Golden memories - interview with scupltor Robert Morris - Interview

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

Mass culture: the Guggenheim is making a scarf with a "Labyrinth" drawing on it, as well as that T-shirt. That's two relationships to mass culture right there.

Classics? I restored a 1955 Porsche Speedster. Now that's a classic.

WJTM: What's your favorite color? Astrological sign? Do you use cosmetics?

RM: I thought once that gray was my favorite color. Aquarius. I don't use cosmetics, but ever since my daughter, at the age of five, asked "Daddy, why don't you buy some more white hair?," I've thought, longingly, of wearing a luxuriant wig.

WJTM: What difference would it make if the figure in I-Box was a woman? What about the role of sex and gender in your art? In your life?

RM: Maybe a woman would have to make another letter than an "I" with her body. Sex and sexuality have often shown up in the art; gender has been fairly straight, though I once wore a regal gown in one of Jill Johnston's '60s performances.

WJTM: What letter might be left for the female artist? O and S seem obvious candidates, but they display an obvious lexical lack. Do you have a photograph of yourself in that regal gown?

RM: I do not want to speak for women, or for what they might or might not want to do with their bodies. Perhaps an unprinted negative of R. M. curtsying in that regal gown lies buried somewhere in the archive of the late Peter Moore, tireless documentarian of marginal '60s performance art.

WJTM: Please explain the relationship between art and politics in 25 words or less. Do you feel that your art used to be more political, say in the '60s? How do you think the political conditions of art have changed during your career?

RM: If the essence of the political is the coercion of the other, by covert or overt means, to do one's will, then art always fails. (Twenty-five words exactly.) I was more political in the late '60s, but my art probably wasn't. During those years I was arrested with a classy crowd that included Dr. Spock and Noam Chomsky. I don't understand the phrase "political conditions of art."

WJTM: Darn, I was hoping you'd make sense of it for me. The Guggenheim is a notoriously problematic space for showing art. Your work is notoriously space-dependent; how do you feel it looks in Wright's building?

RM: I had dreaded the building, and was prepared to bate working in it. I thought the work would look terrible on the ramps without horizontal or plumb references. But when I got into the spaces, and began to feel them with my body, they felt good. Once I started installing I had no problem with Frank Lloyd Wright. I began to go down the ramps without lifting my feet--sort of skating along, with one hand sliding down the parapet. I would sit in smaller alcoves and look around at all the soft curves coming at me, or peer over the parapet and see all those curving walls below sweep into a tangent point just under me. I began to think of the place as the great "Ma" building, the great female space. I wondered what it would be like to lick the curve of the parapet wall all the way down. That I regarded the space as generous and female and that I had the privilege to put something in it is, I suppose, a rather specific gender response.