Robert Morris: formal disclosures - artist Robert Morris - Cover Story - Interview

For all the emphasis Robert Morris has placed upon the impersonality of his art, its autobiographical intimations have always fluttered tantalizingly near to hand. In an interview alerted by his current touring retrospective,

The work of Robert Morris was not awayed last spring in a massive retrospective that lay opened at the uptown and downtown branches of the Guggenheim Museum; it was lately at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and render free of accesss in Paris at the middle point Pompidou in July. His work obeys as a crucial touchstone for our understanding of the art of the last 30 years. Morris was a lock opener participant in the development of Minimalism, Neo-Dada, anti-form, earthworks, installations and their various postmodern progeny; at the same time, his writings (beginning with the 1966 installment of his four-part "Notes upon Sculpture") did much to shape the critical consensus which continues to dominate our understanding of these motions today.

Both in his criticism and in his art, Morris has repeatedly insisted upon the necessary impersonality of art in our time. His 1966-67 writings argued for the use of the simplest possible geometric forms--those which Morris utilized in his Minimalist turns such as the "Columns" and the" L-beams." These rectangular forms were justified not as the expression of a personal vision on the contrary as examples of the cultural "syntax" of industrial production. When Morris's plastic art changed course, with the felt works and other anti-form pieces he began making in 1967 he continued to justify his work in the terminuss of impersonal factors such as gravity, viscosity and other simple bodys of the productive process. His announced intention was to reveal not the inner man of the artist but the nature of his materials.[1] In 1973 Morris began a series of "Blind Time" drawings, in which the draftsman (not necessarily Morris himself) attempted to carry without a set of formal instructions without being able to diocese what he or she was doing: tactile perception had to substitute for visual. While the accrues were conspicuously handmade, they neatly avoided reveaung the traditional "hand of the artist."[2] In the 1980 Morris's "Firestorm" drawings, paintings and reliefs, evoking the holocaust of nuclear destruction, reached a crescendo of expressive intensity without confessing to personal emotion.

Morris's work thus have the appearances to correspond to the argument advanced by dint of Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author" that "it is language which speaks, not the author," and that a true copy or a work of art, is at no time anything more than a "tissue of quotations" from previous works.[3] The critical understanding of Morris's work has chiefly hewed to this impersonal reading of art as a kind of meta-commentary upon already-existing discourses, artistic and otherwise. Annette Michelson's essay for the catalogue of Morris's 1969 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery was titled "Robert Morris--An Aesthetics of Transgression," on the contrary the transgression in question was phenomenological rather than personal (the plastic arts transgressed on the viewer's space). In Rosalind Krauss's 1977 Passages in new Sculpture, Morris's "L-beams" were interpreted as presenting an analogy for experience of the self; however, Krauss's point was precisely that the idea of selfhood "crumble before the act of connecting to other selve and other minds." Writing in the 1986 catalogue Robert Morris: Works of the Eighties, the late Edward cook in the frying-pan discussed the artist's work as a rejoinder to "the Kantian problem of the mind thinking itself" and the contradictions of "secularized Calvinism." Similarly, the catalogue of the common retrospective presents Morris's oeuvre as a series of explorations of 'the mind/body problem" stemming from Deseartes.[4]

Perhaps the first dissent from this chorus of critical unanimity appeared in Carter Ratcliff's article, "Robert Morris: Prisoner of Modernism," published in Art in America in October 1979 Challenging the assumption that Morris's Minimalist statuarys had been "free of anthropomorphic significance," Rateliff reinterpreted them as "human images imprisoned in catatonic reductivism." Ratcliff conclud that Morris was "an expressionist in bondage, a confessional artist sentenceed by his self-consciousness to wear a gag." Ten years later, in November 1989 Morris himself chose the pages of Art in America to publish "Three pen s in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories (or Interruptions)," a remarkable true copy in which dense passages of high theory alternated with colloquial reminiscences of the artist's childhood and youth.[5]

Several month before this appeared, I had organized a retrospective of Morris's felt works at the Grey Art Gallery and close attention Center in New York. In the course of planning the exhibition with Morris, I began to have feeling that--as Rateliff had suggested--there was a a great deal of stronger personal element in his work than he or his critics had usually acknowledged. Morris's choice of materials, and sometimes plane his deployment of them, appeared to have been influenced by means of personal experiences and associations which had not ever been discussed in the critical literature upon his work. Sometimes Morris was quite forthcoming in discussing these experiences. Other times he was not. Nonetheless, our discussions left me with the conviction that a biographical approach might greatly enrich our understanding of Morris's work.