Golden memories - interview with scupltor Robert Morris - Interview

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

Memory reads off fragments seen out of context. I leave fragments that will be read out of context: it was an investigation, there were accidents; desire and fear, loss and memory, repetition and abandonment, theory, speculation, and doubt all accompanied the enterprise. These and the perpetual question, the whispered conundrum, that has followed me since childhood: why is there something instead of nothing? Over and over again the mark gathers itself as a kind of membrane over absence. Movements of the body, the only movements there are, mark this membrane. Again and again the approach to touch its surface, to press, to rub, to mark. What are inscribed there are the signs of passing. These fall away into fragments, runes that stand in for the body that moved. If we are beings obsessed with asserting and interpreting, moving and signing, there is something undeniably agonistic about the game. Memory is delay. Memory is a fragment. Memory is of the body that passed. Memory is the trace of a wave goodbye made with a slightly clenched fist. Memory is politics. Memory is a loss. Memory is hunger.

Do I feel that my art narrates "some historical sequence in American culture?" Does narrative retrieve the fragment? Does interpretation come in the form of narrative? Do our movements form a narrative? Shall we descend to some form of Kantian epistemology, some sort of empiricist assumption of a given, the narrative grid, intervening between mind and world? If Fredric Jameson does this, should we? Then, like Jameson, should we delight in the contradiction of privileging space over time, excusing ourselves by appealing to the zeitgeist? You have gone to some trouble to dismantle such drivel.

". . . Some historical sequence in American culture?" Me and American culture. Up from the working class. Maniac for work. Work ethic. Workmanlike in the beginning--make a slab, make a column. Straightforward. Work alone with simple tools. Only what the unaided body can achieve with inexpensive materials. Watch time--"Time is money," they said, or "Time is all you've got." How long does it take to make a walnut box 9 3/4 inches on a side?

"History": terra moto. A shuddering of earth and memory. "What sort of histories have you felt responsible to?" If this is being asked of the artmaking, the answer is: none. Whose history is to be called "History"? Once I said that every history was someone's propaganda. (But do I remember this correctly? In what context did I say it? Do I begin to lose a grip on my own "history"?) Does memory form a history? How is a narrative obtained from its fragments? How do we identify whose memories form a history? What about the incomprehensible that has happened in our time--do we now know, for example, the real history of Albania? Add that to all the other events that we can hardly bear to remember but can't succeed in forgetting. There are too many corpses to count.

Stalin once remarked that the death of one man was a tragedy, the death of a million a statistic. I once quoted Beckett's Watt: "I am of the little world not the big world." Don't we wish. I made a work in memory of Alan Buchsbaum, one of several friends who have died of AIDS. The work was not a response to the "history" of this plague, not a historical response: the death of a single man, not the statistic. Pretending as hard as I can to be of the "little world."