Golden memories - interview with scupltor Robert Morris - Interview

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

"Do you want to be remembered as a creator of images?" My Schema M: at the apex of a triangle, the object; in the lower-left-hand corner, the self; in the third, lower-right-hand corner, the other. Following Davidson, language flows along the baseline between self and other. A second, inverted triangle above shares the object as its lower point; in the upper-left-hand corner, the text; in the upper-right corner, the image. In the lower triangle, it could be said that a philosophically realist version of the world is delivered by force of the antisubjectivist epistemology that flows along the baseline. Shall we, with a dotted, perhaps unconscious line, connect the other and the image at bottom and top on the right, and on the left, tie a social and symbolic line between self and text? (Continuing to play here, we could superimpose some shadowy third triangle, the Oedipal, at the appropriate register.)

As you pointed out when I first laid this diagram on you, all the corners can be permuted. But I leave it as it is, for now--even though the "image" corner wants to occupy the central point, causing a permutation of all the others. The image exerts pressure on the center, moves toward it out of its inertial mass, and will, eventually, migrate there. We know that in the future, image will triumph in its imperialistic conquest of the center. But for now: objects are what we make, images are what is done to us.

WJTM: The problem that initially brought us together was our mutual interest in the relation of art and language, visual experience and words. Shall we talk about this? This is where you get to interview me.

RM: I'm still interested in the old paragone, and still inspired by your work on the subject. I'm also interested in Davidson's work on language and radical interpretation. In his essay "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," Davidson looks at the interpretation of malapropisms and other misspoken expressions on the basis of "passing theories of meaning." Such passing theories supersede the "first meanings" with which the interpreter begins, for those meanings require a theory that is (a) systematic, (b) shared, and (c) prepared by conventions, while the interpretation of malapropisms involves us in a situation where interpreter and speaker do not share a language "governed by rules or conventions." The passing theories of meaning that come into play in such a situation are derived by "wit, luck and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar," and there is no "chance of regularizing, or teaching this process." Davidson concludes that "there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed." He seems to imply that we do not have an adequate concept of language--that as it now stands, "language" is another reification. Linguists and philosophers have not sufficiently taken account of the art necessary to communication.

Yet we are beings who have our passing theories of truth by which we understand one another, more or less. And we continuously make and interpret assertions, which are all produced by moving the body--by moving our mouths, to disturb the air, or our hands, marking surfaces. The questions I would put to you would be along the following lines: (a) given our obsessive activity as assertive/interpretive beings, could we theorize that what separates "art" (the term is another reification) from the rest of things is a "delay," a holding back of closure in the formulation of a theory of truth, an allowance for the play of repression to emerge, via transforming phantasy, within and beside the task of interpretation? The esthetic does seem to involve (partly) intellectual puzzlements, contradiction and paradox received as pleasure rather than problems, together with somatic sensory pleasure--all bubbling up in the permissive space of the delay, during which theories of truth are held in abeyance. Here not only Eros but loss, pain, guilt, and Thanatos are tolerated as pleasures--as if for a brief moment the dualistic and contradictory economy of the unconscious were permitted acknowledgment and affirmation. (b) These reifications--art and text, poetry and philosophy, etc.--appear distinct and categorical only when seen from the point of view of medium. From the interpretive point of view, they appear as a continuum, mediated by the demands of the varying interpretive speeds that yield theories of truth (instantaneously in the case of everyday speech, delayed in that of literature or art). If we try to set them aside, could we arrive at a theory that would account for that slow passage of metaphor into truth, not to mention having knocked a few rough edges off the old paragone? WJTM: I'm intrigued by the idea that art might be thought of as a sanctioned "delay" in the insistence on truth--is this so far from the old saw "The poet nothing affirmeth," or from John Cage's deadpan insistence that he had nothing to say and was saying it? But a "delay" suggests resumption after an interval. Why not call it, rather, a cancelation of the demand for truth? Otherwise you'll have to tell me what happens to the artwork when the delay is over. Does it then pass from metaphor back into truth--i.e., into prose, philosophy, assertion, objecthood? Or are you thinking of some indeterminate delay, in which a metaphor (or a work of art) might become literal, closed, assertive within a theory of truth, but then, for unpredictable reasons--a new interpretation or historical context, perhaps--might enter a new delay? I also wonder whether it's possible to reformulate this relation more positively, not just as a delay in a theory of truth, but as a switch-over to some other picture of theory, in which truth, assertion, and interpretation would be minor issues. Would all of this only bring us back to Kant and "the esthetic"? Does it make sense to speak of "passing theories of beauty"?