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

Art in America, June, 1995 by Pepe Karmel

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

The work of Robert Morris was presented last spring in a massive retrospective that opened at the uptown and downtown branches of the Guggenheim Museum; it was recently at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and opens in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in July. His work serves as a crucial touchstone for our understanding of the art of the last 30 years. Morris was a key 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 on Sculpture") did much to shape the critical consensus which continues to dominate our understanding of these movements today.

Both in his criticism and in his art, Morris has repeatedly insisted on 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 volumes such as the "Columns" and the" L-beams." These rectangular forms were justified not as the expression of a personal vision but as examples of the cultural "syntax" of industrial production. When Morris's sculpture changed course, with the felt works and other anti-form pieces he began making in 1967, he continued to justify his work in the terms of impersonal factors such as gravity, viscosity and other elements of the productive process. His announced intention was to reveal not the soul 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 out a set of formal instructions without being able to see what he or she was doing: tactile perception had to substitute for visual. While the results were conspicuously handmade, they neatly avoided reveaung the traditional "hand of the artist."[2] In the 1980s, 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 seems to correspond to the argument advanced by Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay "The Death of the Author" that "it is language which speaks, not the author," and that a text, or a work of art, is never anything more than a "tissue of quotations" from previous works.[3] The critical understanding of Morris's work has mostly hewed to this impersonal reading of art as a kind of meta-commentary on 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," but the transgression in question was phenomenological rather than personal (the sculptures transgressed on the viewer's space). In Rosalind Krauss's 1977 Passages in Modern 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 "crumbles before the act of connecting to other selves and other minds." Writing in the 1986 catalogue Robert Morris: Works of the Eighties, the late Edward Fry discussed the artist's work as a response to "the Kantian problem of the mind thinking itself" and the contradictions of "secularized Calvinism." Similarly, the catalogue of the current 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 sculptures had been "free of anthropomorphic significance," Rateliff reinterpreted them as "human images imprisoned in catatonic reductivism." Ratcliff concluded that Morris was "an expressionist in bondage, a confessional artist condemned 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 Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories (or Interruptions)," a remarkable text in which dense passages of high theory alternated with colloquial reminiscences of the artist's childhood and youth.[5]

Several months before this appeared, I had organized a retrospective of Morris's felt works at the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center in New York. In the course of planning the exhibition with Morris, I began to feel that--as Rateliff had suggested--there was a much stronger personal element in his work than he or his critics had usually acknowledged. Morris's choice of materials, and sometimes even his deployment of them, seemed to have been influenced by personal experiences and associations which had never been discussed in the critical literature on 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.