Chapter four – the making of the artist
The list of “ sub-Morrisanian art,” as Ratcliff once said, is endless. On the other hand,
Morris has himself been influenced by the works of Donatello and Brancusi, as we have seen above. His art also contains references drawn from works by (among others) Leonardo, Michelangelo, Goya, Cezanne, Rodin, Duchamp, as well as Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns, and Chinese art. Morris in fact frequently talks about this wide range of influences and inspirations, as well as his childhood experiences that often appear in his work.
Robert Morris was born in
Kansas City,
Missouri, on Februart 9,1931. aThe nearby state of
Kansas, with its flat expansive countryside, left its mark on Morris. In an interview with Paul Cummings, Morris talks about how impressed he was by the landscape of
Kansas:
I often went to
Kansas. My father was in the livestock business and he would take trips out to
Kansas a lot. And I would go with him sometimes. And that kind of scale and stretch of landscape was, I think, a pretty important image. It’s extremely flat. Some places it just is absolutely flat in every direction. You can see for miles and miles.
This is indeed an important image, which perhaps serves to set the stage for Morris’s investigations into both the horizontality of space and infinity in his works, so apparent in his Grand Rapids Project, dating from 1974, and Untitled (Portland Mirrors), from 1977.
While enrolled at the
University of
Kansas city, Morris was simultaneously attending art classes at the Kansas city Art Institute. Interestingly, although he studied art, as a young college student he was actually preparing for an athletic career. He aspired to be a professional baseball player at the time. Instead, he became one of the most important artists of our day.
Morris also studied art at the
California school of fine arts, then philosophy and psychology at reed college between 1952-1954, before moving to
New York in 1961. his interest in philosophy is well known. He often refers to ,quotes from, or includes in his art thoughts and ideas expressed previously by philosophers and thinkers such as Freud, Wittgenstein, Marcuse, Foucault and Davidson. One should also bear in mind that Existentialism was influential in the 1950s and ‘60s, when Morris’s ideas were forming. Kierkegaard (whom Kaufmann considers “the first existentialist”), in particular, fostered “the concept of dread’ (a feeling that does not derive from an objective threat but rather from no definite object), while Martin Heidegger “defined the authentic life as one that sets itself on the path to death.
The five graphic works Morris created for the Gori Collection between 1993-1995 are all concerned with the theme of the labyrinth and the idea of truth and death. Writing about these pieces, Morris turns to Thales of Miletus, Plata, Nietzsche, and Donald Davidson. Like Morris they all deal with “the idea of a human soul attaining trust”:
Truth has been central to philosophy since Thales of MIletus asserted in the sixth century B.C. that “everything is water.” That this was false has less significance than that it was the first answer to the ontological question which sprang from observation and reason rather than from appealing to mythical narrative. Truth for the American philosopher Donald Davidson is primitive, transparent and explanatory of nothing yet central to his theory of meaning.
Of course, there is a centuries-old tradition among artists in all fields throughout the world to imitate, incorporate, or adapt in their art, thoughts and ideas of thinkers philosophers and other artists (past and present). A single work, like Brancusi’s The wisdom o the Earth (1908,
Bucharest, National Museum of Art),can demonstrate a wide variety of influences, from Husserl’s ideas (phenomenological reduction) to Cycladic .Egyptian and Romanian art, as well as the works of Paul Gauguin. The symmetry of the statue’s form suggests an influence from archaic Greek sculpture, it compression and rectilinearity from Egyptian carvings, and its rear view and position of the arms from Cycladic art. For some scholars the position of the seated woman and her proportions link her to Gauguins Breton Eve (1889,
San Antonio ,
Texas,
Marion
Koogler
McNay
Art museum), whereas for others she is purely Romanian in inspiration, relating to the immemorial figure “peasant wisdom” of that country. However, Morris’s work (like Brancusi’s and others) does not actually derive from such a range of influences in any significant sense. As Picasso himself stated of his own relation to African art when painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907,”The African sculptures that hang almost everywhere in my studio are more witnesses than model.
Much of Morris’s work, especially during the 1960s, reflects Duchampian ideas. But what is perhaps most significant here is not whether pieces like his box with the sound of it own making. Litanies and statement of esthetic withdrawal bring to mind Duchamp or not (the reference is direct and obvious), but rather the use he made of this source of inspiration. In an essay that originally appeared in Art in
America in 1981,Morris notes that
Certainly the notion of a conscious strategy and tactics in art making derives from Duchamp and was perhaps more important in the long run than any particular move made by any one artist for changing the parameters of art making in the 1960s. throughout the 1970s, Acconci, Oppenheim, Haacke, Baldessari, Anycock, myself, and others developed works, especially installations, which drew on transformations, skewed systems, metaphysics. Language machinery, and metaphor of all sorts. None of this could have existed without Duchamp’s detonation of the static, self-sufficient aesthetic object as the limit for art making.
Morris’s box with the sound of its own making of 1961 is a cube made from walnut containing a tape recording of all the sounds produced during the three hours it took to construct the box. The work obviously pays homage to Duchamp’s with a Hidden Noise,1916, in which a ball of twine (pressed between two square brass plates that are held in place by four long bolts)contains a small unknown object that makes a noise when the whole piece is shaken.
But there is an important difference between the two objects, besides the fact that Morris’s is not a “readymade” but was entirely fabricated by himself. Unlike Duchamp’s, Morris’s work does not merely deal with a “secret,” the idea of hiding. Morris’s box with the sound of its own making manifests the experience of process: sounds of sawing, hammering, sanding ; and time: duration of object making. In other words, it deals with time in relationship to the object. In an interview in 1972 Morris explains:
I had stopped painting. There was too great a discrepancy between the activity and the image…I made the box in ’61 and I was still in the box was working out those very problems that I couldn’t solve in painting. It put back behavior into the work by actually splitting apart and using those sounds and real tine, but at the time, but at the time I didn’t think that.
Box with the sound of its own making is one of Morris’ earliest work in which the idea of dualism in inherent. The conflict between revealed and concealed elements (visual and aural)is evident here in an extraordinary way.
The confrontational juxtaposition of image and sound that one experiences in box with the sound of its own making gave rise to another, different kind of contrast in Litanies, 1963. It is the confrontational juxtaposition of image and language. Litanies is Morris’ first lead relief. From a thin lead-covered box with a lock hang twenty-seven keys on a steeel key ring;on each key is stamped a work from Duchamp’s green box (a collection of notes,”Litanies of the Chariot,” that Duchamp made while working on the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, Even).
In his first solo exhibition at the green gallery, Litanies was avquired by the architect Philip Johnson. However, when Johnson delayed payment for the work, Morris responded to the oversight with statement of esthetic withdrawal, 1963, a legal document notarized by the state and county of New York in November 15, 1963 that “withdraws the aesthetic value” of Litanies. The document, which is juxtaposed with frontal and profile views of Litanies etched into lead, says:
The undersigned, Robert Morris, being the maker of the metal construction entitled Litanies, described in the annexed exhibit A, hereby withdraws from said construction all aesthetic quality and content and declares that from the date hereof said construction has no such quality and content.
In other words, Morris uses language itself as an art medium. Disguised within the legalized jargon of statement of Esthetic withdrawal seems to be a statement which is the very antithesis of Duchamp’s bold claim that “it is art if I say so,”the very seed idea that transformed a “readymade object” into a work of art and turned the art world upside down, leaving it forever changed. With his statement of Esthetic withdrawal Morris brings Duchamp’s argument full circle, declaring that the artist’s denial can just as easily reverse that process.
Statement of Esthetic withdrawal is testimony to the power of the word, even when it functions as an image. Furthermore, as berger noted,” Morris’s work not only challenges conventional notions of ownership and authenticity but also affirms his waning belief in the artist’s (and the art object’s) magical powers.” Morris here confronts the viewer by shaking up his smug confidence in the conventional wisdom of acquisition and ownership, one of the very “rule” and “standards” that sustain orderliness in our lives. The result is that he forces us to question the way we see things as “reality,” ”truth” or “fact,” not only as they pertain to the physical space around us, but also, in the case of Litanies, as they concern some of our established and accepted societal norms.
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