most profound and general sense in which our seeing is linked to our sense of ourselves as being bodies in space, knowing space through the body. Acknowledging sight as more and other than seeing, he proposes that we take serious account of the fact that “to perceive is to render one’s self present to something through the body,”22 suggesting that we recognize that “if it seems absurd to say that the world is understood by the body because to understand is to subsume a particular set of impressions under a general concept, then in the face of the evidence we must either re-examine our notion of ‘understand’ or of ‘the body.’ Knowing, then, is the body’s functioning in a given environment.”23 The consequences of the acknowledgment were a deflection of the direction taken by sculpture in the 1950s. That direction and the lineaments of its sculptural style had been described by Clement Greenberg in an essay entitled “The New Sculpture.”24 Published in 1948 and reprinted in 1958, it spans a decade of sculptural expectations that were, apart from the work of Smith (and the mature work of Caro done somewhat later), to be deceived. Claiming first that Brancusi had exhausted the monolithic sculptural form, returning sculpture to the arms of architecture, Mr. Greenberg set forth an account of the developments, reversals, and paradoxes of the sculptural situation as it now appeared to him. Under the modernist “reduction” sculpture has turned out to be almost as exclusively visual in its essence as painting itself. It has been “liberated” from the monolithic as much because of the latter’s excessive tactile associations, which now partake of illusion, as because of the hampering conventions that cling to it. But sculpture is still permitted a greater latitude of figurative allusiveness than painting because it remains tied, inexorably, to the third dimension and is therefore inherently less illusionistic. The literalness that was once its handicap has now become its advantage. Any recognizable image is bound to be tainted with illusion, and modernist sculpture, too, has been impelled a long way toward abstractness, yet sculpture can continue to suggest recognizable images, at least schematically,

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if only it refrains from imitating organic substance (the illusion of organic substance or texture in sculpture being analogous to the illusion of the third dimension in pictorial art). And even should sculpture be compelled eventually to become as abstract as painting, it would still have a large realm of formal possibilities at its command. The human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art; now it is eyesight alone, and eyesight has more freedom of movement and invention within three dimensions than two. It is significant, moreover, that modernist sensibility, though it rejects sculptural painting of any kind, allows sculpture to be as pictorial as it pleases. Here the prohibition against one’s art entering the domain of another is suspended, thanks to the unique concreteness and literalness of sculpture’s medium. Sculpture can confine itself to virtually two dimensions (as some of David Smith’s pieces do) without being felt to violate the dimensions of its medium, because the eye recognizes that what offers itself in two dimensions is actually (not palpably) fashioned in three. … The desire for “purity” works, as I have indicated, to put an even higher premium on sheer visibility and an even lower one on the tactile and its associations, which include that of weight as well as of impermeability. One of the most fundamental and unifying emphases of the new common style is on the continuity and neutrality of a space that light alone inflects, without regard to the laws of gravity. … A related emphasis is on economy of physical substance, which manifests itself in the pictorial tendency to reduce all matter to two dimensions—to lines and surfaces that define or enclose space but hardly occupy it. To render substance entirely optical and form, whether pictorial, sculptural or architectural, as an integral part of ambient space—this brings anti-illusionism full circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of modalities: namely that matter is incorporeal, weightless and exists only optically like a mirage.25 Morris’s work appears almost as a point-by-point contestation of these claims, challenging the assertion that Brancusi had exhausted the monolith as sculptural form, challenging, as well, the statement as to “the ever higher premium of sheer visibility and lower one of the tactile,” “the growing disregard of laws of gravity.” Affirming these, affirming, above

all, the specificity of the medium, contesting the pictorially derived nature of its direction, he proceeded to propose, in sculptural form, the terms of a renewal. Morris had painted until 1959, when that aspiration to a seamless identity of process and work began to raise questions, heightening a sense of contradiction at the core of a medium that converts process into static object. It is the contradiction that haunts contemporary art and philosophy alike. By 1961 he had, however, begun making sculpture. The first two pieces known to me are a Column and the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, exhibited in 1963. The shift from painting to sculpture gained momentum through an involvement in theatre work, in a directly temporal medium in which the articulation of process was naturally less fundamentally problematic. The Column in question was, in fact, designed for a performance with La Monte Young at the Living Theater, and intended to be placed vertically for three-and-one-half minutes, horizontally for three. These placements, changes of direction over specified amounts of time provided, as it were, a first source of elementary information about conditions for modification of a given space. The L-shaped pieces exhibited in 1965 at the Green Gallery (originally designed as a group of nine, reduced to seven, and subsequently to three) would appear to have evolved out of this first sculptural work. Later work in dance provided occasions for focus on specific problems of body and objects displaced in time. Morris was, from this point on, to be involved in a multiple effort; I wish to isolate three aspects. The first involves the preoccupation with Process, as rendered throughout an extraordinary abundance of relatively small sculptures. The results of this work pursued over the next several years were redirected, through other materials and on quite another scale, transported, extending into the present. This work is, in fact, so abundant and varied that, in isolating aspects of it, one has a feeling of unintentionally scanting its variety. Of the “process” works, the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making was the first. And its juxtaposition with Column, on the very threshold of Morris’s sculptural career, plainly indicates the double path of his development. The Box was eventually followed by Card File, a work whose elements are composed of the notations inscribed on filing cards and detailing the steps taken in its composition. Seamlessness involved, then, circularity, the elaboration of formal modes of tautology.

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Process is articulated as well, however, within the context of selfpresentation, self-exposure, through the visible trace, the “indexical” sign, that of the body’s involvement in the making of a work. Thus one can contrast the use of an “iconic” presentation of the self in I-Box, an I-shaped box that opens to reveal a photograph of the artist, nude, with the “indexical” presentation of the body in imprint, such as Hand and Toe-Hold, or the cast that fuses both, as in an untitled piece of 1963 involving the artist’s fist and a glove. A final culminating “indexical” work is an electrodeencephalogram, the nerve processes recorded in time. The entire development evolves within the context of the dialectic of contradiction, paradox, or tautology, whose articulations render palpable the terms of irony. Thus, the glove designed to envelop the hand is placed inside of the drawer on top of which that hand reposes, the presentation of Fresh Air, bottled, an untitled work that bears instructions “to leave key on hook inside cabinet.”

Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961. Walnut box, speaker, tape, 9¾ × 9¾ × 9¾ inches. Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle. Gift of Bagley and Virginia Wright. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Scanting the abundance of this work, one scants the richness of the iconography, the precise articulation of the relation to the work of Duchamp and Johns—a task that, one is certain, will engage the art historians of the very near future. I am, for the moment, concerned with setting forth a few of the most general terms for thinking about his work and with indicating the manner in which the formal and conceptual character of these objects provided Morris with a field for an early personal achievement. Passing from the elaboration of an iconography of paradox and of process into another sculptural mode and dimension, he retains, as a prime concern, the engagement with and the awareness of the body’s presence. The threshold of this passage, marking the change from the figuring, recording, tracing of bodily presence to the more radical conception of structural space and a sculptural form that would evoke the bodily sense, is marked by a change of scale and a new morphology, by the elaboration of the forms that came to be known as “minimalist.” It is in sculptures such as Portal (1961), Barrier, the “L-shaped pieces,” Cloud, and Corner Piece, among others, that this passage is effected. It was facilitated, as we have seen by work in theatre and by two or three other factors as well: 1.  A growing interest in the nature of materials and forming processes as presenting new sculptural potential. 2.  A growing awareness of certain historical achievements and precedents. 3.  Contingent upon these two factors, a developing intuition of the manner in which preoccupation with process and bodily awareness could be shifted and redirected in a renewal of contact with the idiom of contemporary abstraction. The shift acts, as well, to detach him provisionally from the zone of Duchamp’s influence. Morris’s relation to Duchamp’s work is, however, except for that initial interval, essentially analogous to that of a composer returning to a master’s themes as to a repertory of sources for profoundly innovative variations. Or, one might say, Duchamp’s work constitutes a text, whose interpretative reading is Morris’s uniquely personal accomplishment. Here, then, are six themes, originating in Duchamp’s work, used, transposed, throughout Morris’s work:

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Robert Morris, I-Box (closed), 1962. Painted plywood cabinet, sculpmetal, photograph, 19 × 12¾ × 1 inches. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

1.  Transparency, translucency, reflection. Seeing a work as into, through it, or past it. The Green Box contains a note for “parts to look at/cross-eyed/like a piece of silvered glass/in which are reflected the objects in the room/.”26 (Morris’s intuition heightens that tension in the startling manner discussed in the opening section of Part II of this essay.) Recent sculptures, however, such as an untitled work of 1968 in expanded aluminum, extend the notion of the surface of The Large Glass, whose viewing involves the view of that which is occurring on its farther side as well. Looking at it, we see into, through it.

Robert Morris, I-Box (open), 1962. Painted plywood cabinet, sculpmetal, photograph, 19 × 12¾ × 1³∕8 inches. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2.  The reconstructed, revised found object. The bicycle wheel of Duchamp, doubled, revised, reconstructed, as it were. Twice as nonfunctional, Morris’s wheels are doubly abstracted from function by their huge scale. 3.  Subversion of measure. A fundamental tactic in Duchamp’s work, synthesizing use of process, chance, and the dialectic of aesthetic and commodity value. Duchamp conceived the Three Standard Stoppages, which presents three long narrow sheets of glass to which strips of cloth have been glued. Each sheet serves as background for a length of thread. All are contained in a croquet box.

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Executed with extraordinary care and attention to detail, this device was intended to fix the units of measurement of Duchamp’s new physics (it is, as we know a pata-physics), according to the formulation of the fundamental law which governs it: … a straight horizontal thread one meter in length falls from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane while twisting at will and gives a new form to the unit of length. When the thread fell three times in succession the lines so formed were transferred and fixed to the three panes of glass and served as a pattern for three wooden rules, thus creating the scientific basis for an average unit.27 Duchamp’s ironic casuality. The subversion of measure is a matter of considerable importance and complexity. The question arises, what is the measurement of the unit in the first place? How long is a foot, in other words? You might hold up your own foot as an answer, but your foot hasn’t always been the same size. … Even if you are past the age of growth, a foot is slightly longer in hot weather than in cold. And even if that weren’t so, your foot isn’t exactly the same length of your neighbor’s. Which is the real foot? Obviously, what is needed is some foot measurement that doesn’t vary from person to person or from time to time. To settle disputes, the ruler of a city might say, “The foot is as long as my foot and no one else’s.” (There is a legend that our foot was originally the length of the feet of Charlemagne, who was a tall person.)28 All societies are careful to control measures and preserve fixed standards. Production in the modern world depends on the accuracy of measure for the identical dimension of bolts, wrenches, and parts that make mass production possible. The subversion of measure is a kind of primary theme in Duchamp as in Morris. It is linked to the notion of process (the measure creating itself through chance, falling) and more particularly to the creation of a socially critical dimension of irony. The subversion of measure is the subversion of so much else as well. In an untitled lead piece of 1964, Morris presents two rulers, of slightly uneven lengths, both nevertheless measuring twenty-four inches (two feet in length) together with the

imprint of two feet, presumably left and right, of unequal size. As an instance of the manner in which distances of all kinds and their measurement have their origins in the measurement of the body, and as an indication, too, of the manner in which the notion of measure is subverted in its origin, it is linked as well to the notion of aesthetic value as commodity and to the framing process. 4.  Framing. To the process of creation and aesthetic value through framing and signing, Morris brought the notion of process as reversible, unframing, deflating value through signature, extracting by fiat the aesthetic value from a work already in existence. Thus, in an untitled document (1963), the following text: “Statement of esthetic withdrawal. The undersigned, Robert Morris, being the maker of the metal construction entitled Litanies, described in the annexed Exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all esthetic quality and content, and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such quality and content. Dated November 15, 1963. Signed by Robert Morris, signed by Notary Public.” Exhibit A is a relief or “index” of an existing work. That is to say, it describes or outlines (in relief) the contours or limits of aesthetic quality and content. The document is the recording of the reversal of a process, the effacing of something. 5.  Art as money: counterfeiting and investment. Duchamp issued The Tzanck Check for $115.00 in 1919 in payment for dental treatment in Paris. (A preliminary pencil sketch for this check belongs to Mme. Suzanne Crooti, Nueilly. Now in the collection of Mr. Daniel Tzanck in Paris, it was bought back by Duchamp and sold again.) Duchamp had also issued coupons designed to be given to the couplers of the Monte Carlo Casino. Both are reproduced in Lebel’s catalogue raisonné of Duchamp’s work.29 The artist as counterfeiter was condemned to seeing his work turn to gold. Midas appears, then, not as collector as one might have thought, but rather as artist. A Morris project, exhibited as a work at the Whitney Museum during a group exhibition of the spring 1969 season, was the typed signed agreement and correspondence relative to the proposal by Morris to the Museum’s Direction of an investment plan, to be considered as his contribution to that exhibition. 6.  Ecology as order and/or chance: In The Green Box, we find the following notation by Duchamp: “Establish a society in which the individual has to pay for the air he breathes/airmeter: imprisonment and

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rarefied air, in case of non-payment/simple asphyxiation if necessary (cut off the air).”30 This was revised in the Morris project for controlled change of temperature. More striking is Morris’s reading of Elevage de Poussiere, dated and photographed by Man Ray: “The Dust Breeding or Dust Raising had been intended for the sieves in the Bachelor Machine. It finally took shape thanks to Man Ray’s photograph of the Large Glass lying flat.”31 Morris’s project for creation of a “dust cloud” suggests a kind of synthetic pun, a huge-scaled literalization of Duchamp’s conceit, a double “translating” of process into the space of landscape. The making of objects and the transformation of terrain through the articulation of process and chance define the range of Morris’s engagement with Duchamp. That engagement provides a fulcrum for a shifting from the so-called literalism of formal transposition to a literalized reinvention of conceits.

Robert Morris, Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal, 1963. Typed and notarized statement on paper and lead over wood, mounted in imitation leather mat, 17⅝ × 23¾ inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

IV

Mathematicians, clarify this matter if you will: The mind is voiceless, for there exists no voice not conjoined with body, and where there is body, there is occupying of space so that one cannot see beyond it, and the surrounding air is filled with this body—filled, that is, with its images. —Leonardo da Vinci I have suggested that Morris’s experience of theatre had facilitated the transition to his first strong sculptural work. I wish now to deal, somewhat generally, with the manner in which it is likely to have influenced his sense of materials, of movement, of placement, of process. The general context of this work was the activity of a group of artists, mostly young, engaged during the mid-l960s in a process analogous to that underlying Morris’s early sculptural effort. They were involved in a reassessment of the dance aesthetics and dance style of the West. That reassessment turned on considerations that parallel those obtaining for the distinction between virtual and real space in the sculptural situation. Balletic style—indeed, almost all dance style—was predicated on the distinction between a time one might call virtual as against a time that is operational, the time of experience, of our actions in the world. This questioning was initiated by Merce Cunningham and radicalized through the work of Yvonne Rainer, Simone Whitman, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, and others, working and performing in New York in the mid-1960s. Their common aim was the establishment of a radically new economy of movement. This required a systematic critique of the rhetoric, the conventions, the aesthetic hierarchies imposed by traditional or classical balletic forms. That rhetoric was, in fact, reversed, destroyed in what has come to be known as the “dance of ordinary language” and of “task performance.” The correlative of virtual, sculptural space, then, is the rhythmic, mimetic time of traditional dance and theatre. Its nature was explored by Valéry, the poet who, more than any other in this century, had acknowledged the central importance and the philosophic character of dance, in a text written not—as was his habit—in celebration of Terpsichore, but in homage to an actual dancer—La Argentina.

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It seems … that this person who is dancing encloses herself as it were in a time that she engenders, a time consisting, as it were, entirely of immediate energy, of nothing that can last. She is the unstable element, she squanders instability, she goes beyond the impossible and overdoes the improbable; and by denying the ordinary state of things, she creates in men’s minds the idea of another, exceptional state—a state that is all action, a permanence built up and consolidated by an incessant effort, comparable to the vibrant pose of a bumble bee or moth exploring the calyx of a flower, charged with motor energy, sustained in virtual immobility by the incredibly swift beat of its wings. … The body seems to have broken free from its usual state of balance. It seems to be trying to outwit— I should say outrace—its own weight, at every moment evading its pull, not to say its sanction. This detachment from the environment, this absence of aim, this negation of explicable movement, these full turns which no circumstance of ordinary life demands of our body—even this impersonal smile—all these features are radically opposed to those that characterize our action in the practical world and our relation to it. The dance moves in a self-contained realm of its own and implies no reason, no tendency toward completion. A formula for pure dance should include nothing to suggest that it has an end. It is terminated by outside events; its limits in time are not intrinsic to it.32 The New Dance set out, in much the same manner as the New Sculpture of the 1960s, to contest point for point this aesthetic, these conventions that had acquired, as it were, an ontological status, by rehabilitating, installing within the dance texture, the task, the operational movement whose quality is determined by the specific practicality of its character. Instituting games—and rules for games—within the dance fabric, it engendered a specific logic of movement—and, of course, the possibility of that logic’s reversal. Using found materials and the principle of found materials transposed into terms of movement, using techniques of disjunction, setting movement against sound, sound against music and against speech, operational movement against recorded movement (film), it distended the arena of organized movement, installing within the dance situation a real or operational time, redefining it as situation within which an action may take the time it takes to perform that action. Neither self-contained

nor engendered by predetermined rhythmic or rhetorical patterns, it was not “synthetic.” The time of the New Dance brought into play, through an apparent process of ascesis, a multiplicity of new possibilities, revising the vocabulary of movement through a rethinking of the problem of energy release, its syntax through structural disjunctions. The nature of Morris’s engagement in dance was complex. Certain concerns already visible in his sculpture were explored. One would suppose, however, that a primary and general interest of this work—quite apart from the particular insights it provided—lay in the total coincidence of work and process that could resolve that initial malaise engendered by the contradiction at the heart of painting. Neither icon (such as the I-Box) nor index (electrode-encephalogram) could afford that totality of fusion. Nor could they quite exhaust the dialectic of masking and self-presentation, attain the immediacy of a devouring temporality; nor did they offer what was, perhaps, the ultimate temptation of reconverting pure process into something palpable, dance into object. Paralleling the critique Morris had initiated through his sculpture, questioning the virtual time of dance as he had questioned the virtual space of sculpture, the New Dance, evolving in a more marginal, less structured, more precarious, social situation, affords thereby a particularly privileged instance of an ascesis performed upon an art form by its artists, an ascesis of a profoundly philosophic character. The New Dance and sculpture (emerging in a culture whose literature of the last two decades has been regressive) converges with the New Novel of France (emerging in a culture whose dance and sculpture have been retrogressive) in the systematic focusing upon the ways of organizing and apprehending the movement of bodies in space. A central focus for modern epistemological inquiry. Sculpture, dance, and narrative are joined in a contemporary style whose common origin is the intensified awareness of that apprehension, “that exquisite satisfaction that it is just this thing, very concrete and very much there, that is what is happening.” This confirms Peirce’s declaration that “the artist’s observational power is what is most wanted in the study of phenomenology, his faculty of seeing what stares one in the face, just as it presents itself, unreplaced by an interpretation, unsophisticated by an allowance for this or for that supposed, modifying circumstance. … A resolute discrimination which fastens itself like a bulldog upon the particular feature that we are studying, follows it wherever it may lurk, and detects it beneath all its disguises.”33

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V

Therefore, the clarification of geometry is, whether or not one is aware of it, the disclosure of its historical tradition. —Edmund Husserl It is the resolute elimination of presuppositions (a resolution conditioned by an acute historical awareness) that confers a philosophical dimension on all these efforts. Philosophic discourse has its ritualistic origin in that drawing back from the process and fabric of existence, as someone says, “Take an object—a bottle, table, a cube—or a person. What is it that I apprehend, what is the relation of that which I apprehend to that which is, how does my partial, multiple experience of the object account for my intimation of a single manifest reality? Is that experience subsumed in a single manifest reality?” That movement of inquiry was to be intensified, radicalized in this century’s rejection of a reality conceived as unknowable, the refusal of the duality of appearance and reality, the insistence on the description of that which is directly given in experience as the condition of knowledge, on the reflective examination of the modes and qualities of consciousness as articulating and constituting the real. Analytic cubism’s gesture toward this resolution was its figuration of the object apprehended in space, for which Leonardo’s extraordinary observation on the perception of solids reads as an inspired caption. Figuring the multiplicity of aspect, the “profiles” of an object perceived in space, cubism necessarily creates an entity at variance with our experience of the object in time. Braque was right: “Painting is the constitution of a pictorial fact,” and the disparity in question is the very condition of Cubism’s progress toward a radically pictorial space. Thus Malevich, discussing the “Spatial Cubist” painters (those who had exhibited in Moscow’s epoch-making Knave of Diamonds exhibition of 1912, which had predated the Blaue Reiter show in Munich by six months), says that “it is in speaking of the return to the model itself [and he has in mind perhaps the manner in which that phrase echoes phenomenology’s call for a return ‘to things themselves’] that the question may arise as to whether we should see this deviation as a striving to convey the ‘as suchness of the object.’ This would be a great mistake. Under no

circumstances should one look for objectivity or ‘the object as such’ in the work of these masters; one should see only the formula of the object with the help of which the artist’s sensations are formed.”34 Cubism corresponded, then, as representation, to that relatively early “objectivist” stage of phenomenological method which produced the obsessive encircling of the object—the object of common use as Object of Knowledge. The analytic articulation of the Table, the Bottle, the Guitar, has, when seen in this particular light, the aspect of those classroom exercises that are said to have absorbed Husserl’s students. They constitute an overture to a more radically conceived investigation of the nature of consciousness. “The Idealists,” Hulme had said, “analyze space into a mode of arranging sensations. But this gives us an unimaginable world existing all at a point. Why not try the reverse process and put all ideas (purely mental states) in terms of space (cf. landscape thinking)?”35 That which Hulme called “landscape thinking” tends really toward the eliciting of certain states and intensities of awareness, through the structuring of situations. (The metaphor is convertible into that of “theatre.”) It is this which impels an artist to posit a work as being perhaps less “self-important”—though “no less important.”36 Conceived as one term of a situation in which the spectator constitutes another, the work of art, through a certain stringency of form, redirects attention, heightening consciousness of what it is to attend and to perceive. It is this concern which generates the increasingly specific focus, the growing variety of form and materials which characterize Morris’s work of the past four years. Ways of looking at and seeing are proposed by forming, shaping, placing, stacking, and scattering, strategies which increase structural possibilities. Materials and the nature of industrial forming processes are explored in works of felt and fiberglass, expanded aluminum and cold rolled steel, threadwaste and earth, proposing relations of parts to whole, of form to forming process articulated or concealed of opacity to translucency. The parameters of description multiply. Thus an expanded aluminum piece, untitled, of 1968, in six parts, one of the most sumptuous in a series of elegant works, produces an optical shimmer and patterning through the play of its subtly latticed surfaces, shifting as one moves, above and around it, each of its six units perceptible as one half of a curve, comprehended in one larger, articulated slow curve, supported by two six-part vertical units only three feet

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high. Principles of industrial cutting patterns are then transposed into the felt pieces, which, exhibited as a group, play out the variations of articulation and concealment of the cutting process—depending on their size, length, and, above all, on the degree to which their fall is controlled. Thus the systematic cutting of one large piece is jumbled by the kind of visual static that ensues upon its being dropped to the floor, while another, depending from the wall, reveals quite clearly that it has been cut into vertical strips. A series of nine translucent fiberglass sleeves (48″ by 24″ by 24″, set 12″ apart), texturally very rich, are apprehended only within a whole when seen from that point from which their outer limits will describe a lozenge shape. An untitled translucent fiberglass piece of 1968, when placed, as I originally saw it, against the white wall of the downstairs room of the Castelli Gallery, presented the most intriguing problems of description. A hollow translucent frame can be perceived as framing the frame of the space beyond it. In 1965, Morris had made a four-part untitled work in fiberglass, each part measuring three feet by three feet by two feet. It suggests a structural variation of the “mirrored cubes,” of that same year. These forms are, however, irregular polyhedrons, so placed that the space between them describes a regular cross on the ground on which they stand. The distance between them (approximately one and a half feet) is such that they are perceived as involved, alternately, in centripetal and centrifugal movement, in a state of irresolution that is experienced as stable, definitive. One sees them as discrete and as related parts, as separate and as comprehended in one trapezo-hedral form. One’s sense of that comprehensive form is enhanced by the manner in which the inner surfaces are unable to fuse in a seamlessness that is almost promised us, as it were, by the perfection of surface, precision of edges and corners, by the angle of inner surfaces rising from the floor, implying that their mutual alignment is not problematic as would be that of the outer surfaces. Those inner surfaces are not apprehended as existing logically prior to their fusion, but as chronologically prior. That is, it is their discreteness which immediately asserts itself, heightening our sense of a unity which one hesitates to characterize as fundamental, essential, potential—and the hesitation over the adjective indicates the existence of a perceptual frontier where logic and chronology overlap in ambiguity. It is the tension between parts seen as related wholes and the whole

Robert Morris, Nine Fiberglass Sleeves, 1967. Fiberglass, 481/16 × 24 × 24 inches. Photograph provided by Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

seen as a relation of parts which freezes the centrifugal-centripetal movement in that stability of irresolution. This is a field of investigation to which Morris will return. Through this work, among others, Morris questions the exhaustion of the monolith, and in a manner that evokes, with particular clarity and interest, those late works by Brancusi which are situated on a frontier between architecture and sculpture, those which nevertheless reveal Brancusi’s ability to invest an architectural situation with a specifically sculptural character. The catalog for the Exhibition of Abstract and Surrealist Art held in Zurich in 1921 had included Brancusi’s project for the Endless Column. It was presented once again in his second New York exhibition at the Brummer Gallery in 1933. Brancusi was later commissioned by Premier George Tatresco of Rumania to erect a full-scale version of the Endless Column, the Gate of the Kiss, and the Table of Silence at Targu Jiu. A model of the Endless Column was sent to Rumania and cast in steel. Stone cutters

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reproduced the Table of Silence and the Gate of the Kiss. It was his first venture into the situation of “fabrication,” his first work to be executed by someone other than himself. It was the scale of the works which demanded this. The Gate of the Kiss is over sixteen feet high, and the Table of Silence is a drum measuring over seven feet in diameter. That seven-foot drum is set on a cylinder placed in a recess so that one’s impression of the work, when viewed in standing position, would be that of an echoing of the table’s circular surface by the twelve tops of the stools placed around it, that of the large circle subsuming the smaller ones. The stools had apparently been placed around the table in pairs, and were later distributed evenly around the drum surface, thus no doubt reenforcing our sense of this. Brancusi had conceived the idea for the structure of the stools when placing two halves of an orange, one above the other, with rounded surfaces touching. The stools, while appearing to be made of reassembled halves of a sphere, are almost four inches taller than the sphere of their diameter. Keeping this disparity in mind, one is inclined to feel that all the elements of this ensemble have the look of being out of the same kind of shape, that the table’s thickness is logically accounted for, or deduced in terms of, that shape and dimension of a sphere reassembled, but no longer quite a sphere. The same public park of Targu Jiu contains a stone bench surrounded, in turn, by stools, and, of course, the Endless Column. The bench is composed of what might be two solid rectangular forms juxtaposed so that the back is formed by the larger form, standing on its shorter side; the back is, so far as I can judge, approximately twice the height of the seat. And the surrounding stools repeat the relation of the stools to Table of Silence with an interesting modification. That is, they are rhomboid forms, echoing those of the Endless Column. Like the stools around the Table of Silence, on the other hand, they, too, are halved and inverted so that their tops are square, as if deriving from the rectangular form of the bench. These three groups, then, are joined in a series of relationships of part to whole which culminates, as it were, in the Endless Column. That column is described by Sidney Geist in the following manner: The elements of the Endless Column do not diminish in size as they mount. The persistence of shape and size, the constancy of repetition cause the column to remain near to the mind as it moves off

from the eye. We have here a poetry of the actual without illusion or compensation, without tapering or entasis. The tension between the sameness of what is known and the perspectival variety in what is seen is unique in art. When seen from nearby the apparent changes in the drawing, from the different angles of vision at which the different elements are seen, are remarkable.37 It is the sensed virtual character of a gesture that divides Morris’s polyhedron that creates a relative complexity, a complexity which is visible, actualized in the discreteness of the four forms converging as it were into that polyhedron. Questioning the exhaustion of the monolith, Morris renews its formal potential, installing it, through scale and placing, in a space which is, as I suggested, real, the space of action. It is the movement, the direction of that installation together with the systematic investigation of the syntactical possibilities of new materials and forming processes, which allies Morris’s work to that of the revolutionary tradition of constructivism—to that of Tatlin and Rodchenko in particular. It is the conception of a “culture of materials,” as extending the possibilities of sculptural form, the realization that “a certain rationalization of processes in the abstract organization of those materials is common to the work of artist and engineer.” Above all, it is the preoccupation with the extension of sculptural form into the space of action. Tatlin’s debt to cubism, like that of all the Russian artists of the revolutionary generation, was great. Returning in 1913 from a visit to Paris, and most importantly from a direct encounter with Picasso, he proceeded, in his “Counter Reliefs” and “Corner Reliefs” of 1914– 1917 to work in a mode whose radicalism far transcended that of his preceding painting and theatre designs. Using found materials, he proceeds in a work such as Complex Corner Relief (1915) in a manner very different from Gabo’s celluloid construction in which the corner space is used as a perspective conceit to frame a Woman’s Head. Looking at these two works, one senses the elation with which Tatlin must have conceived this deployment of materials as a joining of wall areas, signaling real space as the new scene of sculptural enterprise. Tatlin’s work, caught subsequently within the dialectic of the “aesthetic” and the “functional,” moves into the real space of the functional while preserving the aesthetic nonfunctional character of sculpture: toward the constitution of “sculptural facts” in

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the world of functional fact. This is nowhere clearer than in the ambiguity of the debate surrounding the nature and “purpose” of the Monument to the Third International (1920), and the glider, Letatlin, the work which occupied his last years. Malevich, commenting upon Tatlin’s work after his return from Paris, describes a number of “boards” as taking on “a completely new texture of artistic sensation, whilst preserving their ‘as suchness’ or nature. From this we can conclude that spatial painting still continues to exist, and it is on this that we should fix our attention, since this feature in his work is terminal in the conception of pure, spatial, pictorial expression.” “Remarking that it is terminal, we see that it is beginning to acquire a different aim and purpose. … We note that Cubist features, far from disappearing, remain present but that the forming of materials now follows the formula or utilization functions.” And in another, later passage: Tatlin passes over the utilitarian significance of his Monument for the Third International, stresses that this is nothing other than a construction of the materials, iron and glass. What was important for the author was not so much the combination of the monument’s utilitarian functions as the combination of its artistic side with the materials—plus function. The Constructive combination of these functions were based on the Cubist formula, and it is according to this that the work is formed. In such phenomena no utilitarian function ever played a predominant part, but only a painterly one, as such. If we are faced by the fact that life, as utilitarian function, has in itself no formula on the basis of which works of new art could be formed; on the contrary, we see that the formulae of the various trends in new art, create functions of a utilitarian nature.38 That relation of artist to engineer, of form to function, defines the space of constructivism—and of the debate which raged around the Monument for the Third International. The Complex Corner Relief is a first intrusion into the real space later to be more fully occupied by the Monument. One must remember that this work erupts on the horizon of Russian art as the culminating work of a period following immediately upon that of a predominantly “expressive” aesthetic. Punin sees the

Monument as functional, as an “organic synthesis of the principles of architecture, sculpture and painting”; Ehrenberg, as an expression of the “dynamic Tomorrow” surrounded by the poverty of the present. Shklovsky reads it as a formal structure with its own immanent logic, which is to say its own semantics. For Trotsky, it is a nonfunctional intrusion, a luxury in the devastated city of the postrevolutionary period. The Monument provoked a discussion which recalls, in fact, those who greeted the appearance of Morris’s early work. It was a kind of “primary structure” for its contemporaries. Proposing a sculpture as inhabiting the space of function, it transgresses, disconcerts, much as those cubes and beams of 1963 and 1965 did. Sculptures such as the untitled sculpture in aluminum I-beams of 1967, or in aluminum plate are, on the other hand, like the Monument, spaces without hiding places, structures which conceal nothing, implemented by a technology unavailable to the Soviet artist in the austerity of the early 1920s. For an artist of the ’60s, working in the expanded technology and the political constriction of the ’60s, it is Shklovsky’s program, that of a “semantics” of construction, which can be retained. Therefore the interest in the “culture of materials,” the preoccupation with placing as arrangement, stacking, joining, juxtaposing, consistent with an interest in the grammar of construction. Thus a series of units fabricated in fiberglass, exhibited over a three-week period in 1967, proposed a succession of topological variations comprehended within a generally grammatical context. Rodchenko’s Construction of Distance, its form resembling that of Morris’s Barrier of 1962, suggests itself as a fine early use of forms as modules, as a precedent in the revival of a primitive construction process of stacking, a base syntactical instance of a formal grammar. Working with this group of units, Morris was able to establish the variety of manners in which the joining of curved and straight surfaces, relation of outer surface to shape of inner enclosure, could be played out on a series of symmetrically shaped ground plans. A topological geometry of place and position facilitated a grammar of form. Tatlin, speaking of his design for the stage production of Khlebnikov’s Zangezi, has said: The Zangezi production is to be realized on the principle that the word is a building unit, material a unit of organized space. Khlebnikov himself characterized this super-narration as an architectural

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work built of narrations, and each narration as an architectural work built of words. He regards the word as plastic material. The properties of this material make it plausible to operate with it to build up “the linguistic state.” This attitude on the part of Khlebnikov gave me an opportunity to do my work in staging it. Parallel with his word construction I decided to make a material construction. This method makes it possible to fuse the work of two people into a unity. … In one of the “planks of the play,” the “planks of which Zangezi” is built up, we find a succession of thing-like sounds. … To emphasize the nature of these sounds I use surfaces of different materials, treated in different ways. Zangezi is in its structure so many-faceted and difficult to produce that the stage, if it is spatially enclosed will be unable to contain its action. To guide the attention of the spectator, the eye of the projector leaps from one place to another, creating order and consistency. The projector is also necessary to emphasize the properties of the material.39 It has not, I think, been remarked that in 1924, the year following this statement, Eisenstein found himself projected out of the theatre situation toward the space of cinema by his staging Tretiakov’s Gas within a factory space and situation.40 It is, then, neither form nor style, but the conception of a structural order, grounded in the “culture of materials” as the condition of a fundamentally, radically transgressive movement, which Morris inherits from a revolution and its aesthetic innovations. Notes

1.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the work of Faulkner,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, translated from the French by Annette Michelson (London: Rider & Co., 1955), p. 79. 2.  For Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard: Poème, see Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Bibliothêque de la Pléiäde, Librarie Gallimard, 1945), pp. 457–477. Gide, in a lecture made on November 22, 1913, at the Vieux-Colombier theatre and which was published in La Vie des Lettres, April 1914, cited a passage from a letter he had received from Mallarmé concerning this work. “The poem is now being printed according to my own conception of its pagination, on which the whole effect depends. One word in large type requires an entirely white page, and I am quite sure of the effect that will have. I will send the first decent set of proofs to you in Florence … the rhythm of a phrase concerning an action or even an object has meaning only if it imitates them and when, figured on paper, captured through the letter from the original print, restores, nev-

ertheless something of action or object.” The Bible paper of the Pléiäde Edition would, one presumes, have horrified Mallarmé, since the transparency of the paper destroys the whiteness of the pages which are its text, forcing the print of each page into a visual counterpoint with that of the reverse side. 3.  Jacques Derrida, “La Forme et le Vouloir-Dire: Note Sur la Phénoménologie du Language,” La Revue Internationale de Philosophie 81 (1967): 278. Derrida’s brilliant and tenacious investigation of the assumptions underlying contemporary aesthetic and critical discourse is set forth in L’Écriture et La Différence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967) and De La Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Ninuit, 1967). The text cited here forms a kind of footnote to these two volumes. 4.  In “10 × 10: Concrete Reasonableness,” Artforum 6, no. 3 (January 1967). 5.  In “Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings,” Artforum 6, no. 3 (January 1967). 6.  T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924), pp. 95–98. 7.  Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” in Art in America (October–November 1965), reprinted in Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), p. 282. 8.  Ibid., p. 296. 9.  Both quotes from Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News (September 1966), reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art. The following review of Morris’s first New York exhibition, organized at the Gordon Gallery in 1963, had appeared in the May– June issue of Arts Magazine of that same year. It has a certain interest in this connection. “Robert Morris has a standing open gate, a pair of wheels, a suspended slab and some smaller pieces, all of which are apparently concerned with a philosophy of the equivalence of things and times. A small box plays back the sounds of its making. The large pieces are medium gray and completely bare. The understatement of these boxes is clear enough potentially interesting, but there isn’t, after all, much to look at. The horizontal slab suspended at eye level does work. It is a good idea. The proportions of the wheels are dumb. D.J.” Internal stylistic evidence (the successive use of the short, simple declarative sentence) and the initials indicate the reviewer to have been the proponent of the “nonrelational,” “specific” object. 10.  Thomas S. Knight, Charles Peirce (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 74. 11.  Ibid., p. 75. 12.  Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (summer 1967); reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art, p. 146. 13.  Ibid., p. 145. The order of these two fragments of a continuous text has been reversed in an attempt to clarify the statements quoted, necessarily, out of context of a long essay. 14.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a journal entry of October 12, 1838, reprinted in Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 81. 15.  John Cage, “Jasper Johns: Stories and Ideas,” in Jasper Johns (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1964), p. 23. 16.  Emerson, journal entry of October 12, 1838, p. 94. 17.  Robert Morris, “Dance,” Village Voice, February 3, 1966, p. 24.

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18.  The prolonged debates over the design of the table and seating arrangements which preceded the opening of the current “peace talks” in Paris, as reported in the New York Times during December of 1968 and January of 1969, brought to the attention of a wide public the general field and some of the specific points of focus of topological psychology. The variety of solutions proposed (V-shaped, triangular, circular, crosslike, etc.) rendered, within a context of paradigmatic urgency, the relation of form to concept, suggesting that “the setting of a conference is itself a communication.” At the close of these discussions it was suggested by Robert Sommer, chairman of the psychology department of the University of California at Davis, that “the next stage of the Paris talks will be another ritual battle over how the table is to be perceived” (emphasis mine). See New York Times, December 27, 1968, January 4 and January 16, 1969. One remembers as well the celebrated dance known as The Green Table in the prewar repertory of the Jooss Ballet. 19.  The notion of “virtual” space is discussed at length in chapter 6 of Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1953). For a fuller comprehension of its sources, the reader is referred to Bruno Adriani’s Problems of the Sculptor (New York: Nierendorf Gallery, 1943) and, most particularly, to Adolf Hildebrand’s The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (Leipzig: G. E. Stechert, 1907). The underlying assumptions, idealist in character, of Suzanne Langer’s aesthetic deserve fuller consideration than is possible within the context of this exhibition catalog, because they are perpetuated in contemporary criticism. 20.  Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 60. 21.  Ibid. 22.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This statement is transcribed from notes taken during lectures delivered during the 1950s at the Collège de France. It is developed in Le Visible et L’Invisible, suivi de Notes de Travail, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964). 23.  Ibid. 24.  Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 25.  Ibid., pp. 142–143, 144–145. 26.  In The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a typographic version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, translated by George Heard Hamilton (New York: George Wittenborn, Inc.). Edition neither dated nor numbered. 27.  Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (London: Trianon Press, 1959), p. 29. 28.  Isaac Asimov, Realm of Measure (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1960), p. 15. 29.  Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, p. 29. 30.  Duchamp, The Green Box, n.p. 31.  Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, p. 80: “On certain areas he let layers of dust accumulate which later made for some curious photographs resembling desert landscapes.” 32.  Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim, vol. 13 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), pp. 203–206. 33.  Charles Sanders Peirce, in Knight, Charles Peirce, p. 71. 34.  Kasimir S. Malevich, Essays on Art: 1915–1928, vol. 2, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin, ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), p. 77. 35.  Hulme, Speculations, p. 240.

36.  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966), reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art. 37.  Sidney Geist, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (New York: Grossman, 1968), p. 142. Mr. Geist’s exemplary monograph, scrupulously researched and extremely well written, makes available for the first time a great deal of precise information as to the nature of Brancusi’s preoccupations and achievements, thereby raising, for myself at least, a number of questions and points of comparison which demand further consideration—on a scale, however, incompatible with the limitations of this exhibition catalog text. I take this opportunity to inform the reader of the existence of an unpublished essay on Brancusi by Robert Morris, prepared in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts awarded him in 1965 by Hunter College of the City of New York. I have not had access to Mr. Morris’s text. 38.  Malevich, Essays on Art: 1915–1928, pp. 77–78. 39.  Vladimir Tatlin, On Zangezi, a text dated 1923, reprinted in English translation in the catalog of the Vladimir Tatlin exhibition, Vladimir Tatlin, ed. K. G. Hultén, John Melin and Gosta Svensson, trans. Troels Andersen and Keith Bradfield (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1968), p. 69. 40.  Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, “Through Theater to Cinema,” in Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: World Publishing, 1957), p. 16.  

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A Conversation with Robert Morris in 1985 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

  I just read something rather peculiar yesterday which I might as well quote to start with. In a book on sculpture from the 1950s, the author referred to Duchamp as “the first Constructivist sculptor,” literally stating: “The first Constructivist sculpture is Duchamp’s Water Mill.” I suppose he was referring to the Glider. And while I was amused at first, I then thought perhaps this is more interesting than just an art historian’s mistake. Perhaps there was less of a division in the reception of the Dada avant-garde and the Russian and Soviet avantgarde in the mid- to late 1950s. To what degree did you know Duchamp’s work and the work of Russian and Soviet constructivists, and when did you first become aware of these avant-garde legacies? Benj amin Bu chloh:

Ro bert Mo rris:  

I think it is easier, or at least it seems more immediate, to address Duchamp, because he was more present in my mind at that time. Not at the end of the fifties—I was a painter then—but in the beginning of the sixties when I was beginning to make objects. Duchamp was definitely a presence, while the Russian work was really very incidental to me, and I think that I didn’t really focus on it at all. BB:  The question of influence is not really of primary interest to me. Rather I would like to clarify your awareness of historical parallels and historical repetitions. When it comes to your relationship to Duchamp, that parallelism seems in many instances more explicit. RM: 

Right.

This chapter is an excerpt from interviews that were conducted for the purposes of research in 1985. These conversations centered on the reception of the historical avantgardes, specifically the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the rediscovery of the work of the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes by American artists in the early 1960s.

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Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Did you ever meet him?

Yes. I did know him and his work. I didn’t know him very well. I met him a few times.

RM: 

He talks about you and Yvonne Rainer as “terrific people.” Would your work at that time have directly related to Duchamp, or would Jasper Johns have been an important mediating figure? BB: 

Johns, yes, to some extent, but I think it was Duchamp who was a freeing influence for me to be able to explore the different ways of letting process come in. The first lead relief I made was a small object which had keys on it, and each key had stamped on it one of the words from the litanies. So at that time my work had very definite references to him. In those works it is to be seen, but in the large works it would be much more mediated, and I don’t quite know how you would get at that. RM: 

Let us talk, for example, about the Mirrored Cubes from 1964. I always assumed that they were almost a literal translation of an idea that Duchamp had scribbled in the Green Box at some point in 1919. How do you see your relation to Duchamp in the Mirrored Cubes? Is this work more explicit in its quotation and transformation, or is the Duchamp influence again much more mediated than one might think at first? BB: 

Well, I think it is more explicit. When I was doing the so-called minimal pieces, some of those had definite references to Duchamp.

RM: 

So when it comes to the larger works, the Mirrored Cubes for example, you may not have been aware of the Duchamp note in the Green Box?

BB: 

RM: 

I did read the Green Box, but can you tell me what it is that he says?

BB:  He says, “To place mirrored pieces of glass on the floor so that the room and the viewer are mirrored simultaneously.” And there’s another note right next to it, which is also very interesting but doesn’t relate to your work, that says, “To make boxes of colored liquid.”

Where you shake them and look at them. Yes, I knew that. I certainly read that, and actually the first mirror piece I did certainly referred to Duchamp. It’s been destroyed. It was a small piece of wood about RM: 

Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), 1965. 1971 refabrication: Plexiglas mirrors on wood, four units, each 21 × 21 × 21 inches. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

two or three feet long. It had two rearview mirrors—round, simple, truck-type mirrors—and in the center it had a piece of glass with a pharmacy face, one side blue and one red, so when you looked in the mirror you saw into infinity, red-blue, red-blue, red-blue, because it reflected back and forth. So that was the first piece. BB: 

The base was made out of glass as well?

It was painted, one side being red and the other blue. In the mirror it alternates to infinity. So that was the first use of the mirrors that I can recall. Then before the mirrored boxes there was also a portal piece from very early 1961 that was in my notebooks, but I never made it until later. Pine Portal. There was a version that had mirrors on the inside, so as you walked through it you saw your reflection. But that came from an image I saw in Citizen Kane where he walks through, and you see his image immediately reflected to infinity. But that was never made until the 1970s. There’s one without the mirrors, and that’s the 1961 version. But that little piece was the first one I actually fabricated. RM: 

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Foreground: Robert Morris, Untitled (Pine Portal with Mirrors), 1961. Destroyed. 1978 refabrication: laminated pine with mirrors, 85 × 45 × 11 inches. Background: Untitled (Box for Standing), 1961. Fir, 74 × 25 × 10½ inches. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The diversity of your work has been frequently misunderstood by critics and some art historians as a kind of historical eclecticism. In fact, what one could see in your work now—after a period of delay—is that the two major avant-garde positions of the twentieth century, which definitely had been largely excluded from American reception until the late 1950s, gradually entered the consciousness of the younger generation of artists of the early 1960s. But you would probably explain this in totally different terms, not as some kind of historical eclecticism that draws on Duchamp and Dada and Russian constructivism simultaneously? BB: 

RM:  No, I would say it’s not. As I said, there are very literal references to Duchamp in some of these earlier pieces. In the minimal-type pieces that are going on at the same time, there is not necessarily any influence from European art or even much of the reaction to it. If there’s a reaction, it’s a reaction to what’s going on in American art at that time. BB:  RM:  BB:  RM:  BB: 

Sculpture in particular? Yes. Like who? David Smith. A negative reaction.

Yes. If there was some kind of “Oedipal rage,” it was against Smith. I wanted to do something absolutely different, to wipe him right out. RM: 

What about other sculptors held in high esteem by Greenberg and New York School modernism, such as Anthony Caro? Did you have a similar or stronger aversion against him?

BB: 

I didn’t take him as seriously. When I was in San Francisco before I came to New York, I was still painting, but I was also involved in a group of dancers and theatre people, and Simone Forti, then my wife, was involved in this. Subsequently, this kind of concern came to be known as the Judson Church. Simone Forti then pursued some of the structural ideas that she had introduced me to, and I think that some of her ideas influenced me a lot and got transposed into sculpture. She was trying to generate dance movement in a different way, a way that didn’t involve the use of a trained balletic type of movement that’s prearranged,

RM: 

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choreographed, and presented. She came up with the idea of making up rules, the rule game. I remember being in one of her pieces where there were two performers, and my instructions were to lie on the floor. The instructions given to the other person were to tie this person to the wall. So what you got was this incredible fight that went on, and that was the movement. That was one aspect. Another aspect was a building of objects that had to be negotiated. I built some of these for her. Some of these boxes I used as sculpture. It wasn’t just the form; it was the notion, how do you go about making something? I wanted to do this in a way that had nothing to do with the art scene, and it occurred to me to use this principle of construction and think about how things are formed in a very simple, straightforward way. You accept an a priori set of conditions, you fulfill those conditions, and you have a sculpture. I think that’s why I related to what she was doing in dance, and so I chose construction. Not constructivism but construction. BB:  RM: 

Even though they might have something in common after all? Yes.

Material specificity, transparent construction, even procedural elements, once again were clearly present in Duchamp’s work, like the Three Standard Stoppages from 1913, which obviously had been considered by you as one of the most consequential sculptural works of the twentieth century, even though nobody else had really picked up on it. Are you suggesting that this reductivist project in your work (if we can call it this, and I know it’s a problematic term), grew out of task-oriented performance aesthetics more than out of historical awareness?

BB: 

It grew out of task-oriented procedure, behavior, and also I think it came out of a reexamination of a very, very early art—Neolithic art, Egyptian art, early Buddhist art, columns, gateways, platforms, and such things. They were more important to me than anything that was going on in contemporary art.

RM: 

For example, the idea of constructing something according to the law of transparency, or even according to the law of a possible utilitarian function or a task performance—these ideas are not quite as alien to constructivism as they might have seemed at the time. There was a large number of people in the Soviet Union thinking about that even though it probably was not known in New York in the late fifties.

BB: 

Robert Morris, Three Rulers, 1963. Painted wood and metal hooks, 42 × 11 inches. Estate of Harry N. Abrams. © 2012 Robert Morris/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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I did not know that about them. I certainly knew the positions they had taken, to be utilitarian and so on, but the methodology is what I’m talking about, just taking the way common materials are put together for utilitarian purposes, not to build a utilitarian form but to use the structure of that kind of making. That’s what I think I drew on in the early and middle pieces. RM: 

Was the use of plywood and cheap materials at the same time also polemical in the sense that at that time the sculptor was the torch-bearing welder of steel? To make it gray meant to differentiate it as much as possible from official avant-garde sculpture? BB: 

RM:  Yes, absolutely. But I also didn’t have any money, and it was expedient. I found plywood quite congenial, since it allowed you to make things to scale and cheaply. I worked as a carpenter, and I knew how to deal with that kind of technology. It wasn’t complicated. All you needed was a hammer and a skillsaw, and so that’s why I used it. I didn’t make a point of showing beautifully grained plywood; I always wanted to cover it up. Also I think the gray functioned against the mass of the thing, and it worked with light in a way that I was interested in. I also liked the idea that it was easier to reconstitute the work than to ship it. When these things started to be shown, and let’s say somebody was doing a show in Milwaukee, I would say: “Just make another one of it. Go to the store and get a light gray— just get what is in the store and paint it with oil paint so that it doesn’t raise the grain.” I liked the idea of the thing being completely reconstitutable at any moment and place, and the lack of precious materials.

So that was a very important aspect of your position at the time as well, since it defied the idea of the unique, valuable, original sculptural work? BB: 

RM: 

Absolutely. I wanted that aspect.

BB:  So, to be a bit more specific, what exactly was rejected from the sculptural legacy that you saw yourself surrounded by?

The arbitrary aesthetic attitude. You put this here; you put that there; you do not make an a priori decision beforehand, and then carry it out, but you make decisions in a process.

RM: 

Robert Morris in the Untitled (Box for Standing), 1961. Fir, 74 × 25 × 10½ inches. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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And the decisions do not appear necessarily as very definitive to the viewer. Whereas in your case the a prioris were defined for the audience as well as for the work. So it also implied a different relationship to the audience. Was that a concern of yours at the time? Did you want to have different types of interaction with your viewers?

BB: 

RM:  No, I wasn’t concerned about that. I was concerned about generating work.

That was a concern for Simone Forti? To alter the relationship with audiences, to make them more aware, to give them more control?

BB: 

RM: 

No, I don’t think so. I don’t believe it was.

So, in none of these approaches would you see the breakdown of traditional modes of viewing or listening that was clearly addressed in Cage’s or in Cunningham’s work—to involve the audience in a more direct manner or to make them aware of their own physical presence— those issues would not be of primary concern? If we go back to the mirror piece, for example, I’ve always looked at the mirror piece as the work that—more than anything else that I know in this period—establishes an incredible awareness of the viewer’s activity in the reading of a sculpture. BB: 

I knew John Cage; he was one of the few people I knew when I came to New York. So when I was showing my first floor slab in the Green Gallery, I asked John to be sure to go see this work. Later I heard that he told somebody: “I went to see Bob Morris’s sculpture, but I didn’t see any sculpture; I only saw this slab, this pipe form.” I don’t know if he was being completely ironic or not, but I always enjoyed that comment.

RM: 

It must have been wonderful for him to have an opportunity to make that kind of comment that people always made about his music. So in this instance you would say that audience played a part in defining the structure of the work?

BB: 

RM:  Yes, if you mean by audience behavior those kinds of assumed perceptual phenomena with which people would approach the work. Absolutely, this kind of phenomenological formalism was of the utmost importance to me. To make something that had a scale necessary for the

body to encounter. That was there in the beginning. The relationship to scale is a relationship of the viewer’s body to this thing. Also, it’s both optical and physical. That definitely was a very conscious kind of adjustment that was going on in the work. Also, it establishes a triad, so to speak, between the object, the viewer, and the surrounding container with a programmatic clarity that no other sculptures that I know had established before. It seems almost like a manifesto-type work.

BB: 

RM:  Yes, those things are based on what I call phenomenological formalism, and they are very important to me.

Would you be willing to consider a more theoretical notion of audience as well? One could say that the audience is a potential group of people that a work addresses; or is that totally unacceptable for you, like when Apollinaire says about Duchamp that his work will reconcile art and the people, which was of course even in 1913 a fantastically hilarious statement? But let us say, for example, Andy Warhol’s boxes that are BB: 

Robert Morris, Untitled (Battered Cubes), 1965. Painted plywood, four units, each 24 × 36 × 36 inches. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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at the Guggenheim right now—I always thought they had a potential for addressing a nonspecialized audience. It is an art that addresses a general condition of experience first, and then it inserts itself into the cultural division of mass culture and avant-garde art. But if you look at the Mirrored Cubes, you don’t have to know Duchamp or the history of nineteenth- or twentieth-century sculpture, or any other historical formation. If you walk into a room where the mirrored cubes sit, potentially everybody can understand the work. The fact that hardly anybody did at the time doesn’t falsify what I call the audience potential of the work. You don’t have to know the history of Western European and American art in order to experience the art. So in its direct address, it is different from a David Smith. I wrote about that. I said that this kind of work is potentially more democratic. In “Notes on Sculpture” I wrote that this work presents itself in a more democratic, open way and that it is more available. So I did indicate that I felt that it was there; it was plain to be seen. I thought it had those possibilities. I remember doing a performance in Stockholm at a huge museum. I did a thing called Check. I got forty people from the local community and rehearsed them for a week. When the audience left for the intermission, I rearranged all the chairs at random in the center, and the activities went around on the periphery with these two groups of people, two teams that occasionally did things simultaneously, then dissolving into the audience, and then reconstituting themselves. So the whole breaking down of the elevated stage and eroding of the dividing line between performer and perceiver, the specialized movement—all those things were attacked in the piece, and I think a lot of people were addressing those issues.

RM: 

It has been mentioned that you were pretty close to some of the Fluxus people in the early sixties, that when you were actively involved in performance and dance, you were aware of certain ideas, let’s say those of George Maciunas. Did you know him? Were you friends with him? BB: 

RM: 

I met him; I wasn’t friends with him.

Because Maciunas was dealing with a number of ideas very early on that always suggested that he had gone much further in his historical reception of the Russian constructivists, that, in fact, he was one of the first artists of the sixties to rediscover the legacy of Lef and the productivists.

BB: 

Maciunas happened to be the one person who knew something about the aesthetics of the Lef group in the early sixties and who discussed the idea that artists should not be socially delegated specialists of creativity. According to Maciunas, an artist should hold a nine-to-five job and should work the rest of his time on his art. He had these incredibly radical, often grotesque and unacceptable transformations of Russian constructivist thinking in mind. I was wondering if the other members of the Fluxus generation with whom you were in contact at the time were discussing these issues at all. I was not close to any of those people in Fluxus. I was asked to contribute a few times, but I don’t think I ever did. I had met Dick Higgins, George Brecht, and the only contact I had with Maciunas was him wanting me to go into buying a building. I was aware that they were doing these magazines, and there was a lot of activity in Europe, but I was not very aware of what was going on. RM: 

BB: 

So your involvement with performance work and dance …

Was never under the influence of Fluxus. It was done through the contact with dancers and not with musicians, except for one performance I did at the Living Theater which was organized by La Monte Young and which was in fact a kind of Fluxus event. That was the only time I performed with them. So I didn’t really have any contact with them that was of any real consequence for me.

RM: 

But when you talk about task-oriented performance or building an object that was based on an a priori and was transparent in every respect— material, procedures, construction—and producing a sculpture which was bordering on the utilitarian, what kind of motivations were behind this thinking at the time? Weren’t they argued in opposition to the traditional notion of the art object as well?

BB: 

Of course. It wasn’t programmatic though, or defined by an ideology that I identified with. I never proceeded along those kind of programmatic lines, and I don’t think I ever conceived of these things as in any way utilitarian. Utilitarian only in the sense of procedure, but not in the sense of how they were received. I never saw it as something you would set plants on, for example. Those things are there, but I guess I’m using utilitarian in a narrower sense. For me they were art objects; you RM: 

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see them in an art context. While they take on other art and stand for certain things that are rather critical, they are still art objects. Did the fact that you emphasized in many of your works of the late sixties a condition of ephemerality have an impact on your subsequent activities? Did you realize that the work would ultimately disappear and that you would have to do a different kind of work? Did thinking about institutional structures have an impact on your work? BB: 

Well, I think about those kinds of things. Those pieces couldn’t even be handled very well by the media because they couldn’t be photographed too well. So if it can’t be handled through one of those distribution systems, either the media or the museum, then I think the work is in real trouble; it’s going to disappear, and I think those pieces have in a way. I mean Philip Johnson owns one of those pieces. He keeps it in a little corner. So it’s like a little postcard of what it was, and when I first showed it people weren’t sure whether they could go into the room or not. It filled the entire room, and most people didn’t go in. RM: 

BB: 

One was supposed to walk through it?

RM:  It would have been OK with me. But that kind of work disappears. It was considered heavy-handed by the systems that were supposed to represent it. I think the fact that it disappears can’t help but have an impact. I don’t know how consciously it goes on, but it’s got to be there because our visibility depends on institutions—that’s how we present ourselves—and if you work outside, you can’t present yourself. I think there’s always pressure from these institutions that one has to deal with from the very beginning all the way through. They don’t let up. Either you are inside or outside, and there are contradictions that you have to deal with all the time. I don’t think making some of those pieces that disappeared radically changed how I regarded institutions. But it certainly became clear what kinds of things will disappear.

December 17, 1985

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Ayer, A. J.—There are two important reductions to perform on the assertion, “I think that p is true.” The first is to lop off the head of the sentence—the “I think” part—as wholly redundant, since to state “that p is true” is to assert that I think it. The second is to attack the feet of the proposition, getting rid of its “is true” appendage, since “that p” all by itself is, very simply, a statement that p is the case rather than not p. Thus beautifully shorn, “that p” then rises up out of the foam of metaphysics like a mermaid returned to the litheness of a fish: mercifully released from what A. J. Ayer never ceases to term “nonsense.” For tacking “is true” onto the proposition produces the verbal illusion that there is, on the one hand, something called Being and, on the other, something called Truth. And if this is what floats Ontology, it is the “I think” that underwrites Epistemology.1 There can be no mind/body problem if consciousness is simply reduced to a set of propositions about sense-contents. Since these sensecontents are the verbal translations of sense-experiences that may be of the external world—I see x; I hear x—or may be introspected from the world internal to the perceiver—I feel a pain; I remember x—they form a series of propositions that are structurally equivalent, all of them taking the form that p. The Cartesian distinction between two different substances, one spatially extended and physical, the other unextended, immaterial, and mental, is thus dissolved by a third form that comprehends them both (though it explicitly disallows the very notion of “substance”). Analytic

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philosophy displaces the mind/body problem into the medium of language and the logical analysis of propositions. Everything else is dismissed as “nonsense.” It is in Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt that the hammer blows of this analysis receive their most comic response. Indeed, certain of the passages in Language, Truth, and Logic could have been pronounced by Watt, as for instance that part of Ayer’s refutation of Berkelian idealism: “Having now left my room, I have good reason to believe that [its table and chair] are not in fact being perceived by anyone. For I observed that no one was there when I left, and I have observed that no one has since entered by the door or the window; and my past observations of the ways in which human beings make their entry into rooms gives me the right to assert that no one has entered the room in any other way.”2 Watt’s elaborate performances of logical analysis in order to explain the circumstances in Mr. Knott’s house (“to explain had always been to exorcize, for Watt”)3 have precisely this gait: “For were there other fingers in the house, and other thumbs, than Mr. Knott’s and Erskine’s and Watt’s, that might have pressed the bell? For by what but by a finger, or by a thumb, could the bell have been pressed? By a nose? A toe? A heel? A projecting tooth?” (W, 117). And yet, in Watt’s mouth, this very medium of rational analysis quickly takes on the character of series: “Not that Watt felt calm and free and glad, for he did not, and had never done so. But he thought that perhaps he felt calm and free and glad, or if not calm and free and glad, at least calm and free, or free and glad, or glad and calm, or if not calm and free, or free and glad, or glad and calm, at least calm, or free, or glad, without knowing it” (W, 133). And series, organized within the realm of Watt in terms of a linguistic progression, frequently produce the kinds of openings onto infinite regress for which the novel is famous: “And the poor old lousy old earth, my earth and my father’s and my mother’s and my father’s father’s and my mother’s mother’s and my father’s mother’s and my mother’s father’s and my father’s mother’s father’s and my mother’s father’s mother’s and my father’s mother’s mother’s and my mother’s father’s father’s and my father’s father’s mother’s … ” (W, 45). Now, infinite regress is precisely the opening onto insoluble logical conundrum that analytic philosophy’s recourse to language is meant to plug. And, thus, it can be said that these series, in Watt, perform instances

of language spinning out of control and distressingly leaching into Ayer’s very domain of “nonsense”: language perversely biting its own tail, so to speak. The most extraordinary series of all the series in Watt is Watt’s act of communicating to the narrator, Sam, what happened to him at Mr. Knott’s house, which Watt does as the two of them walk, pressed against one another, belly-to-belly and forehead-to-forehead, Sam moving forward and Watt backward, then Watt moving forward and Sam backward, along the extremely narrow passage formed by two parallel chain-link fences, the one the garden fence of the insane asylum Sam is in, the other the fence of the asylum where Watt now resides. The serialization that occurs in this communication is not just in the logic of linguistic relationships but in the very fiber of the syntax and the letters through which Watt speaks: “Day of most, night of part, Knott with now … Geb nodrap, geb nodrap” (W, 162). So that Sam must comment, “These were sounds that at first, though we walked pubis to pubis, seemed so much balls to me” (W, 165). Now, “pubis to pubis” is, perhaps, the most efficient description of the embrace within which the two dancers are clasped for their promenade in the opening and closing sections of Robert Morris’s most celebrated performance piece, Waterman Switch (1965). Moreover, it is not just their strangely de-eroticized gait, as the nude couple inches across the stage and back again, that reconfigures the scene between Watt and Sam; Morris has, as well, conjured up a sense of the confining corridor within which Beckett’s pas de deux is executed. The narrow tracks comprised of two long wooden beams, which are aligned parallel with the front of the proscenium and on which the dancers make their way, recreate both the setting’s vector within the novel and its claustrophobic intensity. Walking just behind the tracks is a third performer, a woman dressed in a man’s suit and hat. She moves far more quickly than does the couple, letting out the string from a ball of twine that she attaches at both sides of the stage, to create a kind of linear web. This string, with its labyrinthine associations, has sometimes figured on the list, drawn up by writers on Morris’s art, of his numerous references to the work of Marcel Duchamp, here to Duchamp’s “mile of string” installation for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York (1942). But in the context of Waterman Switch’s unmistakable homage to Watt, the figure is far more convincing as an allusion to Beckett’s clowns, and thus to a

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somewhat different form of endlessness and repetition than that of the bachelor machine.   Bat, What Is It Like to Be A?—Suppose, Thomas Nagel suggests, we were to imagine what it’s like to be a bat. “It will not help to try to imagine,” he says, “that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside clown by one’s feet in an attic.” It will not help, he explains, because “insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”4 Nagel is rehearsing the mind/body problem in its postbehaviorist, neodualist phase. Whatever we may think, he is saying, of the original Cartesian formulation of the problem—that there are two different types of substance in the world, the physical and the mental—its conclusion, that there is an irreducible, ontological distinction or gap between the objectivity of the world and the subjectivity of consciousness, remains. All the attempts to reduce the mental to the physical, which is to say “consciousness” to “the brain,” will simply not work. The pattern that allows us to reduce one level of description to another, more fundamental level, as when we reduce water to H2O or genes to DNA, saying that the first is really nothing but the second, doesn’t wash when we want to claim that subjectivity can be reduced to something objective like the neurophysiology of the brain. Because subjectivity, or consciousness, is what it’s like for the bat to be a bat. And that we will never get to by examining its brain states. To hold out for “what it’s like to be a bat” is, of course, to stare down the analytic philosophers and their charge that discussions of “the mental” lead nowhere except directly into the “nonsense” of infinite regress. For one of the features the neodualist has to claim for “consciousness” is that it has privileged access to its own contents—which is to say that it cannot be mistaken about what is the case for it; that it is, in this sense, “incorrigible”—and it is to this claim that the analytic philosophers can always reply, “But, how does it know?” The threat of infinite regress that arises from this “how does it (or you) know?” is that if I

add to my claim that “I am feeling pain” or “I am seeing blue” the further condition that, subjectively speaking, I cannot be mistaken about these things, I must, in order to claim this incorrigibility, have something like an inner pattern or rule (the “constancy hypothesis” is an example), which I consult or to which I compare this particular sensation of pain or of color, that would allow me to know that I’m right about this case of toothache or of blue. And this, the analytic philosophers point out, leads to the problem of knowing that I’m right about applying that rule to this case, which would then lead to needing another rule to adjudicate over this instance of application, which would then necessitate another rule, and so on. It’s the story of the man who claims that the world is supported on the back of a giant turtle, and when asked how that turtle would itself be supported, replies, “On another turtle.” And when his interlocutor persists, “But how would it be supported?” the first man answers, “No problem: it’s turtles all the way down.” In 1961, when Morris made Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, he had constructed the first of his own many interventions into the domain of the mind/body problem. A nine-inch cube, handcrafted in walnut, the box—roughly the size of the human skull—contains a recording of the sounds of the sawing, hammering, drilling, and screwing that took place during the process of its own fabrication. With what could be thought, then, to be its “memory” inside it, the box seems to confront its viewer from the other side of that divide that separates object from subject: “What is it like,” it seems to say, “to be a box?” That this question is being asked tongue-in-cheek, however, is not just a function of the obvious fact that a box can’t think. No painted portrait or sculpted marble is literally conscious; but that has never stopped viewers from imputing thoughts and feelings to them, from granting them, that is, a kind of interiority modeled on the dualist’s idea of consciousness. Rather, the box’s irony is clear from the behaviorist form of the object’s own response. Which is to say that “what it’s like” is simply the sum of all those acts, themselves wholly external and observable, through which the box was in fact built. The box has no “privileged access” to this, because it happened in full public view. Further, not only does the object deride the idea of the privacy of subjective experience, it also seems to mock other, associated notions of subjectivity such as the autonomy, or self-containment, of consciousness.

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Taking up the analytic philosopher’s taunt about the threat of infinite regress that hangs over the very claim to the internal privilege and “incorrigibility” of mental events, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, even as it performs a kind of cogito of carpentry, burlesques the idea of the closed circuit of self-reference. For although we could say that the box “contains” its own founding experience, it is equally obvious that that founding originated elsewhere: in the mind and activity of its maker; and that that activity itself responds to the minds and activities of other makers; and that that … Photo Cabinet, which Morris made in 1963, the year Box with the Sound of Its Own Making was first exhibited, is yet another machine for the production of infinite regress within the situation of a professed privacy and interiority. The cabinet, which bears on its door a photograph of itself with its door opened, opens to reveal yet another door bearing a photograph of itself with its door opened, which would open to reveal … And a third work in this group, Metered Bulb (1963), joins Box with the Sound of Its Own Making by puncturing the idea of autonomy and self-containment along another trajectory broached by the earlier object. For the presumed self-containment and autoreferentiality of the work, which bears both a light bulb and an electric meter to monitor the current the bulb consumes, is exploded by the cord connecting the work to the plug in the wall, that in turn connects to the circuitry in the building, that in turn connects to the current in the ground, that in turn connects … The mockery of this electrical dependence had, of course, been wired into the very possibility of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making’s ability to “think.”   Card File—To reduce the “mental” to “language” is to transform the presumed privacy of thinking into the public medium of speech and the logic of propositions. It is as well to exchange the mysterious domain of what can be known only to the knower for the overt space of shared events. Morris’s frequent recourse to language, beginning with Card File in 1962 and then proliferating within his work both in terms of performance, as in 21.3 (1964), or a variety of verbally embossed lead pieces (1963–64), and various graphic exercises beginning with the Memory Drawings of 1963 and continuing to the Blind Time drawings of 1973

Robert Morris, Metered Bulb, 1963. Light bulb, ceramic socket with pull chain, electricity meter, painted wood, 17¾ × 8 × 8¼ inches. Collection of Jasper Johns. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Robert Morris, Card File, 1962. Metal and plastic wall file mounted on wood, containing forty-four index cards, 27 × 10½ × 2 inches. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

and up through the Investigations drawings of 1990, has often been related to the example of Duchamp and the role of his copious “Notes,” made not only for the construction of the Large Glass but for a multitude of projects throughout his career.5 While it seems obvious that in Card File this was an important source for Morris, it also seems clear that the way language actually functions in the early works—like Card File—in which it is employed has less to do with Duchamp and more to do with Beckett, the mind/body problem, and analytic philosophy. For unlike Duchamp’s “Notes,” where autonomy and self-reference are not at issue,6 Card File once again parades its own presumed selfcontainment and completion, with, once again, the same problems of infinite regress rife within it. An ordinary flat file containing note cards onto which an alphabetized account of its own process of conception (the cards headed “Conception,” “Considerations,” or “Decisions,” for example) and fabrication (for example, “Prices” and “Purchases”) is entered, the work performs a critique similar to that of Box with the

Robert Morris, detail of Card File, 1962. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Sound of Its Own Making. But this time, Morris specifically indicates that the public space in which its “thinking” or “remembering” now takes place is the medium of the linguistic event—the that p—neatly typed on its parade of four-by-six-inch cards. An examination of these note cards reveals, however, that the same kind of comic riff is being performed here on the orderliness and system of analytic procedures as had been let loose on them in the world of Watt. One of the categories, for example, is “Categories,” on the card for which is given the total number of categories—44—generated by Card File. Another category is “Number,” in which, in addition to the number of categories, we are given the number of accidents (2), of cards (49), of changes (0), of decisions (12), of losses (1), of mistakes (4), of purchases (4), of things numbered (14), and so forth. It is hard not to look at such an account without remembering the elaborate conundrum Watt tries to solve as he wonders how a dog is brought nightly to Mr. Knott’s house to eat what might or might not be the remains of Mr. Knott’s food, for which, in the course of his attempt at a solution, he totals up not only the solutions “that had not apparently prevailed, but also some of those objections that were perhaps the cause of their not having done so, distributed as follows”: Solu tion

N u mber of Ob jec tion s

1st .. .. .. .. ..

2

2nd .. .. .. .. ..

3

3rd .. .. .. .. ..

4

4th .. .. .. .. ..

5

N u mber of Solu tion s

N u mber of Ob jec tion s

4 .. .. .. .. ..

14

3 .. .. .. .. ..

9

2 .. .. .. .. ..

5

1 .. .. .. .. ..

2 (W, 95)

 

The pointlessness of this system in the face of what might be relevant to “solving a problem” is linked, in Watt, to the very serial madness that is generated inside language when it is itself considered as an open system, as in “and my mother’s mother’s father’s and my father’s father’s father’s and my mother’s mother’s mother’s and … ” In its turn this brings us to the distance that Beckett himself takes from what might be thought of as the linguistic euphoria of Language, Truth, and Logic. For just as Beckett sees the infinite regress that opens within the world of the “mental” into “turtles all the way down,” he also sees the regress that threatens the apparent simplicity of the move from sense-experience to the propositional form of sense-contents. Because in order for this move from the denotation of something in the world—p, say—to a proposition about p—that p, say—we must, in order to move from the truth of p to the truth of that p, have a further proposition, let’s call it Z, that states that that p is true if p is true, which itself refers to a proposition, Y, that states that “Y is true if Z, that p, and p are true,” and so on to infinity.7 If Beckett takes up the linguistic “solution” to the mind/body problem, then he does so ironically, not understanding language to have dissolved the difference, but merely to have added an irrational third term, one that itself is interminable, because serial. Beckett calls this third thing the “wordy-gurdy,” which is somehow played through his characters, as their bodies rot (trying, as Molloy says, to “finish dying”), their minds empty out (“Unquestioning. I, say I,” says the Unnamable), but language, ventriloquizing itself through them—“I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling. … That there is I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other, that I never doubted, no”—persists.8 It is this independent persistence of language as some kind of maleficent entity, capable of spinning itself out into infinite progressions, or of stories burgeoning from within stories burgeoning from within stories … that carries along the helpless vagrants and clowns and Watts of Beckett’s universe, the ones who say “I”: “Unfortunately it’s a question of words, of voices, one must not forget that, one must try and not forget that completely, of a statement to be made, by them, by me” (T, 354). So that although the characters themselves, the ones who say “I,” want to stop, it’s the voice—impersonal but insistent—that continues: “It clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can’t stop it, I can’t

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prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I know” (T, 28l). This invasion by language as anything but a resolution of the mind/ body problem, but instead as a malicious, because serial and unstoppable, third force, reaches desperate proportions in the last words of The Unnamable—“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—but in Watt it still has its amazingly comic cast, as when Mary is described as “eating onions and peppermints turn and turn about, I mean first an onion, then a peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint” (W, 50). A year before Waterman Switch, in 21.3 (l964) Morris had taken up the character of the clown for his continuing exploration of Beckett’s serial linguistics. Dressed in a “professor” suit and standing at the podium, Morris silently recited what the “voice”—a tape Morris had recorded of Erwin Panofsky’s explanation of the levels of visual meaning—insinuated. First Panofsky writes, there is p: the man on the street lifting his hat to me in greeting, a sense-experience whose formal pattern of colors and shapes I endow with a “natural meaning”—man lifting a hat, or that p. Then there is the cultural level, in which this is read as a greeting (call this iconography), from which one can go on to higher levels of interpretation (call them iconology).9 So Panofsky also begins by gliding effortlessly and imperceptibly from the sense-experience into the statement that expresses its truth: that p. Yet for the audience watching 21.3, it was as if—as Erskine had explained to Watt—“something slipped,” so that the self-evident smoothness of language hooking into denotation, with sense-contents being transparent to experience, noticeably begins to fail. As the mimed performance increasingly goes out of sync with the tape and opens a gap between the performer and the “noise” that speaks through him, the professor turns clown, most burlesquely when the gurgle-clink-gurgle sound effect seriously lags after the water-pitcher-pouring-drinking routine of the lecturer, or the tape registers coughing and throat-clearing episodes way before Morris does them. Thus the ease with which we apply “natural meanings” to observed objects and move from p to that p falters, and we wonder where we could find a rule that would right this state of affairs, realizing, of course, that that rule would need its own justification, which would need its own …  

Dance—The dance world into which Morris was introduced by his wife, Simone Forti, underwent an extreme reorganization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Channeled through the performers who gathered at the Judson Memorial Church, in New York, this new conception of a dance of ordinary movement, or of “task performance,” actively sought a way to make a gesture that would have no “interior.” Balletic gestures, it was felt, are always expressive of an inner meaning: of the distilled emotions of the music or of the body, of an inaccessible, virtual field structured by preestablished convention and folded away from real space and time. The dancer’s body normally labors to externalize these meanings; for without them the body would be ordinary, nothing more than that of the jogger, or the worker, or someone just walking down the stairs. By embracing a dance of “ordinary movement” the Judson dancers were declaring solidarity with a notion of “ordinary language,” which is to say, of that philosophy that dissolves the mind/body distinction into a behaviorist view of language.10 The meaning of a word is its use, they would quote Wittgenstein as saying (whether or not they had ever read him).11 To know what a word means, then, is not to have a picture of its “meaning” in one’s mind, to which one can refer; it is, rather, nothing but a function of one’s manifest ability to use the word, to perform it. If the supposed picture in the mind is wholly subjective, private, something to which I alone have access, the implementation of the word is public: I either use it correctly or I don’t. It was in this spirit that the Judson dancers conceived of the notion that walking down the street or simple lifting or bending were just fine as repertoires of “dance” movements. And it was in this same contempt for the privacy of “mental” space that Yvonne Rainer would side with ordinary-language philosophy in truculently declaring that The Mind Is a Muscle (the title of her most celebrated dance). This is the context in which Morris composed his dance Site (1964), whose movements, the shifting of heavy sheets of plywood around the stage, are those of ordinary labor. Interiority is also referred to in Site, for as the last plywood panel is removed, a nude posed as Manet’s Olympia is revealed, reclining in an imitation of the image sequestered within the virtual space that lies behind the picture plane of traditional painting. But if interiority is referred to, it is only to be rejected. Since Site’s Olympia is flesh and blood, she joins her body to the anti-illusionism

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expressed in the very idea of a dance of ordinary movement as well as that refusal of the interiority of painting that would become the manifesto of minimalism, whether in Morris’s own “Notes on Sculpture” or Donald Judd’s essay “Specific Objects.”12 It was Beckett’s world of extreme ordinariness—of tramps and hatpassing routines, of actors scratching themselves and talking about farting or halitosis, or taking off and putting on their shoes—that attracted these New York dancers and performers very powerfully to his work. The Mabou Mines, an important theatre collective, itself connected to minimalism through the intermediary of the composer Philip Glass, was formed through this very attraction and a need to stage Beckett’s work. And Waterman Switch would develop out of Morris’s own experience of the novel Watt, among other things. A serious walk with Watt, however, produces its own extreme reservations about the certainties of linguistic behaviorism. Unable to check its spin into seriality, its language opens out into absurdity, madness, “nonsense.”   Expressionism, Abstract—The kind of attack on the virtuality of balletic gesture carried out by the dance of task performance had been paralleled in the 1950s by Jasper Johns’s attack on the virtuality of the pictorial gesture, particularly on those gorgeous smears and swipes and oozes of viscous pigment through which the abstract expressionist painter was thought to have conveyed his inner self. A work like Johns’s Device Circle (1959), in which a stick attached at its midpoint to a canvas is rotated 360 degrees to register, as it moves, a circular swathe of smeared paint, mocks both the meaning and the presumed expressiveness of such a “gesture.” A function of the “device,” the smear is wrenched out of its putatively private world of feeling and into the public one of task. Rebelling against his own initial training as a latter-day abstract expressionist, Morris encountered Johns’s “device” from within Judson’s search for ordinary movement. And it was from this position that he considered the artist’s problem of how to make a pictorial mark that would have no interior, no connection to virtual space, no expressive overtones. Self-Portrait (EEG) of 1963 was one of Morris’s answers, a solution that, much more overtly than Johns’s, ties the issue of the device to the question of selfhood, subjectivity, private experience—in short to the mind/body problem.

Robert Morris, Self-Portrait (EEG), 1963. Electroencephalogram, lead labels, metal-and-glass frame, 70¾ × 17 inches. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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To make the work, Morris had his electroencephalogram taken for a period that would produce a line the length of his own body. For good measure, during this seismographic recording of his brain waves, Morris decided that he would “think about” himself. In this sense, we could say, if there were ever a line expressive of the artist’s “self,” this is it. And yet the absurdity of the claim is equally obvious. Neither a picture of Morris’s thoughts nor an image of his person, Self-Portrait (EEG) has turned to medical technology for a “device” to produce a line that will itself intersect, but only ironically, with the traditional aesthetic genres. And at the same time it slyly asks the question, “What is it like to be a brain?” Contemporaneous with Self-Portrait (EEG), another work associates this search for a device “to make a mark” not only with the mental but with language. Morris’s Memory Drawings, based on a page of writing that summarized his own research into the then-current theories of human memory, are executed in a written line that gradually comes to “picture” the deterioration of memory, as Morris repeatedly attempted to recall and rewrite the initial page, allowing several days to pass between each repetition. If, in certain versions of his Device Circle paintings, Johns used a ruler instead of a paint-mixing stick as his smearing “device,” this was undoubtedly a reference to Duchamp’s own notorious “device”: a set of three metersticks deformed by chance but ironically given the title “standard,” in reference to the standardization of measure. Duchamp’s Trois Stoppages étalons (Three Standard Stoppages, 1913–14), made by recording the shape assumed by a meter-long piece of string dropped onto a surface from one meter above, and repeating the experiment two times, generated in this arbitrary manner a set of templates that the artist then used to design various works, among them Network of Stoppages (1914) and parts of Tu m’ (1918). Devices produced by chance, the lines they trace have no internal, expressive meaning, for they clearly have no gestural relation to their maker. But, further, insofar as they mock the very meaning of measurement for which the units—such as inches, feet, or yards—must be invariant and repeatable in order to signify, Duchamp’s metersticks form a certain parallel with a behaviorist critique of a mentalist nation of meaning as that which is guaranteed by internally held ideas or rules that allow us to know how to use a word correctly from one instance to another.  

Fluids, Body—The double filiation of the long series of ruler works (such as Three Rulers, Swift Night Ruler, and Enlarged and Reduced Inches) that Morris pursued during 1963 was a declaration of his own connection to Duchamp through Johns. Begun as early as 1961, in the page onto which, over the course of two and a half hours, Morris repeatedly copied out the “Litanies of the Chariot” from Duchamp’s Green Box (his notes for the Large Glass), the connection was declared again in 1962 with Pharmacy, and then over and over in 1963, with works such as Fountain, Fresh Air, and Portrait. This connection, which has been endlessly discussed in the literature on Morris, was given its most important early analysis by Annette Michelson, who went so far as to declare, “Duchamp’s work constitutes a text, whose interpretative reading is Morris’s uniquely personal accomplishment.”13 While much historical writing on the development of the 1960s splits artistic production into either a neo-Dada concern that itself evolved into pop art, or a minimalist position focused on large-scale sculpture, and by so splitting it, presents these as two opposing postures—the first figurative and the second abstract—certain texts contemporary with this production argued for the continuity of a sensibility shared across this landscape. Barbara Rose’s “ABC Art,” for example, postulated that a common concern for the way the ordinary object could be mobilized to critique the terrifying complacency of American culture meant that between pop and minimalism there were both shared strategies (repetition, scale, banal materials) and shared sources, among them the immediate example of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, but more remotely that of both Duchamp and Russian constructivism.14 It is this notion of continuity that Michelson argues for Morris’s own production, refusing to divide it into a set of neo-Dada, absurdist maneuvers, resulting in small-scale, Fluxus-like objects, on the one hand, and the massively inert works of his minimalism, on the other. Of the six Duchampian tropes she sees Morris elaborating, two of them— transparency/reflection (as in the Large Glass’s use of glass and mirror) and the revised found-object—function within his minimalist sculpture; one—the strategy of framing—is shared by both the sculpture and the more “conceptual” direction of his development (as when in Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal [1963] he “unframes” an object he previously made by withdrawing aesthetic value from it); two more—art as money and the subversion of measure—relate exclusively to the conceptual

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work; and a final one—art intervening in the ecologically sensitive field of the social (as in Duchamp’s suggestion in the Green Box to “cut off the air”)—had extended by 1969, the date of her text, into Morris’s process art. As important as this argument is in dissolving the difference between the two “halves” of Morris’s formative work, and in thus joining and extending Rose’s own snubbing of an art criticism (and an art history) based on fairly useless categories of morphology or style, Michelson’s list of tropes omits the whole register of Duchamp’s “Notes.” As a result, the field of language, itself conceived as a self-justifying artistic activity, drops from consideration. If Duchamp had decided that much of his work could remain at the level of proposals—as in his famous projection for a “transformer designed to utilize the slight, wasted energies such as: … the exhalation of tobacco smoke / the growth of a head of hair, of other body hair and of the nails. / the fall of urine and excrement. / movements of fear, astonishment, boredom, anger. / laughter. / dropping of tears”15 (a proposal Morris “completed” in his Portrait)—this idea of art-as-language had been incorporated into Morris’s work as early as 1961. That the linguistic field had somehow to be added as a kind of third force to those mediums in which the expressive body, whether as dancer or as painter, had traditionally performed its gestures from within a conventionally mandated verbal silence had already been remarked by Rose, as she described the invasion of dramatic speeches into the New Dance: In fact the use of taped narratives that either do not correspond with or contradict the action is becoming more frequent among the dancers. The morbidity of the text Rainer chose as “musical accompaniment” for Parts of Some Sextets, with its endless deaths and illnesses and poxes and plagues (it was the diary of an eighteenth-century New England minister) provided an ironic contrast to the banality of the dance action, which consisted in part of transporting, one by one, a stack of mattresses from one place to another.16 And although she makes no comment on their conjunction, Rose opens the part of her text in which she presents the parallel between the dancer’s recourse to language and the sculptor’s production of ironic statements

(“Or consider Carl Andre’s solution for war: ‘Let them eat what they kill’”), with an epigram composed of paired remarks by Duchamp— “There is no solution because there is no problem”—and Beckett—“I could die today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort.”17 However, although Beckett puts in various epigrammatic appearances in the critical literature on minimalism and on Morris—the line from The Unnamable: “I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me,” twice used as exergue by Maurice Berger, for example18—it is only Morris himself who has ever pointed to what it was in Beckett that functioned as a crucial, enabling, strategic model: “In [Beckett’s] spaces, a Murphy, a Malone, or a Watt endlessly and precisely permitted his limited store of ideas and meager belongings,” Morris wrote, commenting about the humor involved in the wordy-gurdy ceaselessly playing inside these characters’ skulls, that “an undefiant separateness and even a confidence in the autistic permeates them.”19 But if Duchamp and Beckett join hands in celebrating a kind of hilarious absurdity, it is only Beckett who sees the wordy-gurdy as a strategy for endlessness and permutation, which is to say as a logical conundrum that leaves the mind/body problem forever unsolved. It is only he who performs the conclusion that, far from dissolving the dilemma of “turtles all the way down,” language will in fact operate its own infinite spinout. Rose had described Morris’s early work as taking up either “Duchampesque speculations on process and sex or illustrations of Cartesian dualism,”20 a dualism that Michelson saw Morris as collapsing into what she called the phenomenological firstness—namely, the indivisible impact of a sense-experience that is “a mere sense of quality … without any elements or relations” of his large-scale sculptural production.21 This impact, which she characterized as tautological—“a cube is a cube”— gave Morris’s minimalist work, she argued, its aggressively antimodernist, antimetaphysical stance. But Beckett’s absurdist metaphysics, with the mind shackled to the body on the one hand and to language on the other, and attacked by infinite regress on all sides, functions as a kind of common ground for Morris’s production, in all its many guises. Portrait, beyond its relation to Duchamp, weighs in to the mind/body debate, as its rows of bottled “substances,” or distillations of the “self,” constitute a version of the

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pineal eye—the Cartesian attempt to locate that part of the body where the connection between it and its mental counterpart takes place. The comic, Beckettian mode of this rehearsal, however, is taken up by the serial nature of the bottles and the suggestion this makes of the endlessness of the search for mental substance within all the various flows of the body. Further, Column (1960), which Morris constructed as his “dance work” for the Living Theater, has also to be seen from the vantage of Beckett’s mind/body ribaldry. This column, a gray-painted, hollow, rectangular prism, the height of a person (six feet tall), was conceived as a performer. Revealed at the center of the stage where it remained standing for three and a half minutes, it was offered as a brute thing that, however, had to be reinterpreted as a body inhabited by something like its own volitional center, or “mind,” at the moment when it suddenly and spontaneously fell over. That this eerie quality of a volitional object was intentional is testified to by Morris’s insistence that there was to be no external source of the column’s movement—like a cord one could pull in order to topple it. To this end, Morris (like the homunculus that would have to inhabit the mental sphere in order for the dualist arguments to make sense, according to the derisive attacks of the linguistic behaviorists) decided to stand inside the column and, at the appropriate moment, to propel its fall. When, during rehearsal, this resulted in a head wound, the performance took place with Morris in the infirmary and the column manipulated by a string. But still the meaning was clear. There are no bodies independent from the series, spatial or verbal, within which their orientation is determined. From the beginning, then, permutation in Morris’s sculpture was attached to the Beckett problem, and thus to a Watt “endlessly and precisely permut[ing] his limited store of ideas. …”   Gestalt—Which brings us to the problem of how to interpret the notion of gestalt in Morris’s earliest explanations of his minimalist work, work that appeared to have been pared down to nothing but mute, large, gray-painted shapes. As Judd wrote of these objects: “Order, in the old sense, can’t be read into something that is just a rectangle or a triangle”;22 and, commenting on the extreme reductiveness of early pieces like Slab or Cloud (both 1962), Judd recalled Robert Rauschenberg’s

self-mocking defense of his own set of totally blank White Paintings: “If you don’t take it seriously, there is nothing to take.”23 That extreme simplicity would reduce the experience of something like Slab to Michelson’s “phenomenological firstness”—or the explosive impact of a single, irreducible, perceived aspect: shape—seems to be the point of Morris’s stress on the importance of gestalt in his own search for “unitary” forms. Accordingly, his “Notes on Sculpture” explained: “Characteristic of a gestalt is that once it is established all the information about it, qua gestalt, is exhausted. (One does not, for example, seek the gestalt of a gestalt.)”24 The gestalt or the “firstness” would then cut through the old mentalist dilemma of how the various aspects of objects (the fact that they must be a bundle of properties—dimension, texture, weight, etc.) are related to one another by a consciousness that claims to “know” them.25 Minimalism, it could be argued, was bringing into being objects that somehow, miraculously, only had one property: the gestalt.

Robert Morris, Untitled (Stadium), 1967. Fiberglass, variable configuration of eight units (this version using four units), each 47½ × 85 × 47½ inches. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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It was in this context that Rose connected Morris’s use of “elementary, geometrical forms that depend for their art quality on some sort of presence or concrete thereness” to Wittgenstein’s philosophical questions about “pointing to the shape” of something. To this effect she cited the Philosophical Investigations: “There are, of course, what can be called ‘characteristic experiences’ of pointing to (e.g.) the shape. For example, following the outline with one’s finger or with one’s eyes as one points—But this does not happen in all cases in which I ‘mean the shape,’ and no more does any other one characteristic process occur in all these cases.”26 Applying this notion of “pointing to the shape” to Morris’s work, she concludes: “The thing, thus, is presumably not supposed to ‘mean’ other than what it is; that is, it is not supposed to be suggestive of anything other than itself.” But Wittgenstein’s questions about pointing to the shape are not meant to invoke the gestalt as a kind of stopping of the experiential buck at “firstness.” They are, if anything, intended to make fun of the very idea of gestalt. For in the battle between the behaviorists and the dualists, gestalt is itself regarded as a turtle in the great chain of “turtles all the way down.” In the eyes of the linguistic behaviorists, gestalt is a mentalist notion, like the constancy hypothesis, that operates like a rule by which we recognize this or that set of sense data as a “square” or a “triangle.” Which is to say that in the constancy hypothesis claims to know that we are seeing a square are backed by referring to a mental image— or gestalt—of a square, in order to check that we are right. But in order to be sure that we’ve matched the two correctly, we would need, Wittgenstein winks, the model of another square, and so forth. That the gestalt cannot be so disentangled is part of the lesson of “pointing to the shape.” Because how would we make it clear that it’s the shape we “mean” and not the color, say, or the size of the thing we’re pointing to; or how would we know that we’re pointing to an object and not just holding up a finger for our interlocutor’s attention; or why is pointing something that moves from the finger to the object and not up the arm to the body of the pointer? Pointing to the shape, Wittgenstein insists, is part of a whole matrix of relations that he calls a “form of life,” or more frequently, a “language game.” And further, what does not underwrite the successful playing of the game “pointing to the shape” is a mentalistic form called gestalt.

In fact, the second part of Morris’s own “Notes on Sculpture,” published later in 1966, also implicitly questioned an idea of gestalt as “firstness” or “concrete thereness.” There may be no “gestalt of a gestalt,” he argued, but this is only to say that if formal relations are not conceived as internal to the minimalist object, this is part of a strategy to take “relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.” The result of this, so far from finding an unanalyzable “firstness,” is instead to end up with an endless set of permutations operating as two properties—space and light—that add themselves to the shape of the object and serialize it: Some of the best of the new work, being more open and neutral in terms of surface incident, is more sensitive to the varying contexts of space and light in which it exists. It reflects more acutely these two properties and is more noticeably changed by them. In some sense it takes these two things into itself as its variation is a function of their variation. Even its most patently unalterable property— shape—does not remain constant. For it is the viewer who changes the shape constantly by his change in position relative to the work.27   Haptic—The body, in Morris’s version of the mind/body “problem,” was projected early on not only in the space it displaced—as in Column—but in the traces it deposited—as in Portrait. And another form these traces took, beginning at the end of 1963 and continuing into 1964 and beyond, was the experience of impact, of the body encountering the resistance of a material external to it and, leaving its mark on that material, being itself deformed or inflected by it. These are the traces of the body’s membranous contact with an exterior, as its own outer surface is pressured by the pressure it exerts. Beckett’s Unnamable describes this: “I know I am seated, my hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet, against the palms of my hands, against my knees. Against my palms, the pressure is of my knees, against my knees of my palms, but what is it that presses against my rump, against the soles of my feet?” (T, 279). Body contact, we could say, creates an awareness of the body as sheathing, isolating it as a kind of boundary that can be peeled away from the self and presented as pure corporeality. It is body as physical pressure, as touch, as what might be called the haptic (or tactile) as

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opposed to the optic. Yet as Beckett has shown us, pressure is pressed. So it also could be said to ask: What is it like to be a body? The behaviorist, shunning the “what is it like” part of this question, points to the body’s connection to its world in the execution of those tasks through which it performs its wholly public meaning. And “task performance” is indeed registered as a series of traces captured in the impressionable surface of warm lead in works like Hand and Toe Holds (1964), in which two lead bars, spaced five feet apart, record the clutching of hands and feet. Although lead was the medium Morris most frequently employed to register imprints, plaster served him in another work, Stairs (1964), in which three steps were fashioned so that a section of each of the treads could be flipped open to reveal the imprint of a foot that had been captured as it performed the task: walking up stairs. Yet the body’s imprint is not the only way to capture this sense of its surfacing into external space. Two other early works address this problem, although at an entirely different scale and through very different means. The first, Passageway (1961), was a curving cul-de-sac of a corridor that formed the “exhibition,” which visitors entered only to discover themselves pressured between the two walls of a blind alley that led nowhere but to the point at which it narrowed to nothing. This work was not the neo-Duchampian gesture of Yves Klein’s exhibitionas-empty-gallery (1958), but rather an attempt to make palpable the body’s physical limits experienced as a reciprocal pressure between itself and the space around it. In 1961 Morris also made Pine Portal, a free-standing doorway, nothing but threshold, doorjam, and lintel. The work is a piece of task performance: walk through it. In a second version, Morris lined the doorway with mirrors. Now walking through the door meant that each time one did it a “trace” of one’s passage was registered, albeit ephemerally; in one’s peripheral vision there would be a trail extending onward from one’s body and into a kind of unlocatable spatial fold that appeared like a weird afterimage: the memory of one’s progress, wrenched away from one’s body and made strangely out of sync with it. What is it like to be a body?   I-Box—Q(uod) E(rat) D(emonstrandum).  

Robert Morris at the entrance to Passageway, 1961. Yoko Ono’s Chamber’s Street loft, New York. Painted plywood, 8 × 50 feet. Destroyed. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Judd, Donald—If the rubric “primary structures,” under which minimalism made its collective museum debut in 1966, tended to direct the critical reception of this work down the misleading path of an aesthetic of ideal forms, the notion of “system,” argued via another exhibition later that year (Systemic Painting), applied this same idealism to the issue of serial composition.28 If minimalist artists tended to work in series, it was argued, this was in order to demonstrate the wholly rational basis for their work, each object the next element of a mathematical progression. It was Judd who first publicly objected to this idea of rationalism as a way of responding to minimalist work. Speaking of European geometric art (he gave the example of Victor Vasarely), which was, in fact,

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pledged to what he saw as “rationalism, rationalistic philosophy,” he countered, “All that art is based on systems built beforehand, a priori systems; they express a certain type of thinking and logic that is pretty much discredited now as a way of finding out what the world’s like.”29 Judd’s description of the type of order he thought his own work and that of his colleagues was substituting for such a priori systems was instead, he claimed, “just one thing after another.” And no matter how tenaciously the rationalist reading of minimalism persisted, Judd was always just as dogged in his rejection of it. In 1983, speaking of this problem to students at Yale University, he said: “One conspicuous misinterpretation for example is the idea of order: most writers in the United States have always said that it’s Platonic in some way and involved in some great scheme of order. … That’s certainly wrong.”30 Sol LeWitt, whose work more than perhaps any other minimalist’s has been saddled with a rationalist reading—his art having been characterized as Cartesian, as “the look of thought”—added his own exasperation to Judd’s protest. “In a logical thing,” he explained in a recent interview, “each part is dependent on the last. It follows in a certain sequence as part of the logic. But, a rational thing is something you have to make a rational decision on each time. … You have to think about it. In a logical sequence, you don’t think about it. It is a way of not thinking. It is irrational.”31 There are many images of this irrationality. For an example in language one could easily cite: Here he stood. Here he sat. Here he knelt. Here he lay. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door; from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door. … (W, 203) It is this kind of series, we can agree with Morris, that takes “relationships out of the work and make[s] them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision.” Which is to say, the series, transferred into the realm of sculpture, enacts the object’s endless capacity for permutation as “it takes these two things [space and light] into itself as its variation is a function of their variation.” But far from being an underlying idea or

reason that would ground one’s experience of the work, or group of works, allowing one to essentialize it around a kind of diagram of itself that justifies it from within, series operates in the art of Morris, Judd, and LeWitt as it does in Beckett’s linguistic spirals: irrationally and endlessly.   Kubler, George—Writing a master’s thesis on Brancusi’s use of bases, during the academic year 1965–66, Morris followed out George Kubler’s notion of form-classes.32 This is a notion of series that is itself idealist, walling off a particular form—classical landscape, say—from its historical context and seeing it project a formal problem from its inception in a prime object—the frescoes of Pompeii or Boscoreale, for example—across those centuries through which it is taken up—as in Poussin’s landscapes—only to be dropped and taken up again—as in late Cézanne. As Morris considered the prime object in Brancusi’s work— the ovoid of the bend detached from the rest of the body and presented as a separate whole—it became clear, however, that the form of its “development” was just as much a function of the object’s different placements and orientations in space as it was the simplification and reduction of detail. Idealism, that is, began to yield to material context. In fact, Morris began to reason, that very reduction toward an increasingly bald shape only served to make more naked and unmistakable the changes brought about with each new position of the form in space. The reflectivity of the mirrorlike surfaces of Brancusi’s polished bronzes heightened this sense of the way the shape was newly inflected by every change in its placement.   L-Beams—Conceived during the period he was examining this Brancusi problem, Morris’s L-Beams (1965) enact the pressure that placement exerts on an object’s shape—whether it is an object seen from outside and thus encountered as a body, or an object experienced from inside, as though it were one’s own form nagged, so to speak, by the mentalist question, “What is it like to be a body?” And each L, as it reflects the apparent distribution of weight and dimension, according to its position—the upright L appearing split between the solid half cleaving to the floor and the “lighter” half reaching skyward; the L lying on its side seeming thickened and dense; while the L poised on its two extremities takes on an arched, lightened quality—resonates with its sardonic account of the mind/body problem. There is the body; there is the self; there is the series.

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Three L-Beams), 1965. Painted plywood, three units, each 96 × 96 × 24 inches. 1969 refabrication, installed as part of The Mind/Body Problem, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

To suck any residual idealism out of the idea of permuting the formclass, Morris had, by 1967, hit on the strategy of making works that, though they would be simple geometries based on squares, circles, and ovals, would be sectional and organized such that they could be submitted to an interpermutational spin. Stadium (1967), for example, an eight-part, inwardly sloping donut, could be reorganized so that its four side sections migrate to join another, more rectangular piece, or else they could be left freestanding to form a linear wedge. In the exhibition in which these works, made of fiberglass, were shown, they were, in fact, rearranged daily by the artist. A chart that had its own kind of insane reasonableness formed something like the text or score for these reorganizations. But to encounter Stadium, even outside the context of the exhibition, was to have the strange feeling that something at the scale of the human body and possessing the simplicity of geometric shape—projecting a concomitant sense of the body’s internal coherence and thus serving as a kind of model for the self’s identity over time and space—could just as easily transmute into something else, which could in turn transmute into another thing, and another …  

Mirrored Cubes—By 1965 it should have been obvious that something was going on in minimalism besides “concrete thereness,” for the galleries in which the various works were displayed were even then awash with the effects of optical illusionism. Judd’s work, for one, was opulent with the reflective shine of Plexiglas and industrialized lacquer surfaces, which Robert Smithson acknowledged in 1966 by coining the paradoxical term “uncanny materiality” to describe the way the glinting surfaces acted to swamp and “engulf the basic structure.”33 This contradictory relationship between the presumed clarity of the “primary structure” and the reflective abyss into which the object seemed to vanish was more than evident in Morris’s Mirrored Cubes, first exhibited in 1965. Trapped in the cross fire of the mutual reflections set up by the surfaces of the four facing blocks, the gestalt itself is absorbed by the constantly delayed experience of its presence as it seems to depart into infinite regress. It is, perhaps, in this work more than any other that seriality is defined as the opposite of progress, being instead a kind of trapdoor opened at the back of experience through which certainty will continue to drain away into infinity. The fact that the mirror displays its cross-reflections as the straight line of an endlessly receding trajectory makes of it another type of “device” to “make a mark.” Impersonal and mechanical, it has—like the encephalograph’s capacity to transform the density of the body and the complexity of the mind into the linear trace—the capacity to transmute the three dimensions of space into a peculiarly linear diagram of itself. Ten years after Mirrored Cubes, Morris began to concentrate on this type of production of the mark. In 1975 he devised an untitled installation in which four mirrors, hung on the four opposing walls of the gallery, were accompanied by paired frames hanging at an angle in front of each, such that to look through any of the frames into the mirrored surface was to have the illusion of looking at a receding line of frames within frames within frames. The three-dimensional, cubic volume within which one was standing seemed to flatten or unbend into the spatial impossibility of a straight line. Two years later, in Portland Mirrors (1977), a work of monumental scale and magisterial simplicity, this mirrored “device”-for-marking had the effect of turning minimalism inside out: the art of massive, closed volumes now seeming to empty into the medium of the infinitely long line.  

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Portland Mirrors), 1977. Four mirrors, each 72 × 96 inches, with 12-inch square fir timbers of varying lengths. Installed as part of The Mind/Body Problem, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994 (with Morris reflected). Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Observatory—But nature also “makes a mark,” and by the early 1970s Morris had begun to think about the structures both made (like Stonehenge) and found (like caves) by prehistoric societies to convert the arc of the sun’s revolutions into the straight line of the intelligible, arrowlike trajectory, and thus to “read” the solstice. Observatory (1971) is a massive project through with to think and to experience this culturally ancient notion of marking, which is to say, of entering into a text that one has not oneself written, and that will continue to be produced to the end of solar time. Thinking the “mark” at this scale led Morris to Peru, in 1975, to see the massive and mysterious Nazca lines: an ancient people tracing the sun’s own hand in order to make a mark. “Aligned with Nazca,” Morris’s reflection on the enigma of these lines, opens with an epigram that seems to hang over the text like its own kind of unexplained talisman. It is taken from Beckett’s Murphy: “I am not one of the big world, I am of the little world,” was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first.34  

Robert Morris, Observatory, 1977. Earth, wood, water, granite, steel, 298 feet 7 inches in diameter. Site-specific earthwork, Oostelijk, Flevoland, The Netherlands. © 2012 Robert Morris/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Pollock, Jackson—“Anti Form” was Morris’s first written analysis of what he would later call “The Phenomenology of Making.” It is continuous with the problem, posed by the opening rebellion against the abstract expressionist gesture, of finding a “device” to make a “mark.” Except that both texts, the first from 1968 and the second from 1970, stage this new phase of the rebellion not against but specifically under the aegis of Jackson Pollock.35 Taking up that problem in the reception of minimalism in which repetition and serial organizations of simple elements seemed always open to an unwanted, dualistic reading—Judd’s despised “rationalism”—because, as Morris wrote, “the duality is established by the fact that an order, any order, is operating beyond the physical things,” Morris turned approvingly to Pollock’s example: “Probably no art can completely resolve this. Some art, such as Pollock’s, comes close.”36 This was so, Morris argued, because Pollock’s order seemed to be fused with the very matter he was manipulating, so that “to make a mark” was not to work according to a formal system, but to expose a process that continues over a duration absolutely coterminous with the making of the object. Acknowledging that “only Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of the work,” Morris saw this as a function of Pollock’s relation to his tools: “The stick which drips paint is a tool which acknowledges the nature of the fluidity of paint. … Unlike the brush it is in far greater sympathy with matter because it acknowledges the inherent tendencies and properties of that matter.”37 Making the mark in sympathy with the nature of one’s tool had, of course, been inherent in the Judson dancers’ manipulation of bizarrely commonplace props in their search for an aesthetics of “task performance.” And so the notion of process art as a form of performance came naturally to Morris, as when in 1969, for an exhibition in Edmonton, Canada, called Pace and Process, he proposed to ride several …   Quarter Horses—back and forth over a 200-yard span (reminiscent of Watt’s and Sam’s shuttle), for the time necessary for either the horses or himself to drop from exhaustion. The result—before he was forced to stop—was a deep track etched into the ground, the product of this centaurian “device.”

The other aspect of Pollock’s gesture, however, was that it made clear that one of the properties of his material—paint—is its relation to gravity. Artistic form, Morris now observed, is always the result of a continual struggle against gravity, as canvas is stretched over wooden frames or clay modeled over metal armatures or plaster applied to a supporting lathe. Without those internal props to enable the materials to hold as (geometric) forms, the cloth or plaster would yield to gravity and become formless. What Pollock demonstrated with his dripped and thrown paint was, Morris argued, the division between the internal, rigid armature that maintains form in the field of the vertical, and the openness of matter to the gravity that pulls it into the horizontal field, forcing it to yield to the ground. To forsake armatures and work directly with soft materials like cloth or latex was to produce art in which “considerations of gravity become as important as those of space,” and where “random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material.”38 In the “Anti Form” essay, Claes Oldenburg was designated as one of the first to use such materials and was represented through an image of his Giant Soft Fan (1967), one of its flaccid blades attaching the limp object to the ceiling of the gallery, its spaghetti of electrical cord falling floorward and sprawling on the ground. Although he did not illustrate this in the article, Morris himself had also explored this yield to gravity and its defiance of “form” in two early …   Rope Pieces—made in 1963 and 1964, in which the free fall of the material into formlessness (and in one case from vertical to horizontal) had been contrasted with the geometric frames from which the ropes emerge. But beginning in 1967, Morris had embarked on a far more systematic exploration of gravity’s production of antiform, for it was then that he began to work with felt. Laying great lengths of fabric on the floor, as had Pollock, Morris then marked the material with line, as had Pollock, except that where Pollock’s line was formed by liquid paint soaking into canvas, Morris’s was made by a razor slicing into the surface of felt. All that was then necessary to “make” the work was to lift it onto the wall, where gravity pulled against the order of this line and opened the work to the continuous disorder of antiform.

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Knots), 1963. Painted wood and hemp rope, 5 × 15¾ × 3½ inches. The Detroit Institute of the Arts. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Morris, of course, was reading Pollock’s painting directly and aggressively against the grain of its most orthodox, modernist interpretation. In the eyes of the pictorially devout, Pollock’s linear web was prized specifically because it seemed to defy gravity, hovering weightlessly before one’s eyes like an effulgent cloud, a field of purely “optical” experience that demanded that one think it apart from anything bodily or physical—“a mirage,” as Clement Greenberg had said.39 The dripped line itself frequently softened by its bleed into the unsized canvas, was hailed by Greenberg as an innovation in the development of drawing precisely because it was able to avoid the sensation that it had produced a cut. “A brush stroke can have a cutting edge that goes into deep space when you don’t want it to,” he had explained.40 For Greenberg, the importance of Pollock’s liquid line was that it avoided the edge that would cut into space, the edge that, by isolating forms, would differentiate figure from ground. By not cutting, it could allow the canvas to read as an unbroken continuity a singular, undivided plane. And that plane would then, according to the modernist logic of opticality, yield an analogue of the immediacy, the unbrokenness of the visual field, and of the viewer’s own perception of that field, in an all-at-onceness that, according to the modernist logic, was the very essence of vision itself. By avoiding the production of forms (cut out within the field), this work, then, could produce form itself as the law of the formulation of form. But for Morris, everything in Pollock’s line had indeed to do with the cut, with something slicing not into space but into the continuity of the canvas plane as it conventionally stretches, rigid, across our plane of vision. The lengths of felt Morris began to work with were submitted to a process of systematic cuts; he sliced their pliant fabric surfaces, distributing their planar geometries even while the cuts themselves were geometrically regular slashes. The irregularity came when the work was lifted onto the plane of the wall, where, hanging from hooks or suspended from wires, gravity pulled open large gaps in the fabric surfaces, gaps that could be called neither figure nor ground, gaps that somehow operated below form.41 The horizontal field as the domain of gravity is also the operator of entropy, in which the energy necessary to maintain the separateness and distinctness of form drains out of a system, and in place of differentiations between things, one arrives at the “dedifferentiation” of the formless. Form, Morris had thus argued in his essay, “is an anti-entropic and

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Tangle), 1967. Felt, one inch thick, overall dimensions variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

conservative enterprise.” In this sense, the antiform of Morris’s felts, as well as aggressively horizontal works such as Threadwaste (1968), or profligate process pieces such as Steam (1967), hooks into the notion of entropy as that was being thought by…   Smithson, Robert—in the simple illustration used to explain it in his “Monuments of Passaic.” One of Smithson’s monuments was a child’s sandbox, whose horizontality Smithson stressed by comparing it to an open grave. Using it to explain the irreversibility of entropy, Smithson advised his reader: Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on the one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.42

Robert Morris, (Untitled) Threadwaste (detail), 1968. Threadwaste, asphalt, mirrors, copper tubing, felt, dimensions variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Indeed, Smithson’s imagination was filled with the entropic production of antiform, exemplified by his notion of the de-architecture of “entropy made visible,” as realized in his Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), and his own enactment of form’s yield to gravity, as in Asphalt Rundown (1969). But the parallel between Smithson and Morris, at this moment in the late 1960s, relates to what we might call the Watt factor, which is to say that antiform, an irreversible, abyssal endlessness, is itself a type of seriality that has its true size in language. “In the illusory babels of language,” Smithson wrote, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge … but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fiction and endless architectures and counter-architectures. … At the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.43 Smithson had always countered the rationalist reading of minimalism, and specifically of LeWitt’s supposed manipulation of “concepts,” by describing LeWitt’s yield to paradox, his welcome extended to the “pitfalls of language.” Far from language guaranteeing the order of logic, Smithson insisted, “Everything LeWitt thinks, writes, or has made is inconsistent and contradictory. The ‘original idea’ of his art is ‘lost in a mess of drawings, figurings, and other ideas.’ Nothing is where it seems to be. His concepts are prisons devoid of reason.”44 Beckett returns, then, through the very guise of antiform. As the body tries to finish dying, something nonetheless relentlessly continues. Taking the form of a text, its logic is that of repetition to infinity, the mad imitation of form produced by the abyss. The textuality of Morris’s own antiform was made explicit in the diary he kept for Continuous Project Altered Daily (1969), in which he talks about the bodily disgust produced by his labors.   The Textual Body—The voice that puts in its appearance in Morris’s work of the early 1970s, the relentless, argumentative, internal drone that fills both Hearing (1972) and Voice (1974), continues to attach the third force of language to the staging of the mind/body problem. But, perhaps, the most effortlessly beautiful of the enactments is to be found in the series

called Blind Time, initiated in 1972 and returned to in 1976, and in 1985, and again in 1991. These drawings, made by carrying out graphic tasks geared to the description of simple geometries—either those of the rectangular sheet of paper itself, or of shapes to be applied to the sheet—were pure exercises in “touch.” For Morris, with his eyes closed, would perform his task by “making a mark” that would deposit a record of his attempt in a smear of velvety powdered graphite mixed with plate oil. These marked areas, everywhere redolent of the hand’s pressure, the fingers’ extension, the palm’s spread, take on exactly that haptic quality Morris had explored in the Leads: the experience of the body’s limit as a sense of pressure pressing against the pressure pressing back. In this, the objective geometries the body describes in the world—the vertical and horizontal bifurcations of the rectangular sheet, for example, or the masking tape deposited as a “square”—take on the resonance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s argument about the body’s role in the phenomenology of perception. It is what he called the “internal horizon” of the body’s density, the fact that it has a front and a back, a left and a right, an up

Robert Morris, Blind Time, 1973. Powdered graphite and pencil on paper, 35 × 46 inches. Collection of Rosalind Krauss. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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and a down, that allows us to “surface” into a world always already anticipated as meaningful. Mind, in this sense, is present in the very dimensionality of carnality: What is it like to be a body?45 The phenomenological reading of the Blind Times, though it captures the striving after an exquisite balance between an inside (the artist’s intentional marking) and an outside (the external record of the success or failure of the task), tends to ignore the presence of the text, neatly, fanatically, penciled into the left corner of every sheet. Entering the third term, language, into the equation, the text pulls apart the beautiful equilibrium that marries subject and object, mind and body. For the text is either the command to do the task, given beforehand, or it is the record of the task, once completed. Bur whether preceding or following, the text is what opens up the regressive paradox of how to know whether one has understood the task; it is, we could say, what introduces the turtle. Never one with the task, the textual command is also what pushes the series onward from one task to another: “… then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another peppermint, then another onion, then another …”   Uncanny Materiality—Smithson found the disappearance of the “unitary” form behind a surface of reflections “uncanny,” a disruption of what was expected from minimalism. It was a case of “uncanny materiality,” he said.46 Freud tells us that what is experienced as uncanny is precisely this displacement of the single, coherent, collected (phallic) form by an aureole of multiple, shifting, spooky things gathered around an unspeakable absence.47 This is the image of the Medusa, he said; this is the dreadful recurrence of what the child must strive to repress: the appearance of the “castrated” mother, proof of the Oedipal threat. The uncanny, he explained, is the return of this threat, in a reminder that what were once narcissistic extensions of oneself—and thus, according to the infantile logic of the “omnipotence of thoughts,” protections of oneself—have suddenly turned against one and become dangers to one’s very being. It’s this sense of the double that is no longer a guardian but now a menace that accounts, Freud says, for the location of the uncanny in the doppelgänger, in the mirrors through which departed spirits can reenter the space of the living, in the bodies of androids, and in the endless series of substitutes for the threatened penis.

The uncanny is thus itself a serial production, whose vehicle can often be the mirror, but whose medium is the body, and the mind, and language. The casting of body parts, in a multiplication of phalluses and phallic stand-ins, to form a frame around an opening, in the Hydrocal works of the 1980s, was one form in which Morris pursued this uncanny seriality.   Vetti, House of the—Another, of course, was through the felt pieces, the folds and pleats of which Morris came increasingly to read as genital. The random swells and repetitions of the Felts from 1970 gradually bloomed at the end of the decade—and never so directly as in House of the Vetti (1983)—into the explicit petals of the uncanny body. It is, perhaps, the brilliance of these works that the meticulousness of their “system,” as in the repeated, supple bands of Inverted Shoulder (1978), is now able to restage the image of minimalist seriality under the sign of the uncanny and the repetition of the repressed. So that the later Felts conduct a rereading of minimalism by entering its own series into a new one, which in turn may enter into …  

Robert Morris, Untitled (Inverted Shoulder), 1978. Felt and metal grommets, 9 feet 3 inches × 14 feet 11¾ inches × 6 feet 2¼ inches. Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Watt—“Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done” (W, 23). “Watt’s smile was further peculiar in this, that it seldom came singly, but was followed after a short time by another, less pronounced it is true. In this it resembled the fart” (W, 25).   X, Y, Z—… N otes

1.  Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952; 1936), pp. 88–89. 2.  Ibid., p. 146. 3.  Samuel Beckett, Watt (Paris: Olympia Press, 1953), p. 75. Hereinafter, textual references to Watt are preceded by “W.” Jacqueline Hoefer’s study of Watt was the first to place the novel in colloquy with the logical positivism, although she specifically argues for a connection to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. See Hoefer, “Watt,” in Samuel Beckett, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 62–76. 4.  Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 169. 5.  Benjamin Buchloh analyzes Morris’s early relation to Duchamp’s readymade as having gone beyond an understanding of it as a form of speech act (“this is a work of art if I say so”) disruptive of traditional forms of art making, to an understanding of art as having a semiotic function. This, he argues, was a result of Morris’s engagement with Duchamp’s “Notes.” See Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (winter 1990): 105–143. 6.  The exception that proves the rule is Duchamp’s “Litanies of the Chariot,” the script of a song to be endlessly repeated within the closed circuit of the bachelor machine, the song itself referring to other forms of self-enclosure such as onanism. Of all the notes by Duchamp, it was the “Litanies” to which Morris was attracted and that, in 1961, he copied out to make a “drawing.” But unlike Beckett’s infinite regress, which operates on the structural possibilities of language and its permutability, Duchamp’s “Litanies” merely illustrate or thematize repetition; they do not enact it in the language. 7.  This argument forms the basis of Gilles Deleuze’s attack on the certainties of analytic philosophy in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 16–17. 8.  These passages are from Beckett’s trilogy, which consists of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. All were first published in French in 1950, 1951, and 1952, respectively; they were subsequently published in English as a trilogy, in Beckett’s own translation (London: John Calder, 1959). The above citations are from the English trilogy, as follows: “wordy-gurdy” (p. 367); Molloy’s statement (p. 9); the two statements by the Unnamable (p. 267 and pp. 356–357). Hereinafter, textual references to the trilogy are preceded by “T.”

9.  Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1962; 1939), p. 26. 10.  Annette Michelson’s important early essay on Morris analyzes his work in relation to, among other things, Judson dance, which she calls the “dance of ordinary language” and of “task performance.” (See Michelson, “Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression,” in this volume.—Ed.) 11.  In her essay “ABC Art,” Barbara Rose relates the minimalist sensibility to Alain Robbe-Grillet and the “French objective novel,” which, however, she cautions against assuming that these artists themselves had read. “This is quite the contrary to their knowledge of Wittgenstein,” she then adds, “whom I know a number of them have read” (Art in America [October–November 1965], reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock [New York: Dutton, l968], p. 292). One of the artists who had read Wittgenstein in the early 1960s was, according to his own account, Jasper Johns. 12.  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–44, reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, pp. 222–228; Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), pp. 181–189. 13.  Michelson, “Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression,” this vol., p. 29. 14.  Rose, “ABC Art,” pp. 274–297. 15.  Duchamp, “Notes,” in Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 191. 16.  Rose, “ABC Art,” p. 294. 17.  Ibid., p. 293. 18.  Berger opens the first chapter of Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989, p. 19) with this citation, and he also places it at the top of “Wayward Landscapes,” his text for Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994). 19.  Morris, “Aligned with Nazca,” Artforum 14, no. 2 (October 1975): 35, emphasis added. 20.  Rose, “ABC Art,” p. 284. 21.  Michelson, “Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression,” p. 15. 22.  Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 5 (February 1965), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975, p. 165. 23.  Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 38, no. 6 (March 1964), reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975, p. 117. 24.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” p. 228. 25.  Richard Rorty, describing the mind/body problem’s relation to the development of epistemology and problems of the claims to know, speaks of this issue of multiplicity (embedded in intuitions) versus singularity (vested in concepts) as analyzed by Kant. Running through the first Critique, Rorty says, is “the assumption that manifoldness is ‘given’ and that unity is made. That assumption is spelled out in the claim that inner space [contains] … a collection of ‘singular presentation to sense,’ but that these ‘intuitions’ cannot be ‘brought to consciousness’ unless ‘synthesized’ by a second set of representations (unnoticed by Hume)—the concepts—which enter into one-many relations with

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batches of intuitions.” The Transcendental Deduction, Rorty says, “is supposed to show that we can only be conscious of objects constituted by our own synthesizing activity,” as when Kant claims: “of all representations, combination is the only one which cannot be given through objects. … For where the understanding has not previously combined, it cannot dissolve, since only as having been combined by the understanding can anything that allows of analysis be given to the faculty of representation” (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979], p. 153). 26.  Rose, “ABC Art,” p. 291. 27.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 22–23, reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art, pp. 233–234. 28.  Primary Structures, organized by Kynaston McShine, was at the Jewish Museum, in New York (April–June 1966); Systemic Painting was mounted at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by Lawrence Alloway (September–November 1966). 29.  Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News (September 1966), reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art, p. 151. 30.  Donald Judd: Complete Writings, vol. 2, p. 25, as cited in Yve-Alain Bois, Donald Judd, exhibition catalog (New York: Pace Gallery, 1991), n. 12. 31.  Sol LeWitt, quoted in Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), p. 58. Yve-Alain Bois called my attention to this statement. 32.  Morris’s master’s thesis, “Form-Classes in the Work of Constantin Brancusi” (Hunter College, 1966), made use of the concept as articulated in George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 33.  Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in 7 Sculptors, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1967), reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 22. 34.  Beckett, quoted in Morris, “Aligned with Nazca,” p. 25. 35.  Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968): 33–35; “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” Artforum 8, no. 8 (April 1970): 62–66. 36.  Morris, “Anti Form,” p. 34. 37.  Ibid. 38.  Ibid., p. 35. 39.  Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 169. 40.  Greenberg, as quoted in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1989), p. 535. 41.  For an expansion of this argument, see my Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 243–320. 42.  Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967), reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, pp. 56–57. 43.  Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” Art International (March 1968), reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, p. 67. For an analysis of Smithson’s relation to language, see Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (fall 1979): 121–30.

44.  Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” p. 69. 45.  For such a reading, see “Blind Time Drawings, 1973,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/ Body Problem, pp. 244–249. 46.  Smithson, “Donald Judd,” p. 22. 47.  Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogart Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1973; 1919), pp. 214–235.  

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The Reception of the Sixties Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Martha Buskirk, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

The need to have a conversation about the current reception of 1960s art has presented itself because of what many of us view as the peculiar and unacceptable response to the Robert Morris exhibition, insofar as that exhibition represents the first major retrospective of a minimalist artist in an American museum and inasmuch as the critical reaction—not that of serious art magazines but of mass-press journalism—was something that shocked us. I’m sure this was experienced by each of us differently, since we all encountered 1960s art and the discourse it generated, and the profound change it effected in artistic practice, at different moments. But we could start by speculating on why we think there is a particular resistance to 1960s art at this moment. What is there in the political or aesthetic situation of the 1990s that makes the issues at stake in Morris’s work invisible?

Ro salind

Krau ss: 

D eni s Hollie r:  Maybe the question should be to see what’s different between today’s resistance and that which the same art encountered in the 1960s. Has it ever been encountered, indeed, by something else than resistance? A nne tte Mic hel son:   One complicating factor is that, as you say, our reaction of shock is the response to journalistic criticism. We don’t yet know of the reception by artists and others who would engage more seriously and thoughtfully with the extraordinary range of issues raised and explored by Morris in the trajectory traced in this exhibition.

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I would answer Denis by saying that what’s intervened between the public response in the 1960s and that of the 1990s is the utter deflation of the prestige that surrounded the modernist project as a whole. Whereas a certain self-censorship was operating in the press before— journalists weren’t allowed to say that a lot of contemporary practice was terrible because it would make them sound like Philistines—now the journalistically assumed perception is that to say it’s terrible makes one sound like an intellectual. Furthermore, newspapers themselves hired far more credible critics in the 1960s—for example, Brian O’Doherty, who was then the critic for the New York Times, and is a practicing artist. When you scan the horizon of who was writing, it was composed of a totally different set of people, either with allegiances to modernist art or at least a predisposition to be impressed by its arguments. So that beyond whatever is special in Morris’s case, I would say the fate of modernism as a whole is inscribed in this phenomenon.

RK: 

Hal Fo ster:  Why do you think the difference is the lost prestige of modernism? For many critics the trouble with Morris is that he breaks with modernism, a modernism become a museum culture defined by signature styles. And that break remains difficult to accept or at least to understand.

Obviously, if we’re going to understand minimalist practice in terms of its own self-description through which it pronounced a hostile, critical relation to the wider field of modernism, there would be a disjunction between the two. But I’m really speaking globally. I’m saying that modernism had achieved such prestige nationally and internationally, it had so institutionalized itself, that there was a blanket respect for what was considered the general avant-garde/modernist project. And that provided a cover for a lot of things. Thus, it was in the early 1960s that the art world rose up on its hind legs and said we will not tolerate John Canaday—the doddering, reactionary critic for the New York Times— anymore. And that’s when he was let go and Brian replaced him. So there was a sense that the art community would not put up with a tired repetition of the belle-lettristic evocations of art as a wellspring of sincere and beautiful emotion.

RK: 

HF:  Yet Roberta Smith, who initiated the media tirade against the Morris show in the Times, once worked as an archivist for Donald

Robert Morris, Brain, 1963. Eight and a half dollar bills over plaster cast in glass case. 7½ × 6½ × 5¾ inches. Photograph by Rosalind Krauss. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Judd—a very different artist, to be sure, but a minimalist nonetheless, and one whom Roberta championed to the end (the juxtaposition of her Morris review and her Judd obituary was very telling). Silvia Kolbow ski:  I think the question you asked about Morris in relation to modernism—in terms of journalist coverage—is interesting because in fact the project of modernism has begun to be understood in a complex and heterogeneous way in the past few years at least, by maybe just a handful of critics, but nevertheless that reassessment has started. But when there is a reaction against that work—whether on the part of artists or critics or journalists—or when the work is taken up in a non- or antihistorical way, then that project is very reduced, and it’s understood in a schematic, uninteresting, and very noncontradictory way. This is not just on the part of journalists, but on the part of art historians as well.

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It’s also interesting that some of the hostility seems related to the fact that you can’t resolve Morris into a signature style. The absence of a signature style runs in some respects counter to a whole professionalization of the art world and an apparatus that’s developed around the fact that the art of the 1960s did prevail and has become tremendously successful in the contemporary art market; hence the desire to package the art. And Morris’s art resists that packaging a bit.

Ma rtha Bu skirk: 

A M:  Morris also began his enterprise as a reaction and counterstatement to a specific version of modernism, one that developed into a doxa. He made that quite clear on the levels of theory and practice, in both his writing and in his sculptural work. He enters the scene at a moment of triumphalism, epitomized in the title of Sandler’s book, The Triumph of American Painting. I think that the factor of the institutionalization of American art on an international scale is an important one, because it must be considered as a background against which to consider future developments; and the modernist doxa, projected onto the international market, certainly did have as one of its implications the development, the primacy of the signature.

To go back to Denis’s question about how the negative reaction is different now from then, I would say that the historical model based on the idea of American hegemony over aesthetic practice, which was operative in the 1960s and ’70s, has been collapsing. Just as the notion of America as the industrial power that can exert global economic control is inoperative, and other economic models are now developing, other artistic models (some progressive but others extremely reactionary) are also developing. This has opened a kind of floodgate through which many different things are rushing—one of which we’ve seen in the current reception of Lucien Freud, a greater phony of which there never was one. Indeed, the whole recent promotion of vacuously representational English art in the pages of many American magazines is an example of how models of what constitutes valid practice are proliferating.

RK: 

SK:  Models that had never disappeared. The fact is that paradigms of expressivity and also of originality (because of course a lot of the griping about Morris is that he sort of whores after every cultural change or shift) have resurfaced. A lot of the 1980s debates about originality seem to be in eclipse right now, and a criterion for good art is once more

Robert Morris, Money, 1969. Detail of Morris’s contribution to Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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originality. This allows for a return to the English models you mentioned, which are models that have always been there. You can find them woven throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. A M:  That’s true, and you have, at present, the simultaneity of two exhibitions in major institutions, involved with the human body. You have only to cross the street to pass from Morris’s sustained meditation on the modalities of the body to confront Freud’s … well, I think you’ve characterized that show. … And the inflation of Freud through the efficiently mounted press campaign represents, of course, the reverse (a mirror image of sorts) of the journalistic reception of the retrospective at the Guggenheim, which impels our conversation.

I think it might not be unproductive in regard to the 1960s to figure in for a moment some questions that are paradoxically— at least in my view of things—precisely not the ones that Morris’s work embodies. If we think of 1960s figures in the context of minimalism, i.e., Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd, in particular, they Benja min Buc hlo h: 

Untitled (Ring with Light), 1965–1966. Painted wood, fiberglass, fluorescent light, two units, each 24 inches high, 14 inches deep; overall diameter 97 inches. Dallas Museum of Art. Photograph provided by Sprueth Magers Berlin London. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

embody a certain production that is demarcated by extraordinary consistency and continuity, basically one that has hardly been modified at all over the course of thirty years, and one that has triumphantly acquired its own position—speaking of triumphalism, I think minimalism itself had become a triumphant style by the mid-1980s. And for those who were deeply formed by the encounter with minimalism (and I count myself among them) in the mid-to-late 1960s, it’s an interesting experience to see oneself gradually disinvest from that position. By the mid1980s, the persistence and credibility of the industrial paradigm, which is clearly in operation in Andre’s, Flavin’s, and Judd’s work, was certainly open to question. Which is to say, the validity of a production based on an exclusive set of parameters that will never ever change, which is clearly the case for those three as well—seemed to become an increasingly pressing question, because what has clearly happened to those artists is that they haven’t at any point reflected upon questions such as the transition from the internal space of the gallery to the external surface or space of architecture. So that suddenly it was not a problem at all for them to transform a phenomenological object into an architectural model or an outdoor sculpture. In the mid-1960s that issue of context was clearly at stake; but then, suddenly, with emerging commissions, it was no longer a question at all. And in that sense, I think minimalism betrayed itself on almost all accounts, certainly in the work of those artists. Interestingly enough, Morris is almost exactly the opposite. He breaks all the paradigms; he breaks the parameters at all points, whenever possible, and forces himself to look at all the questions, including the one that is the most painful for some of us at the table, which is figurative painting. Right? He incorporates even that into his work at a later phase and addresses it, very much to the horror of most of his friends and followers. And so there’s an interesting countermodel produced in his work. And he’s not the only one. I’m thinking of someone like Yvonne Rainer, who’s also a minimalist artist who has made herself over again and again throughout the last twenty years, redefining her practices and position in a way that I find the valid countermodel to what the industrialization of American minimal sculpture embodies. So, strangely, 1960s minimalism, if we want to stay with that model for a moment—because of course there’s another model afterward—has in and of itself undergone a transformation in its own terms and a transformation in my perception, in the

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Robert Morris, Untitled (Corner Beam), 1964. Painted plywood, 24 × 12 × 144 inches. Photograph provided by Sprueth Magers Berlin London. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

sense that at this moment there’s hardly another art movement of the recent past from which I am more disaffected. But your disaffection doesn’t come from an understanding of that work as a purely pictorial mode—which is what happens in almost everything I’ve read or come across and which I consider to be a reductive understanding of that material. Your disaffection comes from placing that work within a historical framework, and, yes, it reaches a point where it becomes the repetition of a certain kind of style and becomes irrelevant politically and culturally and ideologically. But that’s not really what we’re talking about. SK: 

BB:  But there’s also an optimism in minimalism of that kind—of the three I was talking about in particular—which with hindsight is hardly understandable. It’s difficult, of course, to address these reproaches to artists who started their work over thirty years ago; but if you look at the optimism they felt for a fusion of aesthetic practices with industrial materials, for example, or the optimistic belief in communication within very limited material operations rather than in including communicative models directly the way Hans Haacke already did in the late 1960s, that poses a very peculiar problem. Namely, how can anyone continue to work from within that optimism in defiance of the catastrophes of industrialized mass culture, of the actual ecological destruction that industry generates? And yet, here we go installing another five hundred fluorescent light tubes. HF:  That is where I object to your conception of history, Benjamin. It is so punctual and so final: breaks happen for you all at once, and once and for all. The recognition must be total, and the consequences are to be dealt with immediately. But that is to project a clear present retrospect onto a murky past situation in which the proper response (if one can conceive of such a singular thing!) is never known with certainty in the first instance. Sometimes I feel your historical consciousness, which I greatly admire, smuggles in a historicism, which I do not admire, especially when it projects history as a relentless subtraction of possibilities. BB:  Can I illustrate my point? The climax of this was Dan Flavin, who initiated the censorship of Daniel Buren’s work at the Guggenheim International in 1971, and then in 1994 in the Guggenheim Museum, in the precise place where Buren had installed his work, Flavin mounts exactly

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the same project that Buren had done in 1971, now constructing a pink neon column in the central empty core of the museum’s cylinder. No one would argue that there is an urgent relevance to that work in 1994. I think we’re arguing that the Morris show is a historical exhibition and that you cannot go back and look at works from 1962 or 1966, the way some of these reviews do, and understand them from a 1994 recuperative model of expressivity without any regard for the challenges they posed at the time. SK: 

HF:  All those artists—Judd, Andre, Flavin, Morris—were involved in the logic of a certain modernism; that much we agree on. But that logic is not ruptured all at once; it is worked through, genealogically, in different practices with different temporalities and different visibilities. For some people Morris takes up a strategic rather than a genealogical relationship to the problems of this modernism. Sometimes he is content to comment upon these problems—critically, wittily, to be sure, but he does not always work them through formally.

I’d like to buttress what Benjamin said and also repeat something that was implicit in Silvia’s comments. And that is that having lived through the 1960s and having been affected in the relatively undifferentiated way one experiences a movement when it’s happening—at the time you’re more impressed with the similarities than the differences, but as you back further away, the differences begin to appear, perhaps with a special force for those of us who didn’t see them initially—it never occurred to me that Flavin and Judd were really painters. Yet now I perceive that not only did they begin as painters, they continued to be such. So that even though Judd is the author of a famous essay arguing that painting should lose its virtual dimensions to become a “specific object,” he remains a painter—totally involved with questions of illusion. That’s where I agree with the stress Silvia was placing on the term “pictorial.” Think of Flavin as well, with his recurrent use of frames made of fluorescent fixtures set in the corners of rooms, their lights directed inward at the converging walls. Not only does this generate an incredible sense of virtuality, but since this transformed and sublated architectural space is in fact triangular, the works mobilize a whole set of iconographic resonances with three-dimensionality made to glow with trinitarian connotations.

RK: 

And on this retrospectively formed horizon what’s come into focus is the term “academicism,” because I think there’s something deeply academic in Flavin’s or Judd’s practice, something not shared by other minimalists. One of these instances is Sol LeWitt, who is not a cryptopainter even though he’s involved in making colored drawings—and obviously Smithson, and Morris. I think we have to make a distinction between those artists who were always covert painters, and the ones who weren’t. It’s in these terms that I would respond to Hal’s earlier point about Roberta Smith’s having been Judd’s assistant. What I would argue is that this gave her a perfect pedigree in the academic, pictorial understanding of minimalism, and hence a way of holding on to a lot of notions authenticity, originality, expressiveness—that other branches of minimalism brought into question. SK:  I would only object to pictoriality when it becomes oblivious to historical change. I don’t know that just the fact of rejecting pictoriality out of hand—or the fact of not doing so—is enough to determine a work’s critical dimension or to dismiss this work as somehow academic or retrograde. I was just raising it as a means of focusing on the way certain artists persist in a given approach. And this would support Morris in some way over others, even though his movement from one approach to another is now denigrated; perhaps historically it’s more interesting than focusing on one mode that has some kind of historical relevance and then enters into an academic, stylistic stage, repeated over and over as though it has nothing to do with any historical context, becoming an essentialist practice. That’s what Judd’s practice became over the past fifteen years.

But the reason pictorialism is relevant here is that it is grounded in the notion that you carry your dimensions around inside the frame. Easel painting became the quintessential art of modernism insofar as it instantiates autonomy. Sculpture and architecture are not nearly as autonomous as the illusion generated inside a painting’s frame. Yet projecting illusion inside the object is what characterizes Judd and Flavin for me. And that’s what makes such an object immune to the kinds of changes Benjamin was referring to.

RK: 

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But this problem of inside-the-frame is not exclusive to the pictorial tendencies within minimalism. One can make much the same argument in relation to much Anglo-American conceptual art as well. HF: 

BB:  I was hoping we could hold off on the discussion of conceptual art until a bit later. SK:  I was going to say that artists like Richter dealt with painting but examined it on its own terms, and a number of women in the 1960s engaged the space of the tableau and the insertion of their own bodies into a tableau-like or pictorial space. For example, the work of Carolee Schneemann or of Valie Export, who contextualized herself by means of a performance, with the residue of that performance surviving as a sculptural piece. I’m thinking of a talk given recently by Silvia Eiblmayr in which she elaborates the idea of the tableau space. So there were challenges to the pictorial within the terms of the pictorial that were taking place in the 1960s. It shouldn’t be pictorialism per se that typifies the work as purely academic. Although its persistence could be.

I certainly agree that challenges to the pictorial within its own domain arose from body art—Valie Export is an example, but then so is Hannah Wilke. It had to do with framing the body in relation to the photograph and then performing operations on that photographic representation, which Wilke’s work does. So it’s true that there were guerrilla actions on the pictorial that were tremendously important.

RK: 

BB: 

And tremendously overlooked and excluded by the profession.

And it focuses us, exactly, on the fact that even in the 1960s the pictorial was pointed at by these artists as the enemy. Yet this is something I was totally unaware of, because I was seeing all of this as one continuous field.

RK: 

But it’s curious the way you built on Benjamin’s earlier comment, because Benjamin was talking about continuous repetition, as in the use of industrial materials, and complete obliviousness to history, and you moved from that to the pictorial. So I was wondering if you were making the argument that the pictorial focus itself makes one oblivious to historical change?

MB: 

Robert Morris, costumed for War performance, a collaboration with Robert Huot, Judson Memorial Church, New York, January 1963. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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I would say: “pictorial makes academic.” That’s my motto. The untransformed notion of pictoriality, the sneaking back of fundamental values that pictoriality enables, like autonomy and the possibility of excluding everything outside itself—including the body—“makes academic.”

RK: 

BB:  Even though for historical accuracy’s sake we have to remind ourselves that the very transition from modernism to minimalism, inasmuch as it was articulated by Judd and others, and inasmuch as it was assaulted by Michael Fried in his essay “Art and Objecthood,” was precisely that Judd and others depictorialized, that Judd and others phenomenologized, that Judd and others established a new mode of interaction with the sculptural object that was previously excluded from the pictorial operations of modernism. You have to put that into the account.

And I would like to put into the account that if Michael Fried wrote that article in 1967, I wrote one in Artforum in 1965, called “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” in which I talked about his work as supremely illusionistic and involved in pictorialist reflections, in all the things that Smithson would later call “uncanny materiality” because of the doubling caused by such reflections. So Judd’s number as a cryptopainter got called very early on.

RK: 

A M:  I had been struck at one point by Jules Olitski’s statement, cited by Fried, that what he really wanted was to spray color on the air. This was very arresting to someone like myself involved in film, because it is what the projector has been doing since the turn of the century. I was, in that connection, also struck by Olitski’s exhibition of sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum as the most perverse and deadly one I’d ever seen: colorfield sculptures. It seemed to me, as well, that Judd was involved in painting and that both he and Flavin were, in different ways—through reflection and through luminescence—contaminated by that frustrated wish of Olitski’s to spray color on the air. They were, in a sense, inventing modes of pictorialism consistent with that frustrated desire, a desire born, it then seemed, out of the modernist exigence of pictorial opticality. RK:  With the distance we now have, so that we’re not so blinded by what Benjamin referred to as the industrial paradigm, the fact that “spraying color on the air” is done from fluorescent tubes or from Day-Glo plastic impresses us less, and therefore we can see how deeply pictorial it is.

Hal, I want to go back to your point about genealogy. Can you give me an example of a genealogical operation in minimalism? BB: 

I don’t want to oppose the genealogical to the strategic any more than you do. But minimalism did set up an analysis of the art object, its spatial parameters and subjective conditions, that asked to be extended— to a more institutional idea of “space,” a more differentiated concept of “the subject,” and so on. Morris was involved in this project, but he has also had particular philosophical concerns that have led him away from a genealogical analysis of the institution of art to a more strategic posture of critical commentary. HF: 

SK:  But I think that what might be troubling about him is that the institution he does take on is the institution of “the artist,” and he establishes a kind of meta-position for himself. And I think what’s troubling about that for contemporary journalists is that he doesn’t immerse himself the way an artist is supposed to: he thinks a little bit too much about what he’s doing; he thinks a little bit too much about what other artists are doing; he thinks a little bit too much about different kinds of activities that are taking place; and he often plays the role of the critic or the role of the artist playing an artist. Whereas I think that Judd immerses himself, Flavin immerses himself. They may raise questions about what the artist is producing, but they don’t really raise questions about that kind of blindness that artists are meant to have, so that critics can have that outside position; Morris crosses these two positions.

There’s a division being set up here between Morris as the artist who does so many different kinds of things and Judd, Flavin, and Andre as the artists who’ve maintained a certain continuity for thirty years. What I would like to ask Benjamin about is the difference between Morris and Gerhard Richter, a difference marked for me by the fact that whereas Richter has moved in all kinds of different directions there’s still a sense of a unified project, while perhaps Morris doesn’t have that.

MB: 

This idea of the artist as a meta-figure raises the question of who is the major meta-artist of the twentieth century? Marcel Duchamp. And who revived this? Many people did, but one of the principal figures among them was Jasper Johns. And Johns’s revival of the Duchamp paradigm had two major progeny. One of them was Richter and one of them was Morris. And while distinguishing between Richter’s and

RK: 

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Morris’s projects is undoubtedly productive, focusing on this model shows what links them. This role of meta-artist has a prominent position within twentieth-century art. It’s not a paradigm that is easily dismissed. BB: 

Or easily acquired either.

And Johns is the influential reviver, and Richter and Morris are contemporaries and major heirs.

RK: 

But in the two bodies of work Morris seems to move from project to project more than Richter, whereas Richter, to the contrary, circles back in different ways to issues raised by his earlier work.

MB: 

It’s hard to contradict you on that level because with the exception of twelve pieces—if it is that many—Richter has never ventured beyond the boundaries of painting, and in that sense, if that’s a unified project— painting—he is a more unified artist than Morris is. But if one recognizes an extraordinary range of questions and options within the field of painting as equally built on the model of the Duchampian meta-artist, and I think that would be true for Richter, then I think the comparison holds.

MB: 

Richter may have been coherent as to medium, but he’s been incredibly eclectic in terms of representational models.

RK: 

BB: 

Coherence as to medium is one kind of coherence after all.

SK:  Well, also in terms of an assessment based on pictorial criteria, I think such coherence is important because that work becomes less threatening critically in a certain sense than work that moves the way Morris’s does. And I think there’s a distinction to be made between Duchamp and Morris over this. It is important to notice that Morris moves from one type of modality to another, in the sense that some of his works show a lot of evidence of the hand, and are crafted—I’m struck by how many works are painted rather than left in their original state; they’re not just readymades. So there’s a jump from work that is crafted to something that’s presented in an as-it’s-found fashion. Whereas for Duchamp there’s a kind of consistency in the objects that are acquired by him and acted on or presented in a certain way. Of course, there is certainly a meta-position in terms of Duchamp’s looking at the way an artist or institution produces an object or a work of art, but in

Morris there’s a move from one paradigm to another, in a sense, which strikes me as more “meta” than Duchamp or Richter. But what does this meta-artistic status guarantee today? It is institutional too. And it is not so difficult to acquire, Benjamin; it is only difficult to elaborate in critically communicative ways (to use your Habermasian term) rather than according to the common habits of cynical reason. HF: 

But is it desirable? I’m saying this out of some kind of identification, because I sometimes find myself articulating a meta-position with my own work and I have to question it, because “meta” implies some kind of discrete distance that isn’t desirable, let alone achievable. SK: 

BB:  Who has entered the reserve after Morris, somewhat convincingly? I can’t think of anyone. I agree, though, that it seems as though it is a received idea at this point.

I think in certain ways artists like Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Silvia Kolbowski … HF: 

SK: 

And Cindy Sherman as well.

D H: 

Le Gac.

[Laughter] BB: 

A little chauvinist remark.

D H: 

I have a green card.

Hal, what I understood you to say about the difference between genealogy and strategy is that it’s a matter of a movement’s or an artist’s generating transmissible practice and that what the most fecund artistic transmission of minimalism involved was its critique of institutions. So that the displacement of the center of the work from its physical core to an exchange between viewer and work and therefore to the physical space allowed for a secondary displacement, transforming the center of the work to the space of exhibition understood as an institution. That is one way of characterizing the genealogy of minimalism, but I don’t understand why you can’t extend it to the terms raised by Silvia, namely, the artistic persona understood in a meta-critical way, which seems to me to be, for instance, how Cindy Sherman receives minimalism’s use

RK: 

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of the industrial paradigm: the idea that the artistic personality is voided by industrialized production. Therefore, becoming a mirror of social roles would seem to me to be one perfectly operative genealogy stemming from minimalism through the reception of something like Morris’s example: Morris understood as the artist who voids the idea of consistency by adopting a peripatetic model of the artist instead. I don’t mean to put these models in competition. I just think this posture of the obsessively reflexive artist, this Duchampian meta-practice, also needs to be questioned. It has its own conventionality. HF: 

Yet the Duchamp model didn’t become fully solidified until the 1950s and ’60s, which can be related to the point you made in a recent paper about the retroactive definition of the historical avant-garde. So we get a critique or reactivation of the earlier model only in its moment of solidification for the later twentieth century.

MB: 

Major aspects of it still haven’t been solidified. Étant donnés is still not part of a general reception, for example.

BB: 

Doesn’t the delayed reception of Duchamp mean that there can’t have been an early conventionalization of Duchamp?

RK: 

HF:  I speak from the point of view of the present, and today one has to reflect on the conventionality of this meta-artistic posture. (Isn’t this one lesson of the Jeff Koons Story?) I don’t mean to project this necessity back in time, nor do I want to oppose the reflexivity of the artist to the analysis of the institution. Both are essential. (In fact, when people abhor the legacy of art of the 1960s it is often this combination that they abhor.)

I totally agree with the first part of your statement but I don’t know whom you are referring to who is really critiquing the conventionality of the meta-artistic model at this time. BB: 

I think that, in fact, this happened throughout the 1980s in very interesting ways, ones that were tied to developments in theory. The interesting thing about a lot of art work in the 1980s—and you can take Cindy Sherman’s work as an example, or even that of Mary Kelly, among others—is that what one can read in their work is that a meta-position is not really tenable. And this relates back—although not pictorially or

SK: 

iconographically—to some of the work of the women artists in the 1960s, where they’re both inside and outside of the work at the same time. The Lacanian notion of subjectivity, that one is both the subject and object of one’s existence—you see that in a lot of work of the 1980s. So what those artists learned from the 1960s and ’70s was not literally transposed into the ’80s work; it was reworked through a theoretical model. On the other hand, there is the recent work of someone like Janine Antoni, which I find really problematic in terms of the way it figures a relation to an earlier paradigm: you take something for its pictorial value, with no relation to what it meant historically, and you produce work that critiques it purely on a pictorial level. In other words, the logic is: minimalism was bereft of “emotion”—and this ties into the journalistic criticism—and we have to put the body and emotion back into the work. It’s a misunderstanding of the critique of the relation between the art object and body that was taking place then, and it’s a reductive, iconographic kind of transposition. BB:  I would go one step further. It’s not only in pictorial terms but, precisely, cashing in at this moment in time on the radicality of the art of the 1960s, i.e., Fluxus and Beuys and Diter Rot—because he’s a very unacknowledged reference in what she does—but not in order to invest the work now with a specific emotionality but to offer a product that seems to satisfy both demands for radical feministic theorization and for a new quality of dramatized objects. What’s happening in Antoni’s work is precisely the spectacularization of feminist theory. And the spectacularization of Fluxus practices. Those two come together in a very wellplanned strategic operation. And of course it’s fabulously successful to use a Fluxus performance from 1965 by Shigeko Kubota and to perform it now, slightly altered, in a posh gallery in London under the auspices of doing a radical feminist public performance. I’m talking about the hairdye operation.

I think this addresses Denis’s original question about the difference in the resistances, because the current reception of the 1960s is circling back through spectacle. And thus for something to be available as an idea, it has to be available at the level of spectacle. Which is ultimately pictorial, since it means: at the level of the image.

RK: 

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The reception of the Morris show was different from the usual neoconservative reaction against 1960s art and culture in toto. It was also informed by the new threat of an active interest among contemporary artists and critics in the 1960s—in incursions of the bodily and the performative, in strategies of installation and site-specificity. On the one hand, the 1960s is now a historical object that recedes from us, especially as its signal artists like Judd die; on the other hand, it advances upon us again because of this new interest, and this return produces anxiety for people who saw the 1960s as a great fall in culture. HF: 

BB:  But those are precisely the boundaries that minimalism never really transgressed. HF: 

Right. But artists like Morris did.

BB: 

Morris, yes. But not the others.

HF:  And today the recovery of the 1960s is not all pictorial or spectacular. There are also workings-through of the institution-critical art that I associate with 1968, early work by people like Buren and Broodthaers in Europe, and Asher and Haacke in this country. Some artists today admire this work greatly, but they find it often too abstract, too much like the anarchistic attack on the institution of art by the historical avantgarde. These contemporary artists work more immanently, less grandiosely, in part because they operate under very different political conditions (1968 was not 1917, and 1994 is definitely not 1968). These artists—and I count Silvia among them, and others of the generation of Andrea Fraser work with subtle, witty displacements, not grand, abstract oppositions. BB:  You wouldn’t call Michael Asher grandiose, would you? His interventions are so subtle that hardly anybody has ever seen his work.

[Laughter] SK:  I didn’t experience minimalism and the work of the 1960s firsthand. And my experience of it in the mid-to-late 1970s and the ’80s was that it had gone into a kind of eclipse and there was a way in which it was not very present for myself and some other artists who were working at the same time, with whom I felt associated, because we were caught up with certain theoretical/political issues. There wasn’t a disdain for that

work, but I think there was a recognition that its work was done. But what I’m finding now, interestingly, on the part of some students and some artists younger than I, is that there is a revived interest in that work—whether positive or negative—partly as a reaction against theory. Why would that be, then? I think that’s partly why the return is to the pictorial, whether one attacks minimalism on an iconographic level or whether one embraces it in some way; in part it seems to be a rejection of what they see as theory’s draining of expressivity. A M:  How does this work appear to such artists as some sort of refuge against theory? What is it about this work that allows for that kind of reception at this historical juncture?

What I’m picking up is that theory led to a degree of self-consciousness that became painful. Ironically, a return to expressivity, even by artists who consider themselves to be political, leads either to what is perhaps a displaced attack on minimalism’s methodological deliberateness or an embracing of a paradigm, because to a certain extent it doesn’t appear to involve the degree of self-reflection or self-consciousness that theory does. SK: 

A M:  Is it possible that what’s involved is not simply a rejection of theory but of a particular theoretical paradigm, which is that of poststructuralism and Lacanian theory, whereas the minimalist extended moment was for the most part involved in different theoretical projects?

To some extent the way minimalism is seen in relation to theory is that even though there was a separation from the handmade in minimalism, it has become a kind of refuge from what is seen as an overt intellectualization of art work. Some of that is a backlash that’s come about in relation to work that one could rightfully critique for not sufficiently synthesizing theory, for illustrating theory. I don’t think this was a wholesale problem in the 1980s, but obviously it’s true for some of the work.

SK: 

HF:  I see a backlash against feminist psychoanalytic work that emerged by the mid-1970s, and that is part of the recovery of the 1960s I find problematic: a reconstruction of a natural bodiliness as a way out of the complexities of the psychic and the semiotic. The “Bad Girls” exhibition at the New Museum was full of such examples. I see this same voluntarism in art-historical work too, as in the recent construction of Eva Hesse as an artist of the naturally feminine body.

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BB: 

Is that how you see Kiki Smith as well?

HF: 

Yes. I think that’s one reason why she’s so celebrated today.

To go back to Hal’s point about a certain abstractness on the level of institutional critique in work of the 1960s, which a lot of work in the ’80s and ’90s has made more specific, I would say that it’s about more than just the popularity of theory or a backlash against it. It’s about a greater elaboration of the whole art-world context—about more types of spaces, a more professionalized attitude toward being an artist, and therefore more specific institutional formations that are being critiqued. And this can also be generalized to include other kinds of struggles, in that it is characteristic of the micropolitics of the 1980s: the division into people fighting not just for environmental issues, for example, but for just one specific environmental issue, because that’s the only way they felt they could make any actual dent—there being no possibility for a broader, utopian gesture.

MB: 

BB:  There’s one aspect I’d like to return to in what Hal was raising as well. If one looks back at the 1960s, there’s one major feature that makes those artists all the more reprehensible now, which is their total exclusion of female and feminist practices, so that even at the moment of the transition from postminimalist sculpture to conceptual art, the same pattern is basically repeated. And those artists who articulated their art at that moment within the realm of the body as opposed to that of language—and language in the 1960s does not necessarily mean the semiotic; I think we should clarify that as well—through practices such as those of Hannah Wilke or Hanna Darboven or Yvonne Rainer recede increasingly from view as the 1960s proceed into yet another level of self-reflexivity, just as it is articulated in the position of criticism with regard to the modernist legacy and once again by the late 1960s when conceptual art is in place: the opposition is upheld between a victorious paradigm of conceptualism, which represses, excludes, denigrates all other practices—which at that moment are of performance, of the body … SK:  But one can look at the marginality of that work as not reprehensible; one can look at it as the successful deployment of those modalities. Because by the very medium they were engaged in they did resist, to a certain extent, a kind of conventional containment. For example,

performances that took place in the street in a kind of extemporaneous way, or even those that were planned, where there was an entry into street life within a certain half-hour or hour, were not easily documented, did not enter the museum easily, didn’t even enter the realm of the art magazine that easily. Other kinds of performances with the body were prosecuted legally in some countries. So that the emphasis wasn’t always on meticulous documentation and presentation in the institution; to some extent their raison d’être was to defy the containment that minimalism was cut out for, and rightfully so. BB:  But from the perspective of a historian I think it would be rather paradoxical to justify one’s own omissions by the fact that the work insisted on its own ephemerality. My remarks were primarily directed at art-history writing, at criticism, at accounts now written of the 1960s and ’70s—including my own in terms of the account of conceptual art I wrote a few years ago, which is manifestly ignorant of all the counteractivities against the linguistic paradigm as it triumphantly surfaces in the mid-to-late 1960s.

What sense does it make, if you are a historian writing about the emergence of the linguistic paradigm conceptual art was mobilizing, to write about all the counterparadigmatic practices as well? Because then you have to write about Gott und die Welt. Can we say that Lynda Benglis’s work was made specifically counter to Joseph Kosuth? I think not.

RK: 

SK:  I think what Benjamin is saying is that it’s more fruitful to look at that period in terms of different practices at the same time, which is something that hasn’t been done. To see how they did and didn’t relate to each other and how we can look back at them now as a field with a variety of practices taking place at the same time, rather than either seeing them as counterparadigmatic or …

Well, I think it’s fruitful but I don’t know that it’s more fruitful. What I found impressive in Benjamin’s treatment of conceptual art was his attempt as a historian and theorist to create a boundary within which conceptual art could be constructed and to create that in relation not just to “language” but to a whole series of linguistic practices, including that of the bureaucrat. Now we could say, well it would also be interesting to create yet another field. And I agree with you, but …

RK: 

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But it’s not another field; that’s the point. In the present there are renewed involvements in the bodily and the performative. You have to sort through them together; you can’t understand the reactive examples apart from the innovative ones. HF: 

But isn’t it richer to sort through them, once you have this very developed and elaborated model on the table, like the one Benjamin constructed, which shows why it is necessary not to respect the boundaries that someone like Joseph Kosuth, an ultimate academic, has drawn around conceptual art, but rather to show that all forms of verbal production, including that of the administrator or bureaucrat, are necessarily part of this paradigm? And then we can go back to the body as something that’s suppressed not just by the aesthetic paradigm but by that of a paradigm of “administration.” So we loop back through the institutional critique in a way that Benjamin’s historical model makes available.

RK: 

But I think Benjamin’s self-criticism is well taken in that particular instance. While I regard that article very highly, in relation to an exhibition that purports to be historical—that is, not produced at the same time as the work itself—I think his criticism is well taken. SK: 

A M:  But there may be a more general way in which an indictment for the kinds of suppression, exclusion, neglect, that you’ve mentioned, is in order. Perhaps what’s at fault is that historians and theorists of the visual arts have had too minimal a range, have conceived their task and their field too narrowly. Certainly, the work of the performers of the 1960s, of Yvonne Rainer in particular, has not gone undocumented or unassessed or unevaluated. Together with other work—that of Lucinda Childs and Carolee Schneemann, for example—it has been folded into that period. But that work has not been done by art historians. It may be that a recent shift from the notion of “art history” to that of a field of “visual culture” may remedy that situation, although we’ve yet to see abundant and significant results. HF:  For each of us to reflect on how the 1960s are narrated now is also for each of us to reflect on our places in these narratives—to think about our own formations and investments, about what was important to us then and what remains important now.

Also the way the 1960s are perceived now has to be constructed as some kind of fiction, as all history is—even if one purports to take a historical standpoint in looking at it, it’s still going to be recreated every decade. SK: 

D H:  After Le Gac, I will mention a second French person, who is Louis Althusser. For me, the distance and the proximity of the 1960s are best emblematized by the effect of estrangement induced by the fact that today an autobiography by Althusser exists. In the 1960s, and according to Foucault’s sixties-ish concept of an author, an autobiography signed “Althusser” could only have been attributed to a namesake; it could not have been part of the authorial corpus attributed to the same Althusser (i.e., the one who wrote Reading Capital, For Marx, etc.). The fact that the name of Althusser can—or has to—bear responsibility for such a book today (I don’t mention its content) might be consonant with the return of the body, the return to expressivity, the return to the biographical, to the subject. Somehow, all the values against which, precisely, Althusser became an author, making him one of the heroic figures in the fight for the suppression of the centered subject, are now back, and under his very name. He’s recast—he has recast himself—in the present, in exactly the terms he challenged in the 1960s. And there’s no way to have a surgical operation that could remove this late outgrowth from the corpus, that would reinstate the subjectlessness of the historical process (what he termed the procès sans sujet). The publication of his autobiography is a spectacular event; it reinscribes in the very core of the 1960s what that structuralist decade wanted to break away from. It creates a very powerful estrangement effect, a very intense unheimlichkeit: Althusser becoming his own Anti-Christ, his own literal opposite. Suddenly, the promoter of the concept of procès sans sujet turns out to be a sujet sans procès; he becomes a subject precisely because he is deprived of a procès, in that he was not allowed to stand trial, as a subject, for his wife’s murder.

But that kind of spectacularization has to be placed in a more complex context, particularly in an American culture, which is all I can speak about. That is, there has been an irreversible and interesting overlap of the desires inherent in certain practices of popular culture and of highart practices, and you can disdain this and call it the incursion of the petty and the personal into the academic or the aesthetic, but I think SK: 

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there’s a danger in rejecting it out of hand without understanding that in any case high art of the past few decades had an enormous amount to do with this. D H:  In fact I agree with you. But if I brought up Althusser, it’s as a late echo to what Hal was saying about the self-control of the Duchampian artist who’s in control of his image. Whereas Althusser didn’t control his image, and that’s why his autobiography exists.

The Althusser case is extravagantly spectacular, but I don’t think the story of spectacularization tells all. There would not be all this anxiety about the 1960s if it did. Today there is a new access to the disturbances we associate with the 1960s, aesthetically, politically, and institutionally, and it is not only about opportunism or charlatanism. This access is a possibility that many young artists and critics hold open for us all today, and we do everybody a great disservice if we pronounce it somehow closed before the fact. To regard history as already produced (as some of us seem to do) is really to regard it as already consumed (like the bumper sticker that reads “Been There, Done That”), and that is to contribute to its spectacularization, not to challenge it. HF: 

March 13, 1994

Robert Morris and John Cage: Reconstructing a Dialogue Branden W. Joseph

Would you want me to tell them about how you tattooed “Chance” and “Multiplicity” on Body Bob’s derriere so he couldn’t sit down? —Robert Morris, “Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson” (1993) In 1967, Robert Smithson and Allan Kaprow recorded a dialogue on the question, What is a museum?1 In addition to documenting the artists’ views, the conversation is notable for the manner in which it gives evidence of the divide that separated them as representatives of two distinct strands of the postwar neo-avant-garde.2 While both artists are critical of the role of the museum, Kaprow condemns it completely and outright, declaring that “life” cannot exist within such a cultural context without suffering the transformation into an illusory representation of itself. The museal institution as a whole he deems repressive, and consequently Kaprow advocates the relocation of art beyond the confines of the institution, suggesting that it could exist in the marginal zones along roadways or on the outskirts of the city. Kaprow, it seems, fully expects Smithson to agree with his proposal, citing the exploration of such environments as the latter’s own idea. Smithson, however, refuses both Kaprow’s unequivocal condemnation of the museum and his implicit celebration of the liminal zones of suburbia. He proposes instead that the dead “nullity” of the museum space can be seen as its most positive aspect, and finds working on exterior sites strictly predicated upon an indissoluble distance from them. The dialectical reasoning characteristic

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of Smithson’s thought extends as well to the relationship of the museum to its exterior; their identities are always and necessarily intertwined. Because of that, Smithson does not see the possibility of direct escape from cultural institutions as a viable program. As he would come to explain it, “There’s no exit, no road to utopia, no great beyond in terms of exhibition space.”3 Thus, as opposed to Kaprow, Smithson does not view the role of the artist as that of effecting a liberation from institutional limitations, but rather as critically “expos[ing] the site.”4 Instead of moving beyond the museum’s confines, what had to be undertaken from Smithson’s point of view was an investigation of the exact nature of these restrictions. The conversation between Smithson and Kaprow ends at an impasse. Increasingly frustrated by his interlocutor’s deft, dialectical subversion of each of his points, Kaprow comes to label Smithson’s position “ironic.”5 Yet, if this dialogue is a particularly clear instance of two strands of the neo-avant-garde coming together and revealing their differences in point of view, it would not be the only one. Indeed, in the article “The Shape of the Art Environment,” published in Artforum the following year, Kaprow would reiterate very much the same position, this time taking issue not with Smithson, but with Robert Morris.6 Specifically responding to Morris’s article “Anti Form,” Kaprow maintained that, while the processes and materials sculpture Morris was advocating might succeed in transgressing the limitations of determinate form (a possibility Kaprow found dubious in any case), that sculpture’s formlessness nonetheless remained circumscribed by its relationship to the surrounding rectangular space of the gallery.7 According to Kaprow, the work’s subversion of geometric form brought to the fore questions of the physical and ideological constraints that the space imposed upon both the work and the spectators’ response to it. In this, Kaprow’s critique reveals for a second time the fundamental difference in the two neo-avant-garde positions; for, as it has been argued, highlighting the viewer’s cognitive and perceptual awareness of the enframing gallery space is precisely the pivotal historical role played by Morris’s minimal and antiform sculpture.8 In order to escape the determinate effects of the gallery, Kaprow once again advocates exploring ways to “get free of the rectangle,” either through the transformation or the abandonment of the gallery space itself.9 Thus, despite a general agreement on many of the givens of the situation, Kaprow and Morris fundamentally disagree on

the strategy to be pursued by an artistic avant-garde: liberation from the established institution or dialectical critique of it.10 Although at precisely this time John Cage would distance himself from Kaprow’s Happenings, objecting to what he saw as their implicitly authoritarian manipulation of the audience,11 in the debates with Smithson and Morris, Kaprow’s position is clearly related closely to that of his former teacher.12 Like Kaprow, Cage advocated a complete liberation from institutional restraints, an interest expressed through his avowed attraction to anarchism. As early as 1939 Cage had defined his artistic goal in terms of “making music with its materials, sound and rhythm, disregarding the cumbersome, top-heavy structure of musical prohibitions.”13 Uninterested in the dialectical critique of existing cultural and political institutions, Cage located the place of art beyond their confines. At the beginning of the 1960s Cage defined the arts as “Offerings beyond the law within the limits of practicality.”14 Artworks following this example could, he believed, serve as exemplary instances of a social existence equally situated beyond the realm of legal or authoritarian limitations.15 Through art’s example, people could be convinced to ignore the imposition of such institutions, and the latter would, as Cage hopefully put it, “simply fade out of the picture.”16 Certain of Cage’s potentially controversial opinions, such as that people should refrain from voting, can be understood as logically consistent with this point of view.17 Indeed, Cage saw the continued engagement with political institutions, even the critical engagement of strikes and protests, as serving the paradoxical end of shoring up and legitimizing their function. While Morris would demonstrate on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, Cage held that such manifestations ultimately served only to strengthen repressive institutions.18 As he explained it, “Nothing’s accomplished in the way of Global Discipline by being angry because the world’s angry (i.e., protest against war), or rather, what’s accomplished is to give further lease on life to divisive structures (nations, politics, finance) that would otherwise die a natural (i.e., technological) death.”19 As an example of his position, Cage cited none other than the paradigmatic uprisings of May 1968: “Recent instance: French riots; de Gaulle’s position subsequently strengthened.”20 It is upon a recognition of the intersecting but dichotomous neoavant-garde projects that map onto the Smithson–Morris/Cage–Kaprow divide that one might begin to investigate the correspondence that

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transpired between John Cage and Robert Morris at the beginning of the decade. As has been most clearly stated by Annette Michelson, Cage’s questioning of modernism served as a prerequisite for the development of Morris’s own avant-garde project.21 An investigation of Morris’s position as it evolved from the instigation of this correspondence throughout the 1960s reveals the extent to which his work was continually defined in relation to the horizons set out by the Cagean project. The correspondence between Cage and Morris began at a crucial point in Morris’s early artistic career. Although Morris had already had two one-person shows at San Francisco’s Dilexi Gallery, he had, by his own admission, reached an impasse with regard to his painting.22 The beginning of 1960 Morris termed “a period of inactivity” in which he had already abandoned painting and was beginning to interest himself in the possibilities of film and Happening-type theatrical performances.23 During this time Morris apparently began exploring Cagean aesthetics, to which he would have been exposed in the milieu of Ann Halprin’s dance workshops. In his initial cinematic work Morris explicitly utilized techniques of indeterminacy. As he recalled in a typewritten manuscript bearing the title “Films”: I began making films in 1960. The first film used the four images of earth, air, fire, water. Chance procedures were employed to determine the length of each shot; whether there was camera movement, what this was; sequences of all shots; etc.24 In the first half of that year, Morris sent John Cage a theatre work entitled “Wind Ensemble” and inquired about the possibility of its performance.25 Cage, it seems, replied to Morris’s letter with comments that July. Morris’s subsequent reply to Cage on August 8, 1960 finds him generally in agreement with the composer’s point of view. Like Cage, Morris expresses the desire to eliminate artistic expression in a shift toward the locus of reception: a change in “Focus from expressing to watching” that echoed similar ideas Cage had earlier expressed in terms of a listener’s “response ability.”26 Although, in this, both epistlers were indebted to the example of Marcel Duchamp, by describing, with regard to a new theatrical event, his “wish to remove from [his] expression” the work’s “continuities, [and] even their non-continuities,” Morris employed a distinctly Cagean terminology.27 According to Cage,

Robert Morris, Mirror, 1969. Still from 16mm film, black-and-white, Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

continuity—which refers to the note-to-note progression in a piece of music and by extension any succession of events—invariably is received as the mark of subjective expression.28 In his own work, therefore, Cage aimed to eradicate any organized structure of continuity, whether subjective or not, and pursued in its stead what he termed “no-continuity.” In such a discontinuous composition, sounds would be made to follow each other in a manner indeterminate of the other sounds in the sequence.29 Despite the affinity Morris demonstrated toward a Cagean aesthetic, by February of the following year the two artists’ respective positions had clearly divided. Cage’s work can be understood as the attempt to collapse the category of music into the quotidian realm of “life.” Instead of advocating the aestheticization of the world, however, the end result

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of the Cagean program should primarily be viewed in terms of the deaestheticization of art. Admittedly, such a distinction would cease to make sense upon the unlikely completion of the project. Nonetheless, the point must be made that Cage’s outlook was materialist insofar as it entailed the elimination of any and all transcendent or idealist structures which would serve to alienate art from the plane of everyday existence. Examples of such structures, for Cage, included not only the traditional forms of musical composition and the directives of social institutions, but also the limiting determinations of the human mind and ego. Indeed, the import of Cage’s work, he once stated, lay in the demonstration of the indifferent existence of the world beyond the considerations of consciousness. “For ‘art’ and ‘music,’ when anthropocentric (involved in self-expression), seem trivial and lacking in urgency to me,” Cage declared: We live in a world where there are things as well as people. Trees, stones, water, everything is expressive. I see this situation in which I impermanently live as a complex interpenetration of centers moving out in all directions without impasse. … Life goes on very well without me, and that will explain to you my silent piece, 4′33″.30 In April of 1960, Cage reiterated this position, stating concisely in Art News that “The complex of existence exceeds mentation’s compass.”31 It was this point of view that Cage attempted to impress upon Robert Morris that same year with the observation that “most of what happens was never in anybody’s mind.”32 Although—as his letters make clear—Morris was no more interested in self-expression that Cage, he would assert on the contrary that “all of what does happen is in everybody’s mind.”33 From a strictly Cagean perspective, Morris’s retention of consciousness in the equation would have to be seen as a regression, a reintroduction of an incipiently transcendent separation of the viewer from an otherwise complete immersion into the world. However, since what Morris would undertake, especially in his early minimal sculptures, is an investigation into the phenomenological conditions of subjectivity, this step was absolutely necessary. As Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss have established, Morris’s investigation of such phenomenological conditions operated through the subjective dynamic of the ideally grasped gestalt of the

minimalist shape and the transgressive subversion of that cognitive certainty by the viewer’s temporally and spatially unfolding experience of differences in the object’s actual appearance.34 Already in 1961, all the elements of this “phenomenological formalism” are present in Morris’s letter to Cage: “I feel that by reducing the stimulus to next to nothing (some of us really are trying to say nothing in an elegant manner) one turns the focus on the individual, as if to say, ‘whatever you got in the past you brought along anyway, so now really work at it.’”35 Indeed, nowhere is it more clear how Morris forged his initial minimalist position by combining the reductivist logic of modernism (“a kind of reducing process”) with a Duchampian awareness of artistic conventionality (“the desire to get outside by making logical steps”). As shown by Maurice Berger, Morris’s artistic position must be understood in relation to his interest in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, who endorsed a theorization of political transgression in which the individual critiqued and subverted the repressive functions of overarching, ideological power structures.36 The subjective transgression of idealist form effected by Morris’s minimalist sculpture functioned as a model of that dynamic. As Hal Foster has established in his discussion of the minimalist genealogy, this antiformalist dynamic will become the foundation upon which the antiinstitutional program of the later work of Morris, Smithson, and others is built.37 Perhaps an early inkling of such an institutional critique can already be gleaned from Morris’s proposal to shuttle the audience of his “Wind Ensemble” through three different theatres in the course of its three successive movements.38 Although Morris’s initial break with Cagean aesthetics was precocious, it was not total. Instead, Cage’s example of a more thoroughly antitranscendental aesthetic seems to have remained in the background, exerting a certain pressure on Morris’s project throughout the decade. This can be seen not only in Morris’s intention to incorporate Cage’s presence into a work of 1963, but more importantly in Morris’s renunciation of the incipiently transcendental role of the gestalt and other a priori formal structures as expressed in the article “Anti Form” of five years later.39 It was, perhaps, Morris’s renewed closeness to a Cagean position, rather than the remainder of his distance from it, that motivated Kaprow to launch his critique of Morris’s article. Morris never responded to Kaprow’s criticisms in print; however, with his next article, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” of 1969, Morris

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seems to have returned more fully to an engagement with Cagean aesthetics.40 While Morris’s interest in the use of base materials and his engagement with the force of gravity are more explicitly related to the interests of Smithson or other antiform sculptors, Morris’s condemnation of the minimalist form in terms of its relation to “prethought images” and the opposition to them of works based upon “chance, contingency [and] indeterminacy,” puts him squarely within the purview of the Cagean problematic.41 Indeed, Morris’s interest in process, his opposition to the fixed form of the “icon-object,” and his goal of effecting an alteration in perception can all be found expressed in Cage’s writings, and in distinctly similar terms.42 The correlation becomes even more striking when it is realized that the terms “chance” and “indeterminacy,” which enter Morris’s writings beginning with “Anti Form,” are—despite an interest in entropy, fragmentation, chaos, and ruin—conspicuously absent from Smithson’s contemporary vocabulary.43 The predominant critical engagement in part four of “Notes on Sculpture” is with the phenomenology of Anton Ehrenzweig. On the basis of Ehrenzweig’s work, Morris evokes a distinction between minimalist art—based predominantly on the presence of a “figure” as separate from the ground—and an art involved with processes and materials that engages with the dedifferentiated mode of perception associated with a scanning of the figureless field. Morris presented the goal of antiform sculpture in terms of hypostatizing this second structure of perception. Yet, the “field situation” that Morris views through the lens of Ehrenzweig’s phenomenology strikingly resembles the ontology of physical existence described by John Cage.44 Just as Morris described the perceptual field in terms of “heterogeneous, randomized distributions that characterize the figureless sectors of the world,”45 Cage had described the field opened up for exploration by contemporary music as “limitless and without qualitative differentiation, but with a multiplicity of differences.”46 Certain pieces of Cage’s music give rise to an acoustical field with just such qualities. Sounds occur and fade away at unpredictable instants and in unforeseen juxtapositions and spacings. With no predominant motif or recurring theme on which to fixate, one must listen to this acoustical field in a diffuse manner akin to scanning.47 There are indications that Morris revisited Cagean procedures not only in his writings but also in his sculptural production of the time.48 When discussing the work Untitled (100 Pieces of Metal), of 1968–1969

with E. C. Goossen in 1970, Morris divulged that it was based on an elaborate set of chance procedures. “There is a system there,” Morris stated. “A great many decisions were just made by random numbers or chance—all the families of metals—which one would be copper or steel, and so on—were made by chance, as well as the dimensions. So were how they were bent and where the bends would be made.” Although Morris remained intrigued by this piece, he must not have found it to have been entirely successful, for, by his own admission, 100 Pieces of Metal was “the only piece I ever made that way.”49 Although Morris may have approached Cage’s position more closely in these years, his overall artistic project, as Kaprow’s criticism indicated, remained decidedly distinct in continuing to foreground the subjective effect both of the work and of the surrounding institution, rather than attempting to escape from them.50 Nonetheless, rather than understand Morris’s project as simply succeeding or somehow superseding that of

Untitled (Scatter Piece), 1968–1969. Felt, rubber, zinc, aluminum, nickel, steel, dimensions variable. Photograph provided by Leo Castelli Gallery. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Cage, it should be understood as continually engaged in a dialogue with it throughout the 1960s. The Cagean prospect of the completely immanent and unalienated existence of art seems to have served as the space within which Morris’s project was erected and an example against which it would be judged: the tattoo that would not allow Morris to sit down. In the article “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making” of April 1970, Morris takes up the dialogue with Cage again, explicitly, and for the last time.51 In it, Morris seeks to differentiate his position from that of Cage, establishing a distinction between their two strains of the neo-avant-garde. Morris champions the work of Jackson Pollock, finding in it an aesthetic model in which could be found an integral relationship between physical process and visible product, a resolution of the problematic distinction of “effort-process and result-object” he had lamented a decade earlier in his letter to Cage.52 Morris contended that Cage’s work, on the other hand, effected a distinction between the procedure of composition, in which methods are employed to “systematiz[e] the arbitrary,” and the end result, in which these methods were not perceptible in the work as performed.53 Perhaps disillusioned with his own experience with Untitled (100 Pieces of Metal), Morris remarked of Cage’s process that “The kind of duality at work here in splitting off the structural organization from the physically perceived still has strains of European Idealism about it.”54 In imputing to Cage the vestiges of idealist structures, Morris did not reproduce the same division of neo-avantgarde projects that we have seen hitherto, but effectively reversed the terms of Kaprow’s criticism of his work. Cage’s work, Morris now alleged, was more transcendental than his own. The work of Duchamp, which Morris admired as much if not more than that of Cage, also fell prey to this aspect of Morris’s critique.55 Cage, at least, would have agreed with the division into two sides that Morris was making. Although he praised the all-over nature of Mark Tobey’s white paintings as being an important influence on his aesthetic outlook, Cage had long sought to distance himself from the work of Pollock, and championed Duchamp as the antithesis of the abstract expressionist painter.56 When asked to compose the score for Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock painting, Cage declined,57 and later disparaged it in an oblique manner by stating, “Seems Pollock tried to do it—paint on glass. It was in a movie. There was an admission of failure. That wasn’t the way to proceed. It’s not a question of doing again what

Duchamp already did.”58 If nothing else, this provides another example of how the distinction between two forms of avant-garde production seems agreed upon by all parties; the difference lay in the valuation of one or the other of the chosen sides. Robert Morris’s attempt to turn the tables on Cage must be counted as not entirely successful, for he did not take account of the changes to Cage’s aesthetic in the 1960s. Despite Cage’s conviction that composition, performance, and the experience of the audience were three distinct and unrelated activities, Cage had criticized his own work for failing to incorporate indeterminacy beyond the stage of composition.59 Beginning in the 1960s, however, Cage engaged in a series of works in which the process of composition was perceptible, if not fully incorporated into the performance of his scores. The manifesto statement of this period was 0′00″, a 1962 rewriting of his 4′33″ of silence of a decade earlier. The score for 0′00″ reads, simply, “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.”60 In the premiere performance, Cage wrote out, with maximum amplification provided by a contact microphone, the words to the score—thus visibly, and audibly, fusing the compositional process with its result. That Morris did not recognize or acknowledge the change in Cage’s work over the previous decade is, perhaps, an indication that he was no longer actively engaged with it. Indeed, his treatment of Cage in “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making” has all the earmarks of an exorcism, a final summing up and dismissing of a persistently present influence. If this move was not made so that Morris could finally “sit down,” it was made so that he could begin to engage with other problematics, most notably an increasing investigation into the nature of power based on the writings of Michel Foucault. Perhaps in the future we will even find that Body Bob had his tattoos altered to spell out the words “discipline” and “punish.” Notes

1.  Robert Smithson, “What Is a Museum?,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 43–51. 2.  The distinction between two moments of the postwar neo-avant-garde has been most explicitly theorized by Hal Foster in “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986 (New York: Abbeville, 1986), pp. 162–183; and “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” October 70 (fall 1994): 5–32. Both articles are included in revised form in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

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3.  Robert Smithson, “Fragments of a Conversation” (1969), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, pp. 190–191. 4.  Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (1967), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, p. 60. 5.  Smithson, “What Is a Museum?,” p. 50. 6.  Reprinted in Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 90–94. 7.  Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968), reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 41–46. 8.  See Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism.” 9.  Kaprow, “The Shape of the Environment,” p. 92. 10.  Like Smithson, Morris did not completely abandon the space of the gallery or the institution of the museum even in his earthworks. A case in point might be found in Morris’s project for the exhibition SPACES at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. In it, the museum’s climate control system was made to reproduce the natural habitat of a grove of conifers that Morris planted inside. 11.  In Richard Kostelanetz, The Theater of Mixed-Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p. 56. 12.  Kaprow had attended Cage’s courses in composition at the New School for Social Research in the mid- to late 1950s. See Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 133–134. 13.  John Cage, “Goal: New Music, New Dance,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 87. 14.  John Cage, “Where Do We Go from Here?” in A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 92. 15.  John Cage, “Afterword,” in A Year from Monday, p. 166. 16.  John Cage, “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1965,” in A Year from Monday, p. 13. 17.  See, e.g., “These Days,” in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), p. 179. 18.  For a discussion of Morris’s activities of political protest, see Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 107. 19.  Cage, “These Days,” p. 179. 20.  Ibid. 21.  Annette Michelson, “Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression,” in this volume; and “Frameworks,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), esp. p. 60. 22.  Paul Cummings and Robert Morris, “Interview for the Archives of American Art,” March 10, 1968, p. 23 (Morris Archives, Guggenheim Museum, New York). Cf. Berger’s discussion of these years in Labyrinths, pp. 22–25. 23.  Cummings and Morris, “Interview,” p. 23.

24.  Unpublished manuscript (1971) in the Morris Archive, Guggenheim Museum, New York. Cf. Morris’s comments in an unpublished interview with Moira Roth of February 8, 1973, also in the Morris Archive: “Actually, I used chance first in a film that I never completed while I was still in San Francisco in the period after I stopped painting and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was making some films then according to chance.” 25.  That Morris first wrote Cage seeking performance of his piece is revealed in the unpublished interview with Moira Roth. 26.  John Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Silence, p. 10. 27.  Robert Morris, letter to John Cage, August 8, 1960, in “Letters to John Cage,” October 81 (summer 1997): 71. On Marcel Duchamp, see “The Creative Act” (1957), reprinted in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), pp. 138–140. Cage refers to Duchamp leaving “the door open by saying that observers complete works of art themselves,” in Moira and William Roth, “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp,” Art in America 61, no. 1 (November–December, 1973): 74. 28.  See John Cage, “Lecture on Something,” in Silence, pp. 129–130. 29.  See, e.g., “Lecture on Something,” p. 132. 30.  “[Letter to Paul Henry Lang]” (1956), in John Cage: An Anthology, pp. 117–118. 31.  John Cage, “Form Is a Language,” reprinted in John Cage: An Anthology, p. 135. 32.  Quoted in Morris’s letter of February 27, 1961, in “Letters to John Cage,” p. 73. 33.  Ibid. 34.  Michelson, “Robert Morris—An Aesthetics of Transgression”; Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). 35.  Morris, letter of February 27, 1961, in “Letters to John Cage,” p. 73. The term “phenomenological formalism” is Morris’s (see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s conversation with Morris in this volume—Ed.) 36.  Berger, Labyrinths, especially pp. 47–81. 37.  Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism.” 38.  Letter of February 27, 1961, in “Letters to John Cage,” p. 73. 39.  Morris, “Anti Form.” Morris mentions his never-to-be-realized project of casting John Cage’s shadow in concrete in his letter of January 12, 1963, in “Letters to John Cage,” p. 78. 40.  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily, pp. 51–70. 41.  Ibid., p. 67. In the above-mentioned interview with Moira Roth, Morris links the chance in his felt pieces to the chance explored previously in his films. 42.  On Cage’s distinction between object and process, see “Interview with Roger Reynolds,” in John Cage, ed. Robert Dunn (New York: Henmar Press, 1962), p. 50; “Rhythm Etc.,” in A Year from Monday, pp. 123–124 (Cage relates the terms “object” and “icon”); and remarks in “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work,” in Silence, pp. 101–102. On the goal of a changing awareness, see “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” in Silence, p. 15; and “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” in Silence, pp. 204–205.

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43.  Morris, “Anti Form,” p. 46. 44.  Morris’s use of the term “field situation” can be found on p. 54 of “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4.” Cage uses the term “field situation,” in “Seriously Comma” (1966), in A Year from Monday, p. 28; and “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1967,” p. 157. 45.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” p. 54. 46.  Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?,” pp. 204–205. 47.  See James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 56–57. 48.  It should also be noted that Morris was involved in production for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s performance of Canfield in 1969. See Morris’s proposal for the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. dated February 11, 1969, in the Morris Archive. 49.  “The Artist Speaks: Robert Morris,” Art in America 58, no. 3 (May–June 1970): 109– 110. Although an image of Untitled (100 Pieces of Metal) is reproduced with this interview, no record of this piece currently exists in Morris’s archive. Morris did, however, either make another piece in the same manner or incorporated Untitled (100 Pieces of Metal) into another piece from 1968, Untitled (Scatter Piece/200 Pieces of Steel, Stainless Steel, Zinc, Copper, Nickel, Aluminum, Felt, and Rubber). An examination of the sketches for this piece shows that Morris employed both numbers selected at random from the phone book as well as the distinctly Cagean method of tossing coins to determine nearly all component aspects of the work. 50.  Interestingly, nearly twenty years later, Kaprow and Morris would replay much the same discussion. In 1987, Kaprow would write to Morris, asking him to contribute an article on John Cage for Prepared Box for John Cage, which he was editing. In his contribution, Kaprow stated, “In short, as Cage brought the chancy and noisy world into the concert hall (following Duchamp who did the same in the art gallery) a next step was simply to move right out into that uncertain world and forget the framing devices of concert hall, gallery, stage, etc.” (Prepared Box for John Cage [Cincinnati: Carl Soloway Gallery, 1987], p. 41b). To this idea, which Kaprow has previously discussed in his letter to Morris, Morris responded with a counterproposal to write on Cage’s treatment of narrative and his “uses of autobiography and self as subject” (ibid., p. 33). 51.  Reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily, pp. 71–93. 52.  Letter of August 8, 1960, in “Letters to John Cage,” p. 71. 53.  Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making” (1970), in Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 75. 54.  Ibid., pp. 75–77. A certain frustration with the incipient idealism of his own Untitled (100 Pieces of Metal) seems to tinge Morris’s comment to Goossen about the piece: “All of these operations were done—but that’s not in the piece—I don’t particularly want people to know that, it’s not necessary” (“The Artist Speaks,” pp. 109–110). 55.  Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” p. 77. Interestingly, Morris was also explicitly revisiting Duchamp’s ideas at this time. In Untitled (Five Concrete Beams), conceived the same year as Untitled (100 Pieces of Metal), Morris proposed a “scatter-piece” of rubble created by dropping concrete beams from predetermined heights in a manner reminiscent of Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages. 56.  On Cage’s appreciation of Tobey, see his remarks in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1994), pp. 174–181.

57.  David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (New York: Arcade, 1992), p. 141. 58.  John Cage, “26 Statements Re Duchamp,” in A Year from Monday, p. 71. 59.  John Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence, p. 36. 60.  In Pritchett, The Music of John Cage, p. 138.  

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Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective Jon Bird

What is revealed is that art itself is an activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes. —Robert Morris1 Indeterminacy has an important social aspect; it requires the cooperation of others. —Anton Ehrenzweig2 I believe [Morris] thought these works would create a ruminative atmosphere. My evidence for this is the film he made … 48 hours before the exhibition. … He got hold of a girl and got her to take her clothes off, and she very much appeared as a classic art-school nude. … The point is that the atmosphere of that film is of an incredible solemn calm. … There is a kind of serenity about the whole thing which is very beautiful. I take it from the film that Morris idealized his concept into something where the interactions between the objects and the visitor would happen in a state of contemplative calm. —David Sylvester3

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The trouble with participation, it seems, is that apart from making us forget what art’s all about, and inducing the very restlessness of mind which it’s supposed to ease, it makes people behave like wild beasts. —Michael Shepherd4 A grainy, black-and-white image of an almost perspectiveless space. A room, a white wall whose nondescript surface is interrupted by the entry into the frame of a large wooden cylinder, maybe six feet in diameter, rolling slowly, ponderously, across the screen from left to right, then right to left. CUT. The same cylinder, now frontally positioned in relation to the camera, rolls towards the viewer in a straight line, halts up close to the camera filling the screen and revealing the patterns in the surface structure, then gradually retreats towards the rear wall. CUT. Again the cylinder in side elevation but this time the movement is controlled by a figure, on the far side to the camera, promenading the object. The figure, a muscular nude woman, is slightly awkward in her actions, perhaps conscious of the camera, perhaps simply uncertain of her role in the performance. CUT. The action is repeated with the camera closer to the woman and the cylinder. CUT. The second sequence is repeated—but now the pace of the cylinder rolling towards the camera is determined by the woman as she retreats before its advance, hands up against its surface. Her awkwardness is exaggerated by the implied threat of the object, which rears above and bears down upon her as she bears down upon the viewer. She halts with her buttocks almost against the camera lens, pauses, then slowly pushes the cylinder back into the space towards the rear wall. This sequence is repeated. CUT. The cylinder, side elevation, its space filled by the woman kneeling and applying pressure to the interior surface, a gentle rocking motion. Her position emphasizes the weight of her breasts, a dark profile outlined against the white rear wall. CUT. The woman moves across the screen rolling a large ball, maybe 24 inches in diameter. The camera cuts her body so that her head is out of frame, which emphasizes her weight and musculature. She returns pushing the cylinder with the ball inside. CUT. Two rails, frontally to the camera, bisect the screen, their perspectival foreshortening flattening the space even further. The ball runs unsteadily along the rails from the rear wall towards the camera, an unoriginated movement, which halts with a

close-up of the object’s surface: not wood, it could be concrete, or, perhaps, polystyrene. This “to-and-fro” action is repeated several times. CUT. The cylinder rolls across the screen only this time its space is occupied by a revolving clothed male figure, arms and legs tensioned against the interior surface like the spokes of a wheel. Briefly, we recognize the figure as Morris. CUT. A thick hemp rope stretches across the screen, suspended above the ground. Panning along the rope, the camera encounters a naked foot balancing on the rope exerting a gentle pressure, up … down … up … down … CUT. A ramp with ropes snaking across it. A male figure holds the rope and gradually, hand-over-hand, ascends the ramp. CUT. A close-up of a (male?) hand moving, caressingly, over and around the surface and edge of a thick metal plate. CUT. Two hands holding a rectangular metal plate pendulum across the screen, a fast action which obscures the image. CUT. The ball rolls slowly down an angled plane, across the floor, coming to rest against another ramp. CUT. A prone nude figure, after a moment identifiable as the woman, on her back supporting and rotating above her, with some difficulty, a large sheet of plywood. Between the uneven rotation and the rise and fall of the sheet the viewer glimpses her body, the tufts of her pubic hair outlined against the wood, her breasts squashed up against its surface. We feel her discomfort. CUT. The ball nudges against a ramp. CUT. The woman rotates the sheet. CUT. The ball ambles to a halt against a ramp. END. —Neo Classic5 Can we say that a kind of grammatical chasm exists between the form of the proposition and that of the question? Is there a kind of world, as it were, of the question, whose difference, verging on the suspicion of a kind of lack, sets it in perpetual opposition to that other world, that of the statement? Some might read such differences as an allegory of gender—defined, admittedly, in a rather essentialist way. And when it comes to actions, are there those one could designate as interrogative? And what about objects? … I would like to float out the notion of an interrogative space … so that when the examples of the art appear they are coated or infected with a kind of questionlike aspect. —Robert Morris6

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Installation shot of people interacting with works in Tate Exhibitions—Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings, April 28–June 6, 1971. © Tate, London 2012.

The idea of a Robert Morris exhibition was first proposed to the Tate Gallery by the critic and Tate Trustee David Sylvester in October 1968. Sylvester had seen work by Morris in America at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery and in other exhibitions and public and private collections, and had discussed the possibility with the artist earlier that year. Sylvester had interviewed Morris for his series of talks on contemporary artists for the BBC and it is evident from Morris’s correspondence with the Tate that he had a great deal of respect for Sylvester’s critical and curatorial abilities. (“I would certainly want to consult with David … about

all aspects of the show”).7 Morris’s work was little known in Britain at this time and what Sylvester had in mind was a conventional retrospective concentrating on the minimalist works of the 1960s. In May 1970, Michael Compton, Keeper of Exhibitions and Education at the Tate Gallery, wrote to Morris proposing a retrospective exhibition and in his reply Morris recognized the necessity for showing past works in London, although from the outset he clearly intended to limit the retrospective element within an overall conception of a large-scale installation along the lines of his recent exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery and the Whitney Museum. Since 1967 Morris’s work had shifted in its formal and conceptual properties from the closed minimalist structures of monochrome plywood, steel mesh, and various arrangements of metal girders to the hanging and piled Felt Works and assemblages of random materials and “stuff”—the “antiform” and scatter pieces. Morris’s critical writings, which always accompanied his sculptural works and provided the theoretical context, specifically “Notes on Sculpture: Parts 1–4,” “Anti Form,” and “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” all appeared in Artforum between 1966 and 1970. A Duchampian concern with the visual and the verbal, with the semiotic play of meaning across the systems of word and image, is characteristic of this period in the visual arts and is the consistent factor in Morris’s practice, which otherwise appears somewhat disconnected and arbitrary, shifting as it does between styles, techniques, and forms of expression. (These include, besides the sculptural works, writings, reliefs, performance works, dance, choreography, and public lectures.) Morris had absorbed the implications of the propositional aspect of Duchamp— of art as a form of language-game—in the early 1960s. “My fascination with and respect for Duchamp was related to his linguistic fixation, to the idea that all of his operations were ultimately built on a sophisticated understanding of language itself.”8 No prehistory of conceptual art could exclude Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), or Card File (1962). Box with the Sound clearly references Duchamp’s assisted readymade With Hidden Noise and his Green Box containing the notes for the Large Glass, and introduces a theme which returns in the later installations, the crossing or mixing of generic styles to suggest an experiential relation between viewer and object. The simplicity of form—a wooden cube— is distorted by the looped tape playing back the sounds made during its

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three-hour construction, a mixing of visual and auditory sensations that also raises questions of reflexivity, authorship, and intentionality (the box clearly didn’t make itself) which were to become central to conceptualism’s critical development. Card File, an equally self-referential work, also sets up contrasting systems that contaminate any sense of unitary or fixed meaning. The system’s instrumental logic is subverted by the idiosyncratic nature of some of the categories. Morris, apparently, conceived the work while having a coffee in the New York Public Library and finished it on December 31, 1962, at 5.10 p.m.—noted in the file under “Decisions.” Another file is titled “Category,” which gives the total number of categories generated by the work as “44.” Another key and enigmatic work of this period, I-Box (1962), fuses the iconic, indexical, and symbolic elements of language. A hinged, I-shaped door reveals an interior space exhibiting a nude, grinning photograph of the artist, a masquerading of masculinity revealed and situated by the performative act of opening or closing the “I.” Meaning shifts through positionality and the action of revealing and concealing suggests Freud’s famous observation of the child’s repetitive action with a cotton reel—the “fort/ da” symbolization of presence and absence. Although some of these themes persist in the work of the mid-1960s, Morris’s focus moved to the unitary gestalt of the large minimal and serial sculptures produced between 1964 and 1967. The more complexly coded and phenomenological concerns encapsulated in these earlier constructions re-emerge in the late 1960s, possibly partly as a response to the broader set of relations that constitute the field of cultural production that would have to include the political and social aftereffects of the cold war, the civil rights movement, the Nixon government’s escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia, and the beginnings of the women’s movement. Morris’s position within the American New Left and his ambivalence over the social role of the artist in a culture which increasingly alienated its intelligentsia emerged in his 1970 advertisement, placed in various art journals, for the Peripatetic Artists’ Guild. In this Morris offered himself for hire by the hour as an “art worker” available for a range of “commissions anywhere in the world.” These might include such disparate and non-artistic events as “Explosions, Chemical Swamps, Alternate Political Systems, Demonstrations, Ensembles of Curious Objects to Be Seen While Travelling at Great Speed …” etc. Inviting other artists to collaborate, the advertisement suggests a “$25.00 per

working hour wage plus all travel, materials, construction and other costs to be paid by the owner-sponsor.”9 Morris’s parodic utilitarianism, equating the activities of the artist with calculable wage labor in projects which range from the practical to the phantasmagoric, is yet another implicit acknowledgment of his recurrent interest in modernism’s exemplary ironist, Duchamp. The tensions between an internal language of Greenbergian formal aesthetics as a limitation on or prescription for practice, the commodification of the work of art and its institutionalization in public and private collections, and the increasing marginalization of the artist-subject in the social formation can all be evidenced in the various visual and textual strategies deployed by artists in the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-’70s. For Morris, critical writing, sculptural object, and social role intersected in the texts and installations that staged the performative and disruptive possibilities of the work of art, or, perhaps more precisely, the work of the work of art. Always more drawn to art as a phenomenological rather than a philosophical investigation, Morris maintained a tangential relation to the primary concern of post-Duchampian conceptualism, the attack upon the visual. It was in his Tate Gallery installation of 1971 that he pushed up against the hegemonic definitions of work, site, context, and audience in ways that clearly revealed their regulatory boundaries and exclusions. Throughout the correspondence between Compton and Morris during the exhibition’s planning—a period lasting approximately eleven months, until the actual opening in April—the traces of Morris’s shifting theoretical and political interests can be discerned in his reconceptualization of the structure and content of what would finally comprise the work on show. From the outset Morris was concerned to work with nonart materials which could be purchased locally and then recycled after the exhibition was dismantled. Michael Compton recalls three designs prior to the final structure. Initially Morris requested materials similar to his Whitney installation: nine granite blocks eight by four by three feet, forty timbers twelve to fifteen feet long, twelve-inch-square steel pipes, rusted steel plates, and truckloads of coarse gravel. (Morris’s response to Marcia Tucker’s invitation for a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York had been to agree on the condition that he made a site-specific installation with the active participation of building workers to shift and install the massive concrete blocks, pipes, and timbers, and that the

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economic value of the work was, precisely, the material and labor costs of its production. Three weeks prior to opening, Morris reacted to the shooting of four anti-Vietnam student protesters at Kent State University by National Guardsmen by demanding that the exhibition be abandoned and museum staff reassigned to initiating meetings and discussions on institutional complicity in repressive policies against artists and audiences alike. Although the Whitney ignored this request, the exhibition did close three weeks early.) Over Christmas 1970, Morris rethought his monumental schema and shifted to an environmental, audience-participatory construction of plywood based on a rough cardboard model he made in his studio. Writing to Compton, he described his intentions: “Time to press up against things, squeeze around, crawl over—not so much out of a childish naïveté to return to the playground, but more to acknowledge that the world begins to exist at the limits of our skin and what goes on at that interface between the physical self and external conditions doesn’t detach us like the detached glance.”10 Morris’s essay “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated” was published in the April issue of Artforum, and it seems reasonable to crossreference between this essay and the development of his concept for the exhibition. Two themes characterize his thinking. First, a shift from a reflective spectator/object relation where meaning is determined by the optical exchange across the visual field to a haptic or tactile phenomenology of the body as it encounters the physical world—a felt and lived experience of corporeality. Second, a model of language based upon Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games” and including a systems theory and semiotic understanding of art’s social function and the work as text.11 With references to Morse Peckham, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art, and employing Pollock’s gestural immersion in the process of art-making as an example of the interaction between chance and order, body and material, Morris positions art as an arena for performative play in which the active participation of the spectator completes the work. The emphasis upon “disorientation” and the “irrational” also opens both work and site to the unconscious, to desire and the body, a reinscription of Pollock’s pictorial space as event, to an arena for the coming-into-being of work and spectator in an unstable and active field of participatory experiences: “As ends and means are more unified, as process becomes part of the work

instead of prior to it, one is enabled to engage more directly with the world in art making because forming is moved further into the presentation.”12 In relation to this we should also take account of Morris’s choreographic work, which emphasized everyday actions and struggles as central to identity formation. Morris has recognized the influence of the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti, his first wife, on his activities in the late 1950s and early 1960s which resulted in his collaborations with the Judson Group (a name taken from the venue for performance work in New York in the 1960s—the Judson Memorial Chapel). Forti, Rainer, and other choreographers and dancers also responded to Wittgenstein’s emphasis upon meaning as a determinant of context in their deployment of the routine actions and gestures of everyday life in their performances. Morris’s 1973 essay “Some Splashes in the Ebb Tide” includes a photograph from a Simone Forti work, See-Saw (1961), which shows two figures balancing precariously on a pivoted wooden beam, a device which reappears as an element in the Tate installation. Morris ceased choreographic work in 1966 at the request of his then partner, Yvonne Rainer.13 If space as a performative field figures centrally in Morris’s thinking at this time, he equally emphasizes the self as a temporal construct—that it is formed through real-time experience of the situated body as acting on, and acted upon by, the world: From the body relating to the spaces of the Tate via my alterations of the architectural elements of passages and surfaces to the body relating to its own conditions … the progression is from the manipulation of objects, to constructions which adjust to the body’s presence, to situations where the body itself is manipulated. I want to provide a situation where people can become more aware of themselves and their own experience rather than more aware of some version of my experience.14 A few weeks before the opening of the exhibition, Morris sent a rough drawing outlining the final design for three interactive spaces creating different physical relations between the spectators and the objects and structures which were to divide the central Duveen Galleries. In the first area were objects acted upon by the spectator—lumps of metal or stone to be heaved around or rolled over wood and metal ramps and

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Sketch of Robert Morris exhibition, Bodyspacemotionthings, taken from Tate Gallery publicity leaflet, 1971. © Tate, London 2012.

inclined planes. In the second area it was an action or movement by the spectator that set the object in motion—timber logs or large cylinders that could be set rolling, plywood platforms balanced on large balls, or balls that could be propelled along tracks. Here the works were mutually interactive and imposed a certain choreographic pattern on the movement and gestures of the spectators. Finally, the largest space in the North Duveen Gallery was to be filled with fixed structures in which the component parts determined the actions of the participants—variations on the theme of a tightrope, double-tiered ramps which increased and decreased in height, contorting the body as it moved up or down, and wooden crevices negotiated by jamming the body, or part of the body against the structure and using leverage to gain or lose height. Morris intended to bricolage the installation on-site using cheap, reusable materials and scrapyard metal.15 In addition, he stipulated that the only directions as to how the public should interact with the works would come from a series of photographs placed on the gallery walls adjacent to the relevant object or structure, demonstrating “the possibilities of each set of objects or devices.” These 10″ × 14″ black-and-white images were produced prior to the public opening, using museum staff somewhat self-consciously “interacting” with the various assemblages. In addition to the construction, Morris agreed to a slide show of past work, the screening of some of his films, including Neo Classic, and the reproduction of a limited number of minimal sculptures to be sited on the lawn in front of the museum.

Installation shot of people interacting with works in Tate Exhibitions—Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings, April 28–June 6, 1971. © Tate, London 2012.

Installation shot of people interacting with works in Tate Exhibitions—Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings, April 28–June 6, 1971. © Tate, London 2012.

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The work which most clearly prefigured Morris’s final design was a three-week installation at Leo Castelli’s New York Warehouse Gallery in March 1969—Continuous Project Altered Daily. Each day Morris added to, and acted upon, the materials, which, in their rough physicality and random placement, resembled a building site: piles of “matter” (dirt, clay, sand, latex, gravel, grease, wood, and cloth), moved around with a shovel, heaped on to wooden platforms, the whole scene illuminated by hanging, naked light bulbs. Besides the daily manipulating and redistributing of the material, Morris photographically documented and displayed the result of each day’s labors and kept a notebook of his thoughts and actions. This journal of the unfolding event combines a record of daily materials and routines with an attempt to narrativize his sensory and psychological reactions, which included disgust and revulsion, describing it as “a work of the bowels.” Given Morris’s political and theoretical interests, this could be read as another ironic commentary upon use and exchange value in the production of art as aesthetic object or commodity, or a practical example of Peircian semiotics—the work functioning simultaneously as index, icon, and symbol.16 Chaos is precariously near. —Anton Ehrenzweig17 In the fourth of his reflective essays on sculpture, the most critical of the appropriative tendencies of the dominant culture, Morris attacks both the commodity status of the art object and the immediate institutionalization of the processes of cultural production: “Under attack is the rationalistic notion that art is a form of work that results in a finished product. … The notion that work is an irreversible process ending in a static icon-object no longer has much relevance.”18 In the same essay, Morris several times quotes Anton Ehrenzweig, and The Hidden Order of Art is a suggestive reference in Morris’s reevaluation of the formal and conceptual status of the sculptural object—in Lucy Lippard’s memorable term, its “dematerialization.”19 “The art under discussion relates to a mode of vision that Ehrenzweig terms variously as scanning, syncretistic, and dedifferentiated—a purposeful detachment from holistic readings in terms of gestalt-bound forms.”20 Published posthumously, Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art develops a theory of artistic creativity based upon “depth psychology.” Taking the work of art itself as the manifest content

Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1969. Earth, clay, asbestos, cotton, water, grease, plastic, felt, wood, threadwaste, electric lights, photographs, tape recorder, dimensions variable. Installed at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, March 1–22, 1969. Photograph provided by Leo Castelli Gallery. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, 1969. Earth, clay, asbestos, cotton, water, grease, plastic, felt, wood, threadwaste, electric lights, photographs, tape recorder, dimensions variable. Installed at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, March 1–22, 1969. Photograph provided by Leo Castelli Gallery. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of unconscious creative processes that avoid the formulas and restrictions of “our normal logical habits of thinking,” Ehrenzweig argues that all artistic structures are essentially “polyphonic,” and that the artistic imagination is characterized by “unconscious scanning”—a critical form of scattered attention that selects significant elements from the unconscious psychic processes and finds resolution in their completed aesthetic form.

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Constantly threatened with psychosis, the artist succeeds in alternating between “differentiated and dedifferentiated” conceptual modes.21 The traces of chaotic fragmentation remain as a veiled presence in the work, evidence of the struggle to form and of the work of the unconscious— art’s “hidden order.” In interviews, Morris has subsequently played down the influence of Ehrenzweig’s theories on his own critical and sculptural output. However, some of the key concepts from The Hidden Order of Art would appear, at least partially, to contribute to the moves in theory and practice that he was making at this time. It wasn’t only Morris who was interested in Ehrenzweig’s writing. The Hidden Order of Art was an influential text for, among others, Robert Smithson, whose entropic Non-Sites reinterpreted Ehrenzweig’s concept of “dedifferentiation” as a relation of interior to exterior. In the British context, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the painter Bridget Riley were all closely associated with him in the 1950s and ’60s.22 Formally, the relations between figure and ground provide the conceptual basis for the redefining of the art objects’ ontological status that Morris and other artists were pursuing through the late 1960s and early 1970s. Morris’s minimalist sculptures—particularly the simple gray and white polyhedrons—cast the phenomenological weight upon the slight shifts experienced by the viewer moving in relation to the object so that its primary property—shape—is constantly disturbed by a fluctuating pattern of visual moments: a restaging of the division between knowing and seeing, or mind and body. In a sense, these sculptures emphasized the object as sign, the focus for a semiotic play of meanings between sculpture, context, and viewer, or, using Morris’s own terms of reference in the mid-1960s, works that claimed to be visual expressions in a Wittgensteinian “language game.”23 However open the minimalist sculpture was to a textual reading—meaning produced through the visual interaction between viewer and work—its status as physical object and the institutional space of its reception, the museum or gallery, became for Morris a repressive regime. Blurring the boundaries, opening the work to the site either as the resultant effect of gravity—the Felts, or the random distribution of “stuff”—the creation of a “visual field” as in Continuous Project Altered Daily—effected a realignment in the relations between work, viewer, and space/context which introduced a more playfully libidinous role for the viewer/spectator, further undermined the work’s status as the bearer of aesthetic meaning, and made explicit

the legitimating function of the institution. Morris, however, was prescient in recognizing how rapidly any “anti-aesthetic” became a signature style, revalidated by the institutional framework.24 Controlling chaos might aptly describe Morris’s performative actions upon the brute material that he shoveled, spread, manipulated and rearranged in the sparse warehouse environment of Castelli’s gallery. “Chance” and “indeterminacy” define the sculptural priorities expressed in the “Anti Form” essay and echo Ehrenzweig’s introduction to the principle of “unconscious scanning”: “What is common to all examples of dedifferentiation is their freedom from having to make a choice.”25 In Ehrenzweig’s argument, “unconscious scanning” provides an explanation—a way out—of Wittgenstein’s language game paradox: how can we possess knowledge of the total system (language) when the individual elements are variable and interchangeable? We comprehend instantaneously, yet meaning is determinable from future use. Unconscious scanning “can handle ‘open’ structures with blurred frontiers which will be drawn with proper precision only in the unknowable future.”26 In another chapter—“Enveloping Pictorial Space”—Ehrenzweig introduces the term “oceanic envelopment” to describe the viewer’s experience of pictorial space and all-over surface in American painting (he specifically mentions Pollock), which he sees as a tension between “oneness” and “otherness.” In both, it is the experience of separation essential for the forming of a coherent subjectivity that inheres in all processes of representation—what is present standing in for what is absent. In Morris’s projects of the late 1960s and early ’70s, it is first the work as a coherent entity—its formal integrity—that is absented, and then, subsequently, the author/producer. (Roland Barthes’s hugely influential essay “Death of the Author” was published in 1968.) What is substituted is the notion of a “visual field” as the site for a participatory exchange or “process” which is determinedly fluid and non-end-oriented: “What is revealed is that art itself is an activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity and mutability, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes.”27   And this is precisely what an exhibition is—a strategic system of representations. —Bruce W. Ferguson28

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The Morris retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery on April 28, 1971. It remained open for five days and was then closed on the recommendation of Michael Compton and on the order of the director, Norman Reid. Reid’s statement, circulated to the trustees on May 7, listed five reasons for closure, including a number of “minor accidents” to visitors and the possibility of a more serious incident, and the “exuberant and excited behaviour” of some members of the public whose actions had significantly damaged a number of the installations. On May 13, Michael Compton wrote at length to Morris, explaining in detail (he itemized nineteen separate incidents involving individual pieces and structures, and added a further five reflections upon the general public’s response to the exhibition) the Tate’s decision. He concluded: In spite of all this I do not regard the show as having been a failure. I am convinced that, as well as providing the ground for a very special experience and being full of genuine invention, it posed in a particularly succinct and explicit manner some of the important issues of art. For example, the relationship of the way that groups or individuals use art to the way that it is conceived and made; the social role of the museum; the notions of freedom and responsibility in art; etc., as well as those that I expected.29 Six days after closure a substantially remade conventional retrospective reopened and ran until June 6. The catalog which accompanied the exhibition also served to supplement the historical gaps in the actual works exhibited through photographic documentation, with introductory notes written by Compton, of Morris’s output during the preceding decade. The catalog essays provided a biographical summary, also written by Compton, a description and commentary on Box with the Sound of Its Own Making by Sylvester, a conversation between the artist and Sylvester recorded in 1967, and a short text by Morris, “A Method for Sorting Cows,” which had originally been a spoken element in an early choreographic work, Arizona (1963). One whole page of the catalog was taken up with a reproduction of Morris’s 1970 advertisement for the Peripatetic Artists Guild. A removable poster in the back of the catalog illustrated Morris’s final working drawing for the installation, along with photographs of museum staff interacting with the objects and structures, and a brief descriptive statement about the evolution of the design,

Installation shot of people interacting with works in Tate Exhibitions—Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings, April 28–June 6, 1971. © Tate, London 2012.

concluding with a claim for the works as representing “an art that goes beyond the making, selling, collecting and looking at kind of art, and proposes a new role for the artist in relation to society.” Little serious critical attention has been paid to the Tate retrospective other than by Maurice Berger in his account of Morris’s work of the 1960s,30 and a brief reference, based on Berger, by David Antin in his essay for the catalog for the 1994 Guggenheim retrospective.31 For Berger, Morris’s “challenge to the repressive hierarchies of the museum”32 was too threatening for the institution to accommodate or accept, a reaction reinforced by what Berger perceived as a uniformly negative critical response. However, reading the numerous comments and articles produced throughout the course of the exhibition and subsequently, from the art journals to the general press coverage, a more contradictory and nuanced discourse is revealed. Certainly accusations against the installation for resembling a “gym,” an “assault course,” or a “children’s playground” are repetitively narrated, but so also are issues of

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gender, the body, the radical possibilities of the museum as a space of play, and the social aspects of a participatory relation between public and artwork. It is unlikely that the somewhat naively utopian claim expressed in the catalog text anticipated the extent of anarchic engagement with the installation by many of the adult visitors (reports by museum staff suggested that the response by children, who had evidently been properly socialized into appropriate playground behavior, more closely followed the illustrative photographs displayed in the galleries). The most perceptive comments came from Guy Brett in the Times (May 11), Rayner Banham in the New York Times (May 23), and, much later and presumably with a specific political agenda, Edward LucieSmith in Encounter (August issue). Banham reads the audience participation against the grain of Morris’s film, Neo Classic, whose slow rhythms of body/object interaction suggested “a refined, gentlemanly and contemplative aestheticism.” Against this, Banham describes a carnivalesque inversion of social rules and conventions: “by the end of the private viewing the place was a bedlam in which all rules of decorum had been abandoned as liberated aesthetes leaped and teetered and heaved and clambered and shouted and joined hands with total strangers.” For Guy Brett the exhibition represented a moment when the repressed within social life returned as a disruptive element, breaking against the public role of the museum as an authoritarian structure. Rather than catharsis, however, Brett suggests an excess of psychic release uncontainable by the regulatory regime of the institutional apparatus: The invitation to “participate” in a work of art is an invitation to explore sensory experiences, but the implications of participation, the relationships it creates, obviously spread out into life in general. It places art in a social context. And it makes what happens in an exhibition inevitably a part of the exhibition, even if it takes a wrong turning and becomes destructive. Writing some two months after the final closure of the exhibition, Lucie-Smith challenged what he interpreted as the relationship of play to “aesthetic experience.” Hanging his argument on a negative assessment of the recently published paean to a Marcusian-inspired celebration of revolutionary liberated practice, Richard Neville’s book Play Power,33 which, he implies, legitimated the aesthetic strategies of

participatory artworks, Lucie-Smith argued that the notion of art as “play” found its administrative equivalent in the then fashionable political discourse of “leisure time.” “For my own part, I am not certain that play-power in the visual arts isn’t simply a new disguise for philistinism.” In this equation, “art-as-play” is appropriated into the hegemonic discourse around nonproductive (unwaged) social activity—a reinscription of libidinal and disruptive energies into nonthreatening cultural pursuits: rather the public break up the art in the museum than the museum itself. Earlier in the same article, Lucie-Smith takes a curious step into gender politics. Repeating the popular analogy of the installation as an “assault course,” he accuses Morris of a bias toward young, active males, thereby putting himself (Morris) “at the service of physical aristocracy.” Whether the museum and its displays are theorized as an apparatus for the ritualistic reproduction of the citizen-subject, as a disciplinary complex for the operation of power/knowledge, or as a psychic space for the dialectic of desire and the law, there is clearly a more complex economy at work than the restaging of familiar relations and oppositions between the institution, the artwork, and the viewer.34 And it is reasonable to suppose that Morris’s intentions extended beyond the simple generation of dissent. Depending upon the centrality accorded to Neo Classic as an idealized depiction of a performative arena, and the critical texts and exhibited works that preceded this retrospective, something more oblique, reflective, and ambivalent informed Morris’s conception of the installation.35 In fact, both Sylvester in his celebration of Neo Classic and Banham in his somewhat dismissive remarks seem to miss the complex gender politics that interweave throughout Morris’s practice of the 1960s, including I-Box, Site (1964), a performance with Carolee Schneemann enacting the role of Manet’s Olympia, and Waterman Switch (1965), Morris’s final dance composition, performed with Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer, which had Morris and Rainer covered only in mineral oil, shuffling in a close embrace along a wooden track accompanied by Childs dressed in an over-large man’s suit and hat. If managing chaos is one possible definition for the work of this period, then the Tate retrospective added a heightened awareness of the instability of meaning, the exhibition complex offering Morris the possibility for resignification—for meaning otherwise. Morris’s position in relation to conceptual art remained (and remains) problematic, despite sharing many of the general concerns of the “movement”: the decentering of

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traditional artistic categories, a theoretically informed discourse, an emphasis upon documentation and forms of institutional critique. However, the complexly layered and varied nature of his practice, its crossgeneric and intertextual referentiality, and the recurrent theme of how the haptic signifies without being flattened in the letteral, make him a loose thread that threatens to unravel any homogenizing overview. The Tate exhibition, through its combination of elements and interactive dimension, prefigured later examples of installation art that sit securely in the institutional spaces that they set out to deconstruct. As one branch of conceptualism turned inward and discounted any possibility of external reference or effect, Morris’s investment in the body as a site of turbulence and parody suggested a different way for art to figure the world. A few months prior to the exhibition Morris published his most Duchampian text, “The Art of Existence. Three Extra-Visual Artists: Works in Progress” (Artforum, January 1971). Superficially a description of a number of visits he made to three young West Coast “environmental” artists, the narrative documents their work and Morris’s perceptual and emotional response as he experiences various forms of sensory assault, from the “dampness and … slight chill” of Marvin Blaine’s underground passage, designed to maximize the visual effect of the summer solstice, to Jason Taub’s sound transmissions, “similar to what one experiences when one hears a ringing in one’s ears,” ending with a “retrospective gassing” in the “Gas Mixing and Compression Chamber” of the manically sinister Robert Dayton. Interweaving documentary and fictional narrative styles, Morris’s spurious account has sufficient detail and proximity to existing artists and works to function as an ironic metatext on the dominant themes and ideologies of postminimalist art. These include the status of the object qua object, the claims for art as a scientific-like inquiry (there was much interest in Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions),36 art as shamanistic ritual, or the experimental self as a body open to the physical world. That Morris himself touched upon all of these themes in his practice and theory was not an impediment to the process of critical reflection and ironic subversion. If in these fictional encounters he was projecting himself into a number of imaginary haptic situations, then the retrospective provided the context for their actual realization in the three sections of his installation. On reflection, the exhibition would appear to have allowed Morris the opportunity to combine a number of practical and theoretical interests:

his commitment to the social and political character of art-making, a growing skepticism toward the museum or gallery as a neutral space for the encounter between spectator and work, an emphasis upon the semiological structure of the art system with the object functioning as a sign for value in the reception and circulation of meanings, and a shift from the making of art as a metaphor for other (alienated) forms of labor to art as play—a metonym for the embodied subject in a tactile and libidinal relation to the world. Acknowledgments

Thanks to Michael Compton for sharing his recollection of the exhibition and its aftermath with me. Notes

1.  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture: Part 4,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 69. 2.  Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (London: Phoenix Press, 1967), p. 95. 3.  David Sylvester in conversation with Michael Compton, Tate Magazine (spring 1997). 4.  Michael Shepherd, Sunday Telegraph, May 9, 1971. All correspondence and information relating directly to the exhibition comes from the Robert Morris File in the Tate Gallery Archives (TGA: RM file). 5.  Neo Classic, black-and-white 16mm film, approx. 12 minutes running time. Tate Gallery, April 1971. 6.  Robert Morris, “Professional Rules,” Critical Inquiry, 23 (winter 1997). 7.  Letter to Maurice Compton, May 24, 1970 (TGA: RM file). 8.  Quoted in Morris Berger, “Wayward Landscapes,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), p. 21. 9.  For a full discussion of this see Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Icon, 1989), pp. 93–95. 10.  Letter to Michael Compton, January 19, 1971 (TGA: RM file). 11.  Morris’s interest in Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings is well documented by W. J. T. Mitchell in his catalog essay “Wall Labels: Word, Image, and Object in the Work of Robert Morris,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, pp. 62–79. 12.  Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 92. 13.  The relationship of Morris to dance and choreography is explored by Berger in “Wayward Landscapes,” pp. 18–33. 14.  Letter to Michael Compton, March 5, 1971 (TGA: RM file).

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15.  The writings of the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss were frequently cited by Morris. In the essay “The Science of the Concrete,” Lévi-Strauss differentiates between the scientific method of deductive design and that of the “bricoleur” who employs apparently random or devious methods to obtain his goal, which is essentially formulated in the process of employing the methods. Morris’s monumental installations at the Corcoran Gallery and the Whitney Museum and, to some extent, in the Tate retrospective, utilize the techniques of the bricoleur. 16.  For the implications of C. S. Peirce’s system for a semiotics of the visual arts, see M. Iverson, “Saussure versus Peirce: Models for a Semiotics of Visual Art,” in The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and F. Borzello (London: Camden Press, 1986). 17.  Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, p. 31. 18.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 68. 19.  “Dematerialization” first appeared as a theoretical concept in the 1968 essay by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art.” In this account the suggestion is of an absence of material rather than object, which was corrected in Lippard’s later anthology, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (London: Praeger, 1973). The attack upon the object is theorized somewhat differently by Rosalind Krauss in her influential essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” For Krauss, artists in the late 1960s were primarily interested in the negation of sculptural form and space through the object’s proximity to previously excluded categories, such as “landscape” and “architecture”: “The expanded field is thus generated by problematizing the set of oppositions between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended,” October 13 (spring 1979): 38. 20.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4,” p. 61. 21.  “In creativity, outer and inner reality will always be organized together by the same indivisible process. … My point will be that unconscious scanning makes use of undifferentiated modes of vision that to normal awareness would seem chaotic.” Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, p. 5. 22.  Smithson’s connection to Ehrenzweig is explored by Gary Shapiro in his Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 23.  See Mitchell, “Wall Labels.” 24.  In 1969 Morris also organized Anti-Form, an exhibition at Leo Castelli’s Warehouse Gallery in New York which included, besides his own work, pieces by Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Claes Oldenburg, and Bruce Nauman. A precedent for this was Lucy Lippard’s 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery, New York. 25.  Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, p. 32. 26.  Ibid., p. 42. 27.  Morris, “Notes on Sculpture: Part 4,” p. 69. 28.  Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London: Psychology Press, 1996), p. 178. 29.  Letter to Robert Morris, May 13, 1971 (TGA: RM file). 30.  Berger, Labyrinths. 31.  David Antin, “Have Mind, Will Travel,” in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, pp. 44–45.

32.  Ibid., p. 121. 33.  Richard Neville, Play Power (London: Cape, 1970). Neville also mentions R. D. Laing, Bakunin, and the Situationist manifesto as important references for the radical discourse of the 1960s counterculture movements. Herbert Marcuse’s writings provided an important and influential reference for American artists on the left, particularly in relation to countercultural notions of freedom and liberation. Berger points out that Marcuse’s “An Essay on Liberation” was concurrent with Morris’s development of his concept of “antiform,” and Berger’s Eros & Civilization had a direct bearing on Morris’s reaction to the repressive authority of the art institution. 34.  The critical literature on the museum and its displays is now extremely extensive. In relation to these issues, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Psychology Press, 1995); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992); Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994); Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne, Thinking about Exhibitions. 35.  In fact, the making of the film seems to have been something of an afterthought. Certainly it was not an element within the design until a very late stage during the construction of the installation. 36.  Kuhn’s book, along with A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic and Wittgenstein, were primary references for the development of conceptual art in Britain and America. Kuhn’s notion of science progressing through “paradigm shifts” became a model for early Art & Language critiques of the physical-object status of the work of art: for example, see Terry Atkinson and Mike Baldwin, “On the Material-Character/Physical-Object Paradigm of Art,” Art-Language 2, no. 1 (February 1972). For a full discussion of the philosophical aspects of conceptual art, see Peter Osborne, “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, ed. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 47–65.  

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Exhibition as Work

For his 1970 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Morris: Recent Works, Robert Morris created process pieces— “spills” of concrete, timber, and steel—which filled the entire third floor of the museum. These constructions, including a ninety-six-footlong installation that spanned the length of the room, were the largest pieces the Whitney had ever exhibited. Assembled over the space of ten days, the installations were built with the help of a team of more than thirty forklift drivers, crane operators, and building engineers, as well as a small army of professional art fabricators.1 An article in Time magazine observed, “as workmen moved in with gantries, forklifts, and hydraulic jacks to help Morris do his thing, the museum took on the look of a midtown construction site.”2 To accommodate the massive installations, the walls in the gallery space were removed, and there was concern that the floor might not be able to support their weight. Instead of a traditional opening, viewers were invited to watch the labor progress day after day, although this component of the show ended after an injury pinned an art installer under a steel plate as a result of faulty rigging.3 While most artworks of this scale require help from studio apprentices or installers, this exhibit uniquely theatricalized these workers’ bodily involvement at the same time that it proposed an uneasy equality between artist and assistant. The pieces were made partially by chance— the workers rolled, scattered, and dropped concrete blocks and timbers,

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Installation shot of Robert Morris: Recent Works, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1970. Foreground: Untitled (Concrete, Steel, Timbers), 6 × 16 × 96 feet. Destroyed. Photograph by Rudy Burckhardt. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

then left them to lie as they fell. In thus relinquishing compositional control, Morris insisted on an unprecedented degree of collaboration between himself and the workers who installed the show. By circumventing the studio and fabricating the work wholly on the floor of the museum, Morris figured the art itself as a specific kind of work, performed at a specific kind of work site. The 1970 Whitney show was initially intended by curator Marcia Tucker as a comprehensive mid-career survey that would complement the artist’s recent solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts in late 1969. Both Tucker and Morris agreed until late 1969 to exhibit some of his earlier, well-known pieces alongside a small number of previously unseen, new works. But by midDecember, Morris turned away from this idea, writing to Tucker, “I do not wish to show old work.”4 As he elaborated in a letter a few weeks later:

I feel a separate room of older objects shown somewhere off the third floor is antithetical to the position I take with respect to this show and the point I want to make about a redefinition of the possibilities for one-man shows in contemporary museums of art. … My hope is that the museum can support a showing situation which allows the artist an engagement rather than a regurgitation: a situation of challenge for the public and risk for the artist.5 By trying to “redefine” conventional retrospectives, Morris sought nothing less than a total renovation of the ideas of the solo show, one that entailed both “challenge” and “risk.” He wanted to use his exhibition not to solidify or historicize his reputation, but to push a political and aesthetic agenda. This was news to the curator, who had been proceeding with a catalog for a very different kind of show.6 Morris tinkered with plans for the exhibition right up until its first day. In the end, he decided to show only six pieces: four steel-plate sculptures and two new site-specific installations in which he subjected unrefined industrial components to a series of actions in which chance played a role. Tucker later recalled that the show required “more machinery” to install than she had ever used, and that for the museum as well as for the artist, “it was an absolutely phenomenal amount of work.”7 By filling the gallery space with raw materials that had been jostled, pulled, rigged, and dropped, Morris went to great lengths to emphasize effort while simultaneously denying conventional notions of specialized artistic skill, a denial that provoked comment in the press at the time. “What team of corduroy road-builders went berserk here?” one reviewer asked.8 Even though the exhibit generated a voluminous amount of documentation (photographic and filmic), a series of Gianfranco Gorgoni photographs, published in 1972, for decades constituted its primary public archive.9 Beyond documenting the exhibit, these photographs contribute to its discursive framing; in them, Morris is repeatedly depicted at work— gloves on, shirt stained with perspiration and dirt. In one image, for example, Morris drives a forklift, a cigar planted firmly in his mouth. Gorgoni places the viewer down on the street as he captures Morris hauling large timbers through the Whitney’s loading entrance. A man is removing the dolly from under the lift. His frame is contorted as he crouches below the wood, and the beams loom above his doubled-over body. Artists rarely

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Robert Morris drives a forklift to install his Whitney show, 1970. Photograph © Gianfranco Gorgoni/Contact Press Images.

drive their own materials in through museums’ delivery doors, but the photograph produces evidence that Morris is adept at working with machinery and the matters of construction, a point reiterated in a 1970 interview when he stated that “a fork-lift truck works fine” as a tool for heavy lifting.10 In another image, the artist braces himself against a large wooden beam as three men scramble above him. The faceless workers appear as dark silhouettes against the white museum wall, while Morris, smoking a just-lit cigar, is carefully framed by a large block behind his head. The depiction of the artist’s manual and mechanical effort actively promotes the sense that he has become, as one review remarked, a “construction man.”11 Morris’s Whitney installations—Untitled (Timbers) and Untitled (Concrete, Timbers, Steel)—made extensive use of building materials. In Untitled (Timbers), placed close to the stairs and elevators, wood beams from twelve to sixteen feet long were stacked in a grouping that rose seven feet high and extended almost fifty-five feet down the length of the room. Single timbers jut out diagonally at about eye level at either end, wedged under some of the beams to hoist them off the floor. Buttressed

Robert Morris and workers assemble Untitled (Concrete, Steel, Timbers), 1970. Photograph © Gianfranco Gorgoni/Contact Press Images.

by a few smaller slats so that they point at a nearly direct forty-fivedegree angle, they are provocative, resembling fulcrums or levers awaiting the viewer’s pumping hand. At one end, the pile cascaded down in a great tumble, fanning out along the floor. So precarious were the timbers that the museum installed signs warning visitors not to touch them. While the elements in Timbers were importantly hefty—they weighed as much as 1,500 pounds each—the second installation at the Whitney was truly, impressively gigantic. Untitled (Concrete, Timbers, Steel) was made by pushing concrete blocks on steel rods down two parallel rows of timbers until they tipped and toppled in random patterns along the steel rollers. A Gorgoni photograph records this process; in it, four men pull with all their might, muscles bulging with the strain. The men stand between two parallel tracks of wooden beams, and lean back with the effort required to tug the concrete. Just out of the frame of the picture is the concrete block they are hauling. We see mostly a chain of hands and arms grasping at the ropes—the camera focuses on the effort rather than the object. (Gorgoni’s shot also captures a fellow cameraperson, seen at the right of the frame.)

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The blocks were in fact a compromise: Morris wanted to use blocks of rough-quarried granite, but engineers warned that the floor was likely to collapse under the weight, so he replaced them with concrete cubes. The blocks, fabricated by Lippincott, Inc., had cores of plywood and were therefore much lighter than the planned quarried stone. At Morris’s insistence, the wall text included the following caveat: “The limitations of the building—floor loads, entrances and elevator capacity—forced modifications to be made on all works shown. The timber stack was to have been longer. The work with concrete blocks was to have been considerably wider and rough quarried, irregular granite blocks of larger sizes were to be used instead of concrete. … Thickness on all steel was to have been greater. My objections to the design of many aspects of the building are strong.”12 The blocks, supported by cross-beams, were pushed along the tracks until they reached an unsupported area and caved in, tilting the beams up around them with some of the steel poles crowded alongside the cube’s wooden cradle. At one end the blocks crashed all the way to the floor. The work’s very composition (or lack thereof)—unstable, loosely arranged, contingent—was meant to have a political significance; as Morris commented in a 1967 essay, “openness, extendibility, accessibility, publicness, repeatability, equanimity, directness, and immediacy … have a few social implications, and none of them are negative.”13 This essay, penned some three years before the Whitney show, provides a template for Morris’s process work of the late 1960s, including his contemporaneous felt works. At this time, he was deeply interested in the properties of chance and gravity—the component parts of what was called antiform.14 Of all his art, the Whitney works go the furthest in demonstrating how, for Morris, this “publicness” and “openness” have positive social implications—ones that rest on notions of labor. As he wrote in an essay published just as the Whitney show was opening: Employing chance in an endless number of ways to structure relationships, constructing rather than arranging, allowing gravity to shape or complete some phase of the work—all such diverse methods involve what can only be called automation and imply the process of making back from the finished work. … At those points where automation is substituted for a previous “all made by hand” homologous set of steps, the artist has stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art.15

Morris has aligned chance and automation because they both deemphasize the artist’s hand. This is an analogical model of argument: if his process is like work, it becomes work. Analogical and metaphoric thinking of this kind grew to be critically important as leftist artists like Morris sought to refashion themselves as art workers. They were akin to workers, and this likeness was meant to register their work’s political claims. For Morris, relinquishing control in his process works expressed a desire to have his art take place in an arena of social and political relevance, to have “more of the world” enter in. Morris’s repeated use of the word “automation” is also significant for its registration of a turn to deskilling and machinic factory fabrication. Many saw the Whitney works as ideal instances of “antiform,” a term that was itself ideologically loaded. To build on Maurice Berger’s important work on this subject, “form” was a key word in Herbert Marcuse’s widely circulated writings on progressive aesthetics.16 In 1967, Marcuse gave a lecture at the New York School of Visual Arts, subsequently reprinted in Arts Magazine, in which he spoke of art’s need to find a new way to model relations to the world. Marcuse did not prescribe what such revolutionary art practice, or form, would look (or sound) like.17 He stressed, though, that all modes of production, including art making, needed new collaborative conditions of labor, stating that “the social expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation, which, grounded in solidarity, directs the organization of the realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom.”18 Morris attempted to demonstrate these lessons in the Whitney show by seeking to initiate a type of meaningful artistic labor in concert with “real” workers. The materials he used were likewise meant to have literal rather than symbolic value. Morris stipulated that all the materials he used for the Whitney show be acquired “on loan,” that is, cycled back into the economy of construction after the exhibit was taken down. The steel was ideally to be sent back to its manufacturer, the timbers to their mill, and the granite blocks to their quarry. Substituting concrete blocks, which had to be specially made, for the proposed granite threw a kink into this planned closed circuit. Donald Lippincott remembers that the timber was sold back to the mill in Connecticut; he recalls that his fabrication firm kept the steel for future projects.19 Assembled rather than transformed, the materials for the Whitney show underwent no physical changes that would compromise them in future building projects. (Likewise, for his

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show at the Tate Gallery in 1971, Morris used plywood that he hoped would be recycled “for something I feel good about … given to artists, used for necessary housing.”20) The museum was transformed into a way station on the trip from mill to skyscraper or apartment complex. The Whitney show represents Morris’s best effort to find new models of making and displaying art, and he hoped these models would defeat both the co-optation of artistic labor and the commodity logic of the object. The artist wants to reject fetishism outright (even as the process of making itself becomes somewhat fetishized). With their careful, public deployment of physical work, the installations endeavored to retain—to depict and inscribe—the labor power that went into their construction. Much of this inscription was achieved by the art’s sheer scale as it specifically implicated the space of the Whitney as a worksite. As Annette Michelson put it in her 1970 Artforum review: The multiplicity and strenuousness of action, the series of pragmatic re-calculations and adjustments … the hoisting, toppling, hammering, rolling of great weights and volumes produced a spectacle, framed, intensified, by the low-ceilinged, rectangular space of the galleries, animated by the sounds of hammer upon steel and wood, of chains and pulleys and the cries of crewmen calling to one another.21 Artistic work as “hard labor” reached an apex of visibility with the Whitney show, and the frame of the museum walls, its very institutionality, proved integral to this spectacularization. Minimalism is often said to have “activated” the body—the body of the viewer, that is—but it also activated the body of the maker as a worker. Scale, in other words, became a measure of how much work was done, and whether the body, alone and unaided, could do the job. The larger the art object, the more work was needed—whether from machines or teams of workers. Scale was central to the reception of Morris’s Whitney exhibition. As Michelson put it: “No consideration of this exhibition can do without some mention, some sense of these dimensions and of the demands made by scale and weight of materials upon the resources of the Museum’s space, its circulation potential.”22 Michelson comprehends the way in which Morris’s scale entails an institutional component, that is, how scale seeks to put pressure on the museum’s very limits

of feasibility. What can the museum hold, how much can it support, how much flexibility does it allow its artists and its audiences? Morris addressed these questions in literal and symbolic terms. First, he compromised on his materials because of fears that the Whitney floor would not bear the weight of his sculptures. Second, when he rejected a retrospective and instead used the exhibition as a showcase for collective, public physical effort, his show raised institutional issues about the kind of artistic labor usually represented in museum shows (needless to say, primarily singular and private). These ideas were crucial for Morris in the early 1970s, as he aimed to “go beyond the making, selling, collecting, and looking at kind of art, and propose a new role of the artist in relation to society.”23 Morris’s exhibition took place at an especially charged moment in American history—late winter and spring of 1970—one that must be tracked to fully understand what happened in the aftermath of his Whitney opening. It was during these months that the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) reached the height of its activity and influence, including its successful pressuring of the Museum of Modern Art to implement a free day in February. A brief political timeline, charting a span of six tumultuous weeks from April to mid-May of 1970, further fills in the contested circumstances of Morris’s show: the Whitney show opened (April 9), the United States bombed Cambodia (April 29), the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State (May 4), and, in a highly publicized confrontation, New York City construction workers attacked antiwar protesters (May 8). On May 15, Morris decided to shut down his show two weeks early in a self-declared strike—a vexed gesture that stemmed from, and was implicated in, debates about labor and laborers in the United States. With this gesture, he became central to the AWC offshoot called the New York Art Strike against Racism, War, and Repression, and did in fact propose for artists a “new role … in relation to society”: the role of the art worker. Artists and Workers/Artists as Workers

“At 30,” writes Morris, “I had my alienation, my Skilsaw, and my plywood.”24 There is a double meaning implicit in this quote, as it equally invokes art and the characteristically “alienated” condition of modern labor. Morris claims his alienation with some pride, treating it as another

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aspect of minimal art making, one that goes hand in hand with the tools and materials of construction—construction increasingly done with the help of manufacturing plants. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the art press and artists alike were fascinated by the use of factory fabrication, and accounts of successful working partnerships between artist and manufacturers were reported in great detail.25 Finding appropriate fabricators was challenging for those 1960s artists, from the minimalists to an artist like Claes Oldenburg who wanted large-scale works. Contrary to the argument that much factory fabrication entailed giving up artistic control, many artists required detailed oversight of their works. Even as they were barred, in some instances, from shop floors because of union regulations, they wanted to monitor and in some cases participate in every aspect of their works’ fabrication. Because union shops followed stringent protocol about who could operate machinery and handle materials, this was seen as a hindrance to those sculptors who wanted to step in and get their hands dirty during their art’s manufacture.26 The dilemma of artist-specific fabrication needs was partially remedied in 1967 by the opening of Lippincott, Inc., the first large-scale firm to utilize industrial working procedures in North America devoted exclusively to making sculpture. Advertisements placed in major art magazines announced Lippincott’s services and showcased some of its completed works. Other firms joined the burgeoning ranks of those that manufactured sculpture, a potentially promising area of growth for industrial plants otherwise in danger of becoming obsolete, such as Treitl-Graz and Milgo Industrial, Inc.27 Overseen by Donald Lippincott and occupying ten acres in North Haven, Connecticut, Lippincott, Inc. encouraged artists to build their works “all at once,” that is, to work directly with the materials full-scale, rather than first perfecting the design with a small model and then enlarging it. In a laudatory article in Arts Magazine, Barbara Rose pointed to the unique situation initiated by Lippincott, in which “artists were encouraged to work on the spot, directly assisting the welders and joiners and making alterations as they work.”28 (Here the artists assist the workers, rather than the other way around.) The firm became the manufacturer of choice for Robert Murray, Oldenburg, Barnett Newman, and Morris, and artists raved about what Rose called “the humanized environment of the ‘factory.’”29 The scare quotes around “factory” matter; because of its highly specialized focus on art only, Lippincott was

never considered a true manufacturing plant. Although it often made editions of works (such as the multiple versions of Newman’s Broken Obelisk), it was by no means an industrial setup primed to pump out identical objects ad infinitum. An exhibition, Artist and Fabricator, held in 1975 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, celebrated the close cooperative relationship between Lippincott, Inc. and artists, and repeatedly emphasized the firm’s investment in craftsmanship rather than manufacture; it was “more a communal studio than a factory.”30

Advertisement for Lippincott, Inc., featuring Robert Morris on a forklift, 1970. Originally published in Avalanche.

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The separation between artist and assistant was often blurred. Take the ad for the Lippincott factory published in the fall 1970 edition of Avalanche. Here, again, Morris drives a forklift—a further demonstration that the work, while machine-manufactured in a quasi-industrial factory, still had some sort of a relation to the artist’s laboring body. This photograph presents a nostalgic view of the kind of honest toil that was amply on display in the Whitney show and offers it up to prospective clients of Lippincott, suggesting that they, too, could participate in the evidently “hands-off” yet participatory procedures of factory fabrication. The ad is selling not the final product—Morris’s sculpture—but a fantasy about inhabiting the position of the laborer. It is also an image that wants to extend the boundaries of the artwork; art is a process, it implies, that takes place on the streets as much as in museums, although the presence of the woman in the photograph codes it as “art” more than the male domain of “work.” If the artist was authorized to slip into the role of the laborer on the shop floors of Milgo and Lippincott, in a reciprocal move, were the workers allowed to inhabit the role of the artist? Murray, who contracted with Bethlehem Steel to make some of his steel-plate sculptures and was seen wearing a hard hat alongside a machinist, reported that at the end of making his work Duet, the shop crew gave the foreman the gift of a beret with a card that read, “Trade in your hard hat.”31 The beret is, of course, meant as a joke, and a good-spirited one at that; it is a marker of bohemia, if not slightly foppish effeminization. The punch line of the hatswap actually underscores the distinction between the artist and the foreman and demonstrates that when the artist becomes a “worker,” it is ultimately at the level of the engineer, manager, or overseer. Despite the various appraisals of the 1970 Whitney show and Morris’s process piece with Lippincott, the press was unified on one theme: these public installations effectively merged, or at least destabilized, the positions of laborer and artist. In interviews during this time, Morris often mentioned his working class origins and his persistent work ethic; the show went even further to secure this affiliation.32 Here, the vital, active participants were not the audience but the workers, and their exceptional visibility within the museum made it look “as if Uris Brothers had moved in with a load of raw materials for a construction project.”33 The trade that Morris inhabits is clearly specified: construction, which was in 1970 a tendentious and politically besieged identity.

Detroit and Hard Hats

A few months before the Whitney show, Morris produced a work outside the Detroit Institute of Arts that formally foreshadowed his Whitney installations. Near the colossal scale of the Whitney pieces, it relied on a similar process of collective construction. Composed in part out of chunks of the demolished I-94 overpass that Morris spotted when driving from the Detroit airport, this found-object work was for him an instance of bricolage. He employed forty-ton industrial derricks to move the concrete, railroad ties, timbers, and scrap metal. Then, with the help of the Sugden Company construction crew, Morris installed his work on the north lawn of the Detroit Institute; the materials were roughly piled into a long, overlapping stack that resembled a toppled or destroyed structure.

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1970. Installation, Detroit Institute of the Arts. Scavenged concrete, steel, and timbers. 16 × 25 × 40 feet. Destroyed. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Interestingly, some in the Detroit press focused less on Morris’s art than on the actual laborers who helped to assemble these pieces. A reporter for the Detroit Free Press even interviewed the crane operator, Bob Hutchinson, who commented with evident satisfaction, “Only in America can a man awake a crane operator and go to sleep an artist.”34 (Although referred to as a “semi-sculptor” in the article, Hutchinson, it was revealed, was not invited to the show’s opening.) Not everyone was so pleased with this vaunted collaboration; Otto Backer, the construction foreman (also called, with some sarcasm, a “co-creator” of the art), complained that the work was “a mess” that might invite citations for zoning violations. Backer was especially unhappy about the prospect of removing the broken bridge abutment when the show was over; Morris did not stay to assist with the work’s dismantling. Possibly as a result of the press about the participation of a construction crew, the Morris show in Detroit was viewed as a rare art show that had cross-class appeal. One enthused supporter to Wagstaff: “Don’t know how you do it—but you’ve brought in a whole new audience to art—hard hats!—and made everyone stop and ask that crucial question (again); what is art?”35 The recruitment of hard hats both as art makers (the crane operator) and as a newfound audience for art would take on special significance for Morris’s Whitney show. Who were these workers that were summoned both as the makers and the improbable spectators of postminimalist sculpture? In 1970 hard hats served as the paradigmatic emblem of blue-collar culture. According to historian Joshua Freeman, “By the 1970s, the hardhat itself became the central symbol of American labor, a role earlier filled by the leather apron, the lunch pail, and the worker’s cap. … The multiple symbolic meanings of the hardhat were intensely gendered.”36 The hat itself functioned almost as a symbolic totem that conferred on its wearer associative powers of working class masculinity (a masculinity that was also coded white). This was more than a matter of symbols; statistically speaking, women had virtually no representation in the construction industry before 1978, when the government began requiring construction companies to employ affirmative action policies along gender lines. A decade later, women still made up only 2 percent of the building fabrication workforce.37 Aside from invoking clearly gendered resonances, recruiting hard hats as participants in the making or viewing of art also reflected a brand

of anti-elitism familiar to leftist ideologies. Within the AWC, organizing as workers provided a certain leverage, since, as artists attempted to model themselves on other trade unions, moments of actual association with hard-hat culture were perhaps understood to literalize or bolster their claims to this identity. The crane operator’s fantasy of class mobility is inverted in the déclassement of the art worker: only in America, one might say, could one go to sleep an artist and wake up a worker. In the context of the Vietnam War, this alliance between hard hats and artists proved, not surprisingly, untenable. It unraveled precisely around the Whitney show even as Morris explicitly invoked construction and manufacture as the basis for art’s formal means. On May 8, 1970, a few weeks after Morris’s show opened, several hundred pro-war construction workers lashed out at students who gathered in lower Manhattan to protest the bombing of Cambodia. “War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers” read the front-page headline in the New York Times.38 Seventy people were injured as construction workers, “most of them wearing brown overalls and orange and yellow hard hats, descended on Wall Street from four directions.”39 The workers proceeded to storm City Hall and forced officials to raise the American flag that had been lowered to half-mast to honor the four students shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State on May 4. Now known as the hard-hat riots, the incident received widespread media coverage at the time and has become a flash point in discussions of alliances between blue-collar workers and the New Left during the Vietnam War. Some have used the assaults to validate the viewpoint that the American working class was a conservative, pro-war force; others have asserted that the workers on May 8 were instigated by unknown forces, “managed” in some way by gray-suited bosses.40 In any case, their identification as hard hats—in some way metonymic of a mainstream “American public”—was central. In the words of one construction worker who participated in the May 8 riot, “The construction worker is only an image that’s being used. The hard hat is being used to represent all of the silent majority.”41 More than any other single event, the hard-hat riots served to redefine publicly the position of the laborer as politically conservative. A news photograph of the riot depicts crowds of white men—not all of them in hard hats—massing together with American flags and hand-lettered “USA” signs held aloft. This counterdemonstration was

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taken as proof that the working class—which, after all, was drafted into the armed forces in disproportionate numbers—was finally having its say about the war.42 The building trades were facing one of their slowest times in the early 1970s—a factor that may have contributed to these workers’ anger; many blue-collar workers were in April 1970 on the verge of a major work shut-down.43 Some at the time viewed the riots not as a bullying display of pro-war sentiment, but as a discharge of political rage due to a loss of economic power; as one proclamation put it in 1971: “The link between declining jobs in the construction industry—as a result of Nixon’s high interest-rate policies that make construction money scarce—and the hard-hat demonstrations should be obvious.”44 The May riots irrevocably colored the symbolism of construction workers. Hard hats became strongly linked to hawkish, pro-war positions, an association that lingered even as labor increasingly turned against the war in the early 1970s, a move that was arguably crucial to the ultimate end of the United States involvement in Vietnam.45 Construction workers in particular became known as militantly conservative, and, as photographs of pro-war hard hats continued to circulate in the press and the art world, the hard hat itself became a marker of aggressive patriotism. For example, in a by-now familiar campaign strategy designed to show the honest, plain-folks side of the politician, Richard Nixon was presented with a hard hat by a coalition of union presidents on May 26, 1970. Although he was photographed wearing the hat, he refused to let the photograph be published because of the hat’s negative associations with the worst kind of pro-war brutishness. “Shrinks with horror at idea of hard hat,” explained one Nixon official in an internal memo, “no hard hat … would never live it down.”46 Strike

The hard-hat riots were but one instance in an inflammatory period in 1970 that encompassed an unprecedented amount of protest and demonstration throughout the United States. In April and May 1970, the bombing of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State, Florida, propelled the antiwar movement to a new level of vigor. Even the Nixon administration perceived the difference in degree of radical resistance spreading through the streets, in workplaces, and on campuses:

worried one official, “We are facing the most severe internal security threat this country has seen since the Depression.”47 These antiwar disruptions dovetailed with a surge of labor unrest. In 1970 the number of strikes by union workers had reached a postwar high; as labor historians have documented, “large strikes were more important in 1970–1972 than at any time during the 1930s, and the proportion of workers involved in them was surpassed only in 1946–49.”48 As part of what has been termed “the Vietnam era labor revolt,” a postal wildcat strike in March of 1970 halted the U.S. mail in fifteen states, and record numbers of wildcat strikes by autoworkers shut down plants in the Midwest.49 High-profile strikes such as the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, the United Farm Workers strike of 1973, the 1972 longshoreman strike, the 1968 New York City teacher’s strike, and late 1960s wildcat strikes in the auto industry led some union leaders to coin this phrase. And in April 1970, the Teamsters, air traffic controllers, steelworkers, various teachers’ unions, and workers for New York newspapers held strikes.50 Not included in this statistic are the vast strikes called against the Vietnam War, such as student walk-outs (which climaxed the week of May 8 and virtually paralyzed the nation’s institutes of higher learning, with more than 80 percent of universities closing), non-union work stoppages to protest the war (such as those enacted by the film industry in May 1970), and the ongoing Women Strike for Peace campaign. As the Washington Post observed on May 6, 1970, “The nation is witnessing what amounts to a virtual general and uncoordinated strike.”51 In his comprehensive account of the antiwar movement, Tom Wells contended that “[in May 1970], the antiwar movement was alive as never before. The political possibilities seemed stupendous. A truly general strike against the war was not inconceivable—just shut the whole country down.”52 Artists were swept up by the promise of work stoppages, walkouts, and boycotts as well. On May 13, in New York, the artists in the Jewish Museum group show Using Walls voted to close the show to protest the U.S. government’s escalating violence in Southeast Asia and on campuses.53 Morris participated in this show and the subsequent shutdown; inspired by the forceful message of artistic blackout, he decided to dismantle his Whitney show several weeks early. As a prominent artist who had just launched a major solo show that mimed the procedures of construction and hence provided fresh evidence for the art worker’s

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self-descriptor, Morris was uniquely positioned to capitalize on the ethics of mass shutdown. On May 15 he sent a notice to the Whitney Museum demanding that his show be ended immediately, stating, “This act of closing … a cultural institution is intended to underscore the need I and others feel to shift priorities at this time from art making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war and racism in this country.”54 He declared himself “on strike” against the art system and further demanded that the Whitney close for two weeks to hold meetings for the art community to address both the war and a general dissatisfaction with the art museum as an agent of power. In Morris’s view, “A reassessment of the art structure itself seems timely—its values, its policies, its modes of control, its economic presumptions, its hierarchy of existing power and administration.” The Whitney administration at first refused his request, but after Morris threatened to use the museum as a site for a massive sit-in, it acquiesced and closed the show on May 17. Morris’s demand was a stunning instance of an artist using the polemical language of the strike for political purposes. While it echoed the 1937 Artists’ Union strike, Morris’s strike was not a campaign about wages or working conditions.55 Although not initially involved with the AWC, Morris was propelled to the forefront of New York artistic activist circles when he shut down his Whitney retrospective. The day after his show was closed, concerned artists held a meeting at New York University’s Loeb Center to discuss what they could do to protest the bombings of Cambodia. Over one thousand people attended, and “Robert Morris, Robert Morris, Robert Morris was the name on everyone’s lips.”56 He was elected chairman of an offshoot of the AWC known as the New York Art Strike against Racism, War, and Repression. (Poppy Johnson, in a gesture of gender conciliation, was elected co-chair.)57 The Art Strike was by no means unified about its overall strategy or how overarching artists’ withdrawal should be. Some pressed for the cessation of all art except antiwar protest art—a surprisingly popular view and one Morris evidently endorsed as he asserted that abstract art was racist and bourgeois and should possibly be stopped.58 “If art can’t help the revolution, get rid of it,” proclaimed one anonymous poster created during the Art Strike.59 Some articulated the belief that art making should be stopped in favor of reaching out to the proletariat. As

Cindy Nemser reported, some artists (she does not name them) “demanded that artists make works that could be used as propaganda to unite the artists with the workers.”60 This proposal, seen as a call for oldfashioned social realism, was roundly rejected, and not only because artists were looking for wholly unprecedented aesthetic models for political artistic practice. The invocation of “the workers” was also challenged: “Mention of the workers had driven a frantic Ivan Karp to the podium. Wringing his hands, he reminded the hotheads of what the construction men had done to the students only a week before. “Remember who your enemies really are,” he implored.61 In short, hard hats had gone, in the space of a few weeks, from idealized participants in artists’ efforts to democratize their practices to alignment with their enemies. Artists at the meeting ratified a motion about the efficacy of an art strike. They demanded that New York museums shut down on May 22, seeking to stop business as usual for one day as a gesture of protest against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Some museums and galleries agreed to close their doors. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which failed to do so, was picketed by a group of several hundred artists, led by Morris and Johnson, who acted as spokespeople for the event. At its peak, its ranks swelled to over five hundred artists who remained on the picket line for hours in defiance of the Metropolitan’s contrary decision to stay open late. Photos of the Art Strike, taken by Jan Van Raay, depict the steps of the Metropolitan Museum thick with protesting artists, their posters lined up like shields. With its unified look of monochromatic, text-only graphics—influenced by the pared-down aesthetics of conceptualism—it struck an observer that the Art Strike was “put into action like a new kind of ARTFORM.”62 Many of the images position Morris at the center of the event—pointing accusingly at the museum, for instance, or addressing the crowd and being handed a makeshift bullhorn as Johnson flanks him. In other photos, however, different characters are foregrounded. For instance, artist Art Coppedge raises a revolutionary fist as he stands next to assistant director Joseph Noble, whose suit and bitter expression mark him immediately as the “establishment” antagonist. Coppedge was an active member in the branch of the AWC that sought equal representation in museums for black and Puerto Rican artists, and his strident gesture is an active reminder that in fact the Art Strike put “racism” before “war” in its title. The strike’s confrontational attitude

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was not just with the museum power elite; as Therese Schwartz reported, “one smiling, amiable construction worker talked to two artists. He remained unconvinced, defended his prosperity and good job, saying that he wasn’t being persecuted. More construction workers who worked in the museum were allowed in, followed by the chant ‘construction workers, join us!’”63 This hopeful chant of solidarity was met with deaf ears; still, Carl Andre, in his worker’s coveralls, swept the stairs with satisfaction when the event was declared over, and the event was deemed a success. In fact, throughout this spring, strike sentiment among artists gained momentum. The International Cultural Revolutionary Forces (consisting of two long-time members of the Guerrilla Art Action Group, Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche, along with occasional others) took the notion of a strike quite literally, calling for “all artists to stop producing art, and become political and social activists.”64 Artist and critic Irving Petlin declared that artists should participate in the “waves of strikes, calls, interruptions, demands, non-cooperation, sabotage, resistance, by no business as usual anywhere.” He called on artists to “withhold their work, deny its use to a government anxious to signal to the world that it represents a civilized, culturally-centered society while melting babies in Vietnam. No.”65 While artists as image-makers took an active part in the battle of images being fought about the popularity of the war, many chose instead to stop showing their work. Jo Baer and Robert Mangold removed the works they had on view at the MoMA for the month of May to protest the Cambodia bombings; and Frank Stella closed his MoMA solo exhibition for the day of the Art Strike. Those taking part in the strike went under the assumption that aesthetic practices are productive and that their stoppage will interrupt the functions of economic life in some crucial way. As much as the strike was a rhetorical gesture, it was also meant to signal alliances with the conventional strikes as well as the student strikes that were energizing the antiwar movement. The Art Strike raised significant questions about the viability of the “art worker” identity, given that with art there is no consolidated employer, nor is there a factory line to halt. These questions had serious implications as artists sought the most effective means to enact reforms within their “work sites”—museums and galleries. Because it sought to dissuade visitors from entering art institutions, the Art Strike might more accurately be termed a boycott. Still, it drew on

the rhetoric of the general strike and the moratorium, which in their most radical forms went beyond protests of working conditions to gestures that sought nothing less than revolution. It might be tempting to read the Art Strike as the culmination of a conceptual strategy—the logical conclusion of Morris’s “dematerialization.” Such a reading ignores the political context—the labor revolt— within which the Art Strike and the closure of the Whitney show occurred. As part of the rising tide of strikes engulfing the nation, the Art Strike used the motif of work stoppage as a galvanizing practice to embrace a range of issues. If, in this sense, the Art Strike could be described as a conceptual performance, it was at the same time a performative act aimed at political intervention. Morris’s tactic of withholding his artistic labor by shutting down his Whitney show early could also be read as a form of aesthetic refusal much influenced by Marcuse’s theory of a “Great Refusal”—“the negation of the entire Establishment.”66 The Great Refusal, the possibility of imagining alternatives to the “massive exploitative power of corporate capitalism,”67 was most expansively outlined in Marcuse’s 1969 An Essay on Liberation, a book that was highly influential for the New York art left.68 In the late 1960s, Marcuse saw hopeful indications that this refusal was undermining mainstream society, especially in the widespread “collapse of work discipline, slowdown, spread of disobedience to rules and regulations, wildcat strikes, boycotts, sabotage, gratuitous acts of noncompliance.”69 Morris took his theory of artistic negation directly from Marcuse’s theories, as seen in the following statement made by Morris around 1970: “My first principle for political action, as well as art action, is denial and negation. One says no. It is enough at this point to begin by saying no.”70 In 1970, posters and antiwar art struck artists as less and less relevant, and withdrawal—a refusal to let things proceed as normal—took over as a popular protest strategy. As Lucy Lippard put it, “it’s how you give and withhold your art that is political.”71 But some criticized the Art Strike as flawed in design and motive and dismissed its calls for the withdrawal of art as ineffectual. In June 1970, a small group of art strikers, including Morris, met with senators Jacob Javits and Claiborne Pell of the Senate Subcommittee on Arts and Humanities in Washington, D.C., to discuss the ramifications of removing art from state-sponsored exhibitions. The senators were unmoved, and commented that if the strike

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had involved doctors or other types of workers deemed “necessary” for society to function, their withholding of their labor would be a different matter.72 Others saw the strike as a threat. Said John Hightower, then director of the MoMA, “The irony of conducting a strike against arts institutions is that it puts you in the same position of Hitler in the 30s and 40s, Stalin in the 50s.”73 Hardly: the Art Strike did not advocate the complete closing of all museums but, along with the AWC, pushed to make museums more widely accessible. Instead, as a letter back to Hightower emphasized, “You fail to understand the meaning of symbolic denial (closing the museum for ONE DAY!) which speaks to the actual denial of life by forces of violence.”74 The conditions for an art strike lasted only a few months, as they were embedded in the specific historical coincidence of the Vietnam War, the large-scale strikes around the country, and the activities of the AWC. As early as September 1970, postmortems for the Art Strike appeared in print: “feelings among Strike activists range from apathy to suspicion to disgust. The protest, if not destroyed, is dormant. What happened?”75 By November 1970, the Art Strike had splintered into several organizations; one of them, the Emergency Cultural Government, was an ad hoc group (including Morris) that lobbied artists to withdraw from the American Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale to protest U.S. military action in Vietnam and Cambodia.76 What had happened? The answer lies, in part, with the growing feminist movement and the defection of many women involved in the Art Strike to a group called Women Artists in Revolution. And, despite the attention paid to the word “racism” in the Art Strike, some artists of color felt that this was merely lip service.77 The Art Strike eventually was folded back into the AWC and its activities tapered off by the end of 1971, although it did help mobilize the museum staff as workers and was actively supportive of the union drive and strike of the Professional and Administrative Staff Association of the Museum of Modern Art (PASTA). In a further resignifying of the potent symbol of the hard hat, one protest poster from the 1971 PASTA MoMA strike appropriates the Rembrandt-school painting Man in a Golden Helmet. The subject of this canonical painting is made to speak, as a pasted-on word balloon saying “Strike” issues forth from his closed lips. Many of the strategies used by the strikers in their placards were art historically savvy, with a similarly

détourned Bruegel painting and the familiar image of Uncle Sam. Critically, the Rembrandt-era work, perhaps chosen because the helmet of the title is so prominent, is captioned “Even a few hard hats support PASTA MoMA,” making reference to the ostensibly conservative bluecollar workforce so politically contested just one year before. Every standard account of the closure of Morris’s Whitney show puts it within the context of the Art Strike. Was there, perhaps, another reason that Morris was so eager to shut down his Whitney show on May 15? In the aftermath of the hard-hat riots, construction was no longer a viable metaphor for the new relations between work, labor, and politics that Morris sought in 1970. The intense ideological contradictions that accompanied the yoking together of “art” and “workers” were made starkly, and uncomfortably, visible. The driving ideas behind the Whitney exhibition, with its ambitious, even wishful assertions of collaborative production, workers and artist working side by side, had soured. One writer described the following pervasive feeling in the wake of the hard-hat riots: “the masses, those cabdrivers, beauticians, steel-workers, ironworkers, and construction men so beautifully romanticized by generations of dreamy socialists, are really an ugly bunch of people.”78 After the riots, Morris commented in the New York Post, “museums are our campuses.”79 This assertion draws a parallel between student strikes and the art strike, solidifying the artists’ affinity with students rather than with blue-collar workers. In Morris’s Whitney show, the art is formally associated with the building trades, as are the myriad photographs that depict it as an active “construction site.” Underscoring that he was above all an art worker, Morris performed the position of the blue-collar forklift driver; such an identity proved drastically less alluring after blue-collar workers stormed down lower Manhattan waving flags and beating up students. Morris’s sudden involvement with the Art Strike struck some as careerist or opportunistic; stickers appeared in downtown New York that read “Robert Morris: Prince of Peace.”80 Critic Nemser scoffed, “greater sacrifice hath no man than to shut down his art show for his fellow man.”81 Although Morris was at the periphery of the AWC before the Art Strike, his involvement in the Art Strike and the Emergency Cultural Government constituted genuine efforts to come to terms with the ethics of art making and art display in the “museum system.” It also represented an attempt to find a new kind of political viability after his

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formal exercise at the Whitney turned into such a critical (and ideological) disappointment. Morris’s disillusionment with the possibility for cross-class affiliation paralleled that of the New Left’s in general, as the left embraced Marcuse’s belief that the working class was “counterrevolutionary.”82 The Whitney show, which was the residue of collaborative production with a team of dozens of workers, suddenly betrayed sympathies with the regressive politics, and Morris sought to remove it from view. Challenge and Risk

If the Whitney show was a failure, it is because the elements Morris wished to bring together were irreconcilable. Morris’s re-presentation of industrial objects and his desire to shift them from the realm of art to work led not only to a romanticized personal identification with working class labor, but also to culturally incoherent objects. While Morris wanted a show that would be sensitive to populist visions of artists and workers collectively forging new relationships, the version of labor he

Robert Morris, Untitled (Five Studies Using Steel Plates, Timbers, Granite, and Stones), 1969. Pencil on paper, 42 × 59 inches. © 2012 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

performed was fast obsolescing. The crude pulleys and weights do not necessarily speak to their moment—a moment that was rapidly undergoing major shifts—but in fact hark back to a previous time. Morris’s Whitney show does not even demonstrate a last gasp of industrial manufacture just as that version of construction becomes moot. As Michelson notes, these basics of construction date from Stonehenge and the pyramids. She quotes a crew worker’s astonished utterance upon witnessing the installation of Concrete, Timbers, Steel: “My God! This is like 2000 bc!”83 In his effort to forge an art from raw materials and construction crews, Morris displayed a profound nostalgia for the preindustrial (rather than postindustrial) mechanics of hard manual work. (This sentiment includes nostalgia for the lost masculinity of working-class manhood. In this, Morris is not alone; anxieties attendant to shifts in the conditions of production—and in times of war—are often displaced or refigured in sexualized terms.) The collapse of artists’ identification with workers after the hard-hat riots points to the misrecognitions inherent in trying to eradicate distinctions between art and labor.84 Morris’s 1970 Whitney exhibition— and its photos of strong-armed workers hauling heavy loads, their faces grimacing, their muscles straining—crystallized apprehensions facing the leftist U.S. art world about how to make art viable as a form of labor. Why, in so many of the shots of Morris in which he is supposedly one of the workers, is he puffing on a cigar, the very symbol of “bossness”? The fictive identification with labor that these works insist upon vacillates between the artist as foreman and the artist as “construction man.” It is critical that there are no photos of Morris actually wearing a hard hat during the installation of the 1970 Whitney show; it sits on his head spectrally, in the realm of psychic projection and fantasy. Despite a flurry of major press attention given the Whitney show in 1970, it has largely disappeared from Morris’s historical record.85 This erasure is striking. It discounts Morris’s most important (if problematic) effort to merge political purpose and artistic form, and it overlooks the pivotal role the exhibition took in Morris’s own development. After the Whitney and Tate shows, Morris abandoned postminimalism as he shifted away from nonfigurative process art. Thus Morris’s Whitney show produced a critical rupture within his practice; as Alex Potts has astutely theorized, the Whitney show constituted a “crisis … ending in a bleak rejection of almost everything [Morris] had seemed to stand for.”86

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Robert Morris consults his floor plan drawing, 1970. Photograph © Gianfranco Gorgoni/Contact Press Images.

The events of 1970 signaled a major shift in American artists’ ideas about the relation between art and labor; the AWC itself stayed together for only about a year after the Art Strike. The Art Strike is often referred to as a triumphant moment of artistic activism, but investigating the contradictions attendant to its most fervent period—May 1970—reveal the fractured and unsettled nature of the identity “art worker.” Notes

1.  There is some slippage between the terms “installer” and “fabricator” here: fabricators are usually the actual constructors (welders, molders) of art objects, but since these works were assemblages of unaltered raw materials, their “fabrication” became a matter of arrangement and placement. 2.  “Maximizing the Minimal,” Time (April 20, 1970), p. 54. 3.  Although the worker, Ed Giza, an employee of the art fabrication firm Lippincott, Inc., was rushed to the hospital, he suffered nothing more serious than bruising (interview with the author, November 2003). 4.  Morris, letter to Marcia Tucker, December 14, 1969, Robert Morris archive, Gardiner, New York (hereafter RMA). 5.  Morris, letter to Tucker, December 28, 1969, RMA. 6.  Marcia Tucker, Robert Morris (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970) presents an overview of Morris’s earlier work. 7.  See her interview with Sean H. Elwood, December 10, 1979, quoted in Elwood, “The New York Art Strike (A History, Assessment, and Speculation)” (Master’s thesis, City University of New York, 1982), p. 52. 8.  Dore Ashton, “New York Commentary,” Studio International 179, no. 903 (June 1970): 274. 9.  Grégoire Müller and Gianfranco Gorgoni, The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies (New York: Praeger, 1972). 10.  E. C. Goossen, “The Artist Speaks: Robert Morris,” Art in America 58, no. 5 (May/ June 1970): 108. 11.  Christopher Andreae, “Portrait of the Artist as a Construction Man,” Christian Science Monitor (May 6, 1970): 12. 12.  Typed draft of Morris’s wall text, RMA. 13.  Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 24–29; reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 33. 14.  Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968): 33–35; reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 46. Morris later distanced himself from this term, which was given to his article by Artforum editor Phil Leider. One comprehensive look at “antiform,” as well as of crucial notions of dematerialization, and revolution in sculpture at this time is provided by Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in the United States and Europe 1965–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Suzaan

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Boettger has also provided a helpful consideration of “antiform” vis-à-vis the Vietnam War and reactions against minimalism; Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 15.  Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” Artforum 8, no. 8 (April 1970): 62–66; reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily, p. 87. 16.  See Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 8 (May 1967): 29–31. In Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), Maurice Berger focuses on desublimation and libidinal repression; I expand on his account to make labor and class more central. I am also indebted to James Meyer’s book on minimalism that touches on the U.S. reception of Marcuse in the late 1960s, Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and to Richard J. Williams’s account in After Modern Sculpture (2000). 17.  Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 38. Marcuse is not entirely of one mind about the possibilities of art to create new modes of thinking and living. Charles Reitz labels the two major periods of Marcuse’s thinking on these matters as “Art-Against-Alienation” (1932–1972), and his subsequent phase as “ArtAs-Alienation,” a phase that started with the publication of Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972) and was consolidated in his The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). See Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). 18.  Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 91. 19.  Phone interview with the author, June 23, 2003. 20.  Letter to Michael Sylvester, dated January 19, 1971, Robert Morris file, Tate Gallery Archive, London. 21.  Annette Michelson, “Three Notes on an Exhibition as Work,” Artforum 8, no. 10 (June 1970): 61. 22.  Ibid., p. 64. 23.  Statement on poster insert, Michael Compton and David Sylvester, Robert Morris (London: Tate Gallery, 1971). 24.  Morris, “Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories (or Interruptions),” Art in America 77, no. 11 (November 1989): 144. 25.  See, e.g., John Perreault, “Union Made: Report on a Phenomenon,” Arts Magazine (March 1967): 26–31. 26.  See Robert Murray’s 1967 letter to Rose in her “Questions about Sculpture,” Rose papers, Smithsonian Institute Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (hereafter AAA). 27.  On Milgo and its clients, see John Lobell, “Developing Technologies for Sculpture,” Arts Magazine 45, no. 8 (June 1971): 27–29. 28.  Barbara Rose, “Blowup: The Problem of Scale in Sculpture,” Art in America 56, no. 4 (July/August 1968): 87. 29.  Ibid., p. 90. 30.  Interview with Lippincott by Hugh Marlais Davis, Artist and Fabricator (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1975), p. 40. 31.  Barbara Rose, “Shall We Have a Renaissance?,” Art in America 55, no. 2 (March/ April 1967): 35.

32.  See, e.g., Goossen, “The Artist Speaks,” p. 105. See also a more recent interview in which he summarizes his biography: “Up from the working class. Maniac for work. Work ethic. Workmanlike in the beginning …” Quoted in “Golden Memories: WJT Mitchell talks with Robert Morris,” Artforum 32, no. 8 (April 1994): 89. 33.  Glueck, “Process Art,” p. 26. 34.  Al Blanchard, “Bridge to the Art World,” Detroit Free Press, January 15, 1970, 8A, Detroit Institute of the Arts papers, AAA. 35.  Letter from Daniel Berg to Wagstaff, March 21, 1970, Wagstaff papers, AAA. 36.  Joshua B. Freeman, “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 ProWar Demonstrations,” Journal of Social History 26 (summer 1993): 725. 37.  Molly Martin, ed., Hard-Hatted Women: Stories of Struggle and Success in the Trades (Bay Press: Seattle, 1988). 38.  Homer Bigart, “War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers,” New York Times, May 9, 1970, p. 1. 39.  Ibid. 40.  This is maintained by Peter Levy, The New Left and Labor in the Sixties (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 41.  Richard Rogin, “Why the Construction Workers Holler, ‘U.S.A. All the Way!’ Joe Kelly Has Reached His Boiling Point,” New York Times Magazine, June 28, 1970, p. 179. 42.  For the classed nature of the draft, see Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 43.  Mike Lamsey, “Blue Collar Workers May Be Next to Strike,” Washington Post, April 5, 1970, p. 30. 44.  Patricia Cayo Sexton and Brendon Sexton, Blue Collars and Hard-Hats: The Working Class and the Future of American Politics (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 5. 45.  See Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s chapter on labor in Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 46.  Internal White House memo, HR Halderman to Charles Colson, May 1970, quoted in Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 447. 47.  Anonymous Nixon aide quoted in James M. Naughton, “U.S. to Tighten Surveillance of Radicals,” New York Times, April 12, 1970, p. 1. 48.  P. K. Edwards, Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 180. 49.  Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), p. 249. 50.  “Scorecard on Labor Trouble,” New York Times, April 5, 1970, p. 159. 51.  Nicholas von Hoffman, “A Real Bummer,” Washington Post, May 6, 1970, p. C1. 52.  Wells, The War Within, p. 429. 53.  Artists participating in Using Walls included Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Daniel Buren, Craig Kauffman, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Wiener. 54.  Unpublished press release, May 15, 1970, Protest file, Whitney Museum of American Art Archive, New York City, New York.

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55.  See Gerald M. Monroe, “Artists on the Barricades: The Militant Artists Union Treats with the New Deal,” Archives of American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (1978), pp. 20–23. 56.  Cindy Nemser, “Artists and the System: Far From Cambodia,” Village Voice, May 28, 1970, p. 64. 57.  Johnson, interview with the author, September 2002. For a blow-by-blow account of the New York Art Strike, see Elwood’s “The New York Art Strike”; Glueck, “Art Community Here Agrees on Plan to Fight War, Racism, and Oppression,” New York Times, May 19, 1970, p. 30; and Therese Schwartz and Bill Amidon, “On the Steps of the Met,” New York Element 2, no. 2 (June–July 1970): 3–4, 19–20. See also Julie Ault, “A Chronology of Selected Alternative Structures, Spaces, Artists’ Groups, and Organizations in New York City, 1965–1985,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002), pp. 17–78. 58.  Elizabeth C. Baker, “Pickets on Parnassus,” ArtNews 69, no. 5 (September 1970): 32. Morris, embracing figuration in the immediate aftermath of the Art Strike, made his “War Memorials” series of lithographs that same year, some of which he exhibited as protest posters—for instance, in Lucy Lippard’s Collage of Indignation II show at the New York Cultural Center in 1970. 59.  Corinne Robins, “The N.Y. Art Strike,” Arts Magazine 45, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 1970): 27–28. 60.  Nemser, “Far From Cambodia,” p. 21. 61.  Ibid., p. 64. 62.  Lil Picard, “Teach Art Action,” East Village Other 5, no. 29 (June 16, 1970): 11. Emphasis in original. 63.  Schwartz, “On the Steps of the Met,” p. 19. 64.  Flyer for the International Cultural Revolutionary Forces, dated May 31, 1970, Protests and Demonstrations file, MoMA archive. 65.  Irving Petlin, quoted in “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,” Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970): 35. 66.  Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 25. 67.  Ibid., p. vii. 68.  See Gregory Battcock’s “Marcuse and Anti-Art II,” Arts Magazine 44, no. 2 (November 1969): 20–22. 69.  Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 83. 70.  Robert Morris, notebook page circa 1970, RMA. 71.  Lucy Lippard, “The Art Worker’s Coalition: Not a History,” in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), p. 16. 72.  Barbara Rose, “The Lively Arts: Out of the Studios, On to the Barricades,” New York Magazine 3, no. 32 (August 10, 1970): 54–57. 73.  Typewritten statement by John B. Hightower, May 22, 1970. Art Strike File, MoMA archive. 74.  Typewritten letter to Hightower from the Art Strike, May 25, 1970. Art Strike File, MoMA archive. 75.  Baker, “Pickets on Parnassus,” p. 32.

76.  Glueck, “Artists to Withdraw Work at the Biennale,” New York Times, June 6, 1970, p. 27. 77.  Michele Wallace wrote a scathing letter claiming that the Art Strike was a racist action that had nothing to do with real battles for inclusion and diversity within the art world: “Black art workers denounce art strike … as a racist organization which is designed to project SUPERSTAR ANTI-HUMAN ARTISTS.” See typed letter, June 14, 1970, RMA. She asked, what does it mean to demand the withdrawal of all artistic labor when, as a disenfranchised person of color, that labor has never been valued in the first place? Wallace and others formed a splinter group, Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, to address these issues; Wallace, “Reading 1968: The Great American Whitewash,” Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 1990), p. 195. 78.  Pete Hamill, quoted in Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 14. 79.  Quoted in Ralph Blumenfeld, “Daily Closeup: Show Mustn’t Go On,” New York Post, June 4, 1970, p. 37. 80.  This is recounted by Lippard in A Different War: Vietnam in Art (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1990), p. 53. 81.  Nemser, “Far from Cambodia,” pp. 20–21. 82.  Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 8. 83.  Michelson, “Three Notes,” p. 64. 84.  The accident that hurt the worker and hence ended the public component of the Whitney show is telling. The specter of bodily harm summoned by this injury—as well as those that have occurred during the installing of Richard Serra’s pieces—raises troubling questions about artists inhabiting the position of the “worker,” as they are most often removed or distanced from the bodily danger posed by the manipulation of equipment and heavy materials. 85.  For instance, the exhibit is nowhere mentioned in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1994). This absence is noted by Pepe Karmel in his 1995 interview with the artist, “Robert Morris: Formal Disclosures,” Art in America 88, no. 6 (June 1995): 88–95, 117, 119. 86.  Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 251.  

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Index

Althusser, Louis, 135–136 Andre, Carl, 83, 116–117, 120, 125, 196 Antin, David, 169 Antoni, Janine, 129 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 61 Argentina, La (Antonia Mercé y Luque), 35 Asher, Michael, 130 Augustine, Saint, 16 Ayer, A. J., 65–66, 175n36 Backer, Otto, 190 Baer, Jo, 196 Bakunin, Mikhail, 175n33 Banham, Rayner, 170, 171 Barthes, Roland, 167 Beckett, Samuel, 66–67, 71, 74–76, 78, 83–84, 87–88, 91, 95, 102, 106 Benglis, Lynda, 133 Berger, Maurice, 83, 143, 169, 183, 204n16 Beuys, Joseph, 129 Boettger, Suzaan, 203–204n14 Brancusi, Constantin, 25, 26, 41, 42, 91 Braque, Georges, 38 Brecht, George, 63 Brett, Guy, 170 Broodthaers, Marcel, 130 Buchloh, Benjamin, 106n5 Buren, Daniel, 119–120, 130

Cage, John, 10, 17–18, 60, 81, 139–147 Canaday, John, 112 Caro, Anthony, 16, 25, 55 Carter, Elliott, 17 Castelli, Leo, 156, 164, 167 Cézanne, Paul, 91 Childs, Lucinda, 134, 171 Compton, Michael, 157, 159, 160, 168 Copland, Aaron, 17 Coppedge, Art, 195 Crooti, Suzanne, 33 Cunningham, Merce, 35, 60, 81 Darboven, Hanna, 132 Duchamp, Marcel, 17, 18, 29, 31–34, 51–52, 55–56, 61–62, 67, 71, 80–83, 106n5, 106n6, 125–128, 140, 146–147, 157, 159 Ehrenberg, Ilya, 45 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 144, 153, 164–167 Eiblmayr, Silvia, 122 Eisenstein, Sergei, 46 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 18, 19 Export, Valie, 122

160,

Ferguson, Bruce W., 167 Flavin, Dan, 116–117, 119–121, 124–125 Forti, Simone (Simone Whitman), 1, 35, 55–56, 60, 77, 161

210

Foss, Lukas, 17 Foster, Hal, 143, 147n2 Foucault, Michel, 135, 147 Fraser, Andrea, 130 Freeman, Joshua, 190 Freud, Lucien, 114, 116 Freud, Sigmund, 104, 158 Fried, Michael, 124 Gabo, Naum, 43 Geist, Sidney, 42–43 Gide, André, 46–47n2 Glass, Philip, 78 Goossen, E. C., 145 Gorgoni, Gianfranco, 179, 181 Greenberg, Clement, 25–26, 55, 99, 159 Haacke, Hans, 119, 130 Habermas, Jürgen, 127 Halprin, Ann, 140 Hamilton, Richard, 166 Hay, Deborah, 35 Hendricks, Jon, 196 Hesse, Eva, 131 Higgins, Dick, 63 Hightower, John, 198 Hulme, T. E., 12–14, 39 Huot, Robert, 123 Husserl, Edmund, 38, 39 Hutchinson, Bob, 190 Javits, Jacob, 197–198 Johns, Jasper, 29, 52, 78, 80–81, 107n11, 125–126 Johnson, Philip, 64 Johnson, Poppy, 194, 195 Judd, Donald, 14, 47n9, 78, 84–85, 89–91, 93, 96, 112–113, 116–117, 120–121, 124–125 Kandinsky, Wassily, 8 Kant, Immanuel, 107n25 Kaprow, Allan, 137–139, 143, 145, 146 Karp, Ivan, 195 Kelly, Mary, 128 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 45–46 Klein, Yves, 88 Kolbowski, Silvia, 127, 130 Koons, Jeff, 128

Index

Kosuth, Joseph, 133, 134 Krauss, Rosalind, 142, 174n19 Kubler, George, 91 Kubota, Shigeko, 129 Kuhn, Thomas, 172, 175n36 La Argentina (Antonia Mercé y Luque), 35 Lacan, Jacques, 129, 131 Laing, R. D., 175n33 Lawler, Louise, 127 Lebel, Robert, 33, 48n31 Le Gac, Jean, 127, 135 Leonardo da Vinci, 23, 38 Levine, Sherrie, 127 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 174n15 LeWitt, Sol, 90–91, 102, 121 Lippard, Lucy, 164, 197 Lippincott, Donald, 183, 186 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 170–171 Lude, Andrew, 3 Maciunas, George, 62–63 Malevich, Kazimir, 8, 38, 44 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 9, 46n2 Manet, Edouard, 77, 171 Mangold, Robert, 196 Marcuse, Herbert, 143, 170, 175n33, 183, 197, 200, 204n17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 103–104 Meyer, James, 204n16 Michelson, Annette, 81–83, 85, 140, 142, 184, 201 Mondrian, Piet, 8 Murray, Robert, 186, 188 Muybridge, Eadweard, 4 Nagel, Thomas, 68 Namuth, Hans, 146 Nemser, Cindy, 195, 199 Neville, Richard, 170, 175n33 Newman, Barnett, 186, 187 Nixon, Richard, 158, 192 Noble, Joseph, 195 Noland, Kenneth, 14, 16 O’Doherty, Brian, 112 Oldenburg, Claes, 97, 186 Olitski, Jules, 16, 124

Panofsky, Erwin, 76 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 166 Paxton, Steve, 35 Peckham, Morse, 160 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 7, 15, 37, 164 Pell, Claiborne, 197–198 Petlin, Irving, 196 Picasso, Pablo, 43 Pollock, Jackson, 96–97, 99, 146, 160, 167 Potts, Alex, 201 Poussin, Nicolas, 91 Punin, Nikolai, 44–45 Rainer, Yvonne, 35, 52, 77, 82, 117, 132, 134, 161, 171 Rauschenberg, Robert, 84–85 Ray, May, 34 Reid, Norman, 168 Reitz, Charles, 204n17 Rembrandt van Rijn, 198–199 Richter, Gerhard, 122, 125–127 Riley, Bridget, 166 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 107n11 Rodchenko, Alexander, 43, 45 Rorty, Richard, 107n25 Rose, Barbara, 14, 81–83, 86, 107n11, 186 Rot, Diter, 129

Tatlin, Vladimir, 43–46 Tatresco, George, 41 Tobey, Mark, 146 Toche, Jean, 196 Tretiakov, Sergei, 46 Trotsky, Leon, 45 Tucker, Marcia, 159, 178–179 Tzanck, Daniel, 33 Valéry, Paul, 35 Van Raay, Jan, 195 Vasarely, Victor, 89 Wagner, Richard, 17–18 Wallace, Michele, 207n77 Warhol, Andy, 61–62 Wells, Tom, 193 Whitman, Simone. See Forti, Simone (Simone Whitman) Wilke, Hannah, 122, 132 Williams, Richard J., 203–204n14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 77, 86, 107n11, 160, 161, 166, 167, 175n36 Young, La Monte, 27, 63

Sandler, Irving, 114 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 160 Schneemann, Carolee, 5, 122, 134, 171 Schwartz, Therese, 196 Serra, Richard, 207n84 Shepherd, Michael, 154 Sherman, Cindy, 127, 128 Shklovsky, Viktor, 45 Smith, David, 16, 25, 26, 55, 62 Smith, Kiki, 132 Smith, Roberta, 112–113, 121 Smithson, Robert, 93, 101–102, 104, 121, 124, 137–138, 143, 144, 166 Sollers, Philippe, 19 Stella, Frank, 14, 196 Stravinsky, Igor, 17 Sylvester, David, 153, 156–157, 168, 171

Index

211