Golden memories - interview with scupltor Robert Morris - Interview

ArtForum, April, 1994 by W.J.T. Mitchell

W.J.T. MITCHELL TALKS WITH ROBERT MORRIS

I taped an interview with Robert Morris a few hours before the February opening of his current retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. We sat on the floor in the Tower Gallery, where some of his earliest objects were displayed--Slab, Frame, and Corner, all from the early '60s. Mercifully, most of this conversation turned out to be inaudible on the tape. Instead, we offer here an edited sequence of the faxed exchanges that occurred in the days just before an after the opening.

W.J.T. MITCHELL: Let's pretend this is your 15 minutes and I'll ask you some celebrity questions. How do you feel about your success? Has it been a burden? What's it like to be retrospected by one of the great institutions of Modern art--do you feel humble, proud, exploited, anxious? About what? What is your view of that venerable artistic institution known as Fame?

ROBERT MORRIS: What I like doing is making art, and sometimes writing about it. What I detest is "being an artist" insofar as it connects with the celebrity question. As to that "venerable institution known as Fame," isn't it just one of those answers we grasp at in the face of our inevitable deaths?

WJTM: I know you hate interviews, but please explain why. Why did you decide to let me interview you? What is an interview anyway? Could an interview be a work of art--an inter/view, inner/between scene/look? How shall we play this interview, you as Ignatz the Mouse and me as Offisah Pup?

RM: I hate interviews because, (a) if verbalizing about the work, I would rather write; (b) they're part of the being-an-artist game; (c) they're performances pretending to be conversations; and (d) I occasionally read the art magazines and can't help wondering if this interview will be as depressing as what I usually find. Why did I agree to this? Because sometimes I find it hard to say no. This interview might become an artwork if we worked on it long enough--revised, rewrote, added, subtracted, etc. I'd like to play it by generating material at this first go-round and seeing where it leads--defining it "unfinished" for a while, throwing it into the mode of writing. I'll do nearly anything to avoid talking about myself or the work--except talking with you about the many things you and I talk about when there's no media apparatus plaguing us, talks I think you know I value.

WJTM: What are the protocols of the interview? Can I ask about your failures, the work you no longer like, or think was wasted? Can I ask about other artists? Current artists? Artists whose work you admire, or despise? What do you think of contemporary political art?

RM: The protocols should be mutually agreed upon. I don't generally segregate my efforts into successes and failures; sometimes things are abandoned, and once in a while they return in other forms, media, etc. I have little to say about other artists and I fail to keep up much with what's current. I have no thoughts on contemporary political art.

I admire any number of artists of the past; the only one I vaguely despise is Picasso. As to influence, Marcel Duchamp is obvious. Less obvious perhaps was my first wife, Simone Forti, who set the agenda for the Judson group--rule games, task performances, the use of objects to generate movement, the use of text in performance. Yves Klein was an early force for me in his use of the body to make marks, his strategy of performance as artmaking, his easy movement between a space of emptiness or monochrome unity and an emphasis on the body, his use of text and of the elements of air, fire, and water, and his rejection of the notion of art as media bound.

WJTM: How is "History" a factor in your art--i.e., world-historical events like the Cuban missile crisis or the Vietnam War, or eras like the cold war or the post-cold war period? Do you feel that your art indirectly narrates some historical sequence in American culture? What sorts of histories have you felt responsible to, and what sorts of art history? A related question: what about memory? Some of your pieces seem designed mainly to show the dissolution of memory, its dispersal into enigmatic fragments of a "whole" that was itself already an assemblage of fragments now forgotten. Do you want your images to be memorable? Do you want to be remembered as a creator of images? How do you want to be remembered, how historicized?

RM: I responded in my aRT to the moments that you mention; whether those responses add up to a narrative seems doubtful. I haven't felt responsible but in some cases responsive. I've been interested in memory and forgetting, fragments and wholes, theories and biographies, disasters and absurdities, and drawing but not dancing in the dark. As for memorable images, one I consider a total failure and mistake, the 1974 poster of myself with chains and a Nazi helmet, seems destined for a Guggenheim T-shirt.

What about memory? I can remember so many different reactions to various works, some of them varying wildly over the years. I could discuss this phenomenon in terms of theoretical notions about interpretation: how art permits relatively sustained periods of puzzlement and deferred responses--"delays"--in terms of "truth." But I want to open up the subject of memory as the subjectivity of memory, as the genealogy and/or etiology of certain feelings. (Wittgenstein: "On the other hand one might, perhaps, speak of a feeling 'Long, long ago,' for there is a tone, a gesture, which goes with certain narratives of past times.") And here we enter a tangled, murky zone where phantasy and images, desire and loss, and wit and guilt reside. Joseph Brodsky once said something to the effect that one of his strongest visual memories was of sitting on a wooden porch in Russia at the age of five, looking out at a muddy road, and wearing green rubber boots: "Maybe I'm still there," he said.