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Seth Kim-Cohen Sculpture in the Reduced Field: Robert Morris and Minimalism Beyond Phenomenology An artist’s first solo museum show is no place to start. Such a show almost always functions as confirmation of a consensus already arrived at – if not always complete. But Robert Morris presents an unusual case in that his production changed so frequently and considerably from the beginning of the 1960s, when he began to exhibit, to the end of the decade, when he had his first solo museum shows. The first of these, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from November 24 to December 28, 1969 (then at the Detroit Institute of Arts from January 8 to February 8, 1970), represented a fidgety retrospective, including both existing and new works. And, while the Corcoran show was not the first opportunity to critically assess Morris’s oeuvre – he had already exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad – the exhibition catalogue included an ambitious essay by Annette Michelson that, in many ways, set the agenda for the subsequent critical reception of Morris. Theoretically, Michelson situates the course of Morris’s artistic journey between the twin stars of Charles Sanders Peirce and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and what she sees as their common concern for perception. In Merleau-Ponty, this preoccupation is clear enough. His phenomenology is predicated on what he called ‘the primacy of perception.’ To assign a similar perspective to Peirce takes a little more doing, but Michelson identifies a Peircean perceptualism in his notion of ‘epistemological firstness.’ This critical perspective was picked up and endorsed by Maurice Berger in his book-length study, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s, published in 1989. Thus this phenomenological reading of Morris’s sixties production maintained its currency for more than two decades. Every aspect of that experience [‘confronting sculptures such as those by Robert Morris’s] – the ‘reduction’ on which it is posited, its reflexiveness, the manner in which it illuminates the nature of our feeling and knowing through an object, a spatial situation, suggests an aesthetic analogy to the posture and method of phenomenological inquiry, as it is familiar to us in the tradition of contemporary philosophy.1 In Husserlian phenomenology, the apprehension of that which appears to us in our perception is a singular and simple act. Michelson’s account equates this Husserlian procedure with Peirce’s idea of ‘firstness.’ But, in fact, for Peirce, the phenomenal encounter is necessarily more complex. At the very least, it includes the components he describes as ‘firstness’ and ‘secondness,’ and a thorough account of Peirce’s phenomenology would necessarily include ‘thirdness’ as well. A close look at Peirce’s ‘phaneroscopy,’ – his term for what has come to be known as phenomenology – exposes Michelson’s reading as incomplete; not so much a misreading, as an under-reading. She equates firstness with presentness. But for Peirce firstness is a matter of qualities which exist not in the object, not in the subject, but as potential attributes of objects and of their perception by subjects. ‘Remember,’ Peirce writes, ‘that every description of it must be false to it.’2 Firstness is related both to idealism and to something like Chomskyan universal grammar: qualities, as Peirce describes them, are slots waiting to be filled by particular potentials. ‘A quality is a mere abstract potentiality,’ and it is an error to hold that, ‘the potential, or possible, is nothing but what the actual makes it to be.’3 On the other hand, secondness in Peirce is a matter of fact; of actuality. It is possible to think secondness as more closely related to that which phenomenology seeks. 2 We find secondness in occurrence, because an occurrence is something whose existence consists in our knocking up against it. A hard fact is of the same sort; that is to say, it is something which is there, and which I cannot think away, but am forced to acknowledge as an object […] The idea of second must be reckoned as an easy one to comprehend. That of first is so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it; but that of second if eminently hard and tangible.4 But it if one wants to leverage Peirce in the way Michelson does, then a fuller account of both firstness and secondness seems warranted. And a very good argument can be made for applying Peirce’s notion of thirdness to Morris. Peirce says that, although firstness and secondness ‘satisfy the mind for a very long time,’ eventually, ‘they are found inadequate and the Third is the conception which is then called for.’5 Thirdness is the bridge that connects the first to the second, potential to actuality, ideality to reality. Thought this way, thirdness sounds a lot like Kierkegaard’s description of consciousness: If ideality and reality in all naïveté communicated with one another, consciousness would never emerge, for consciousness emerges precisely through the collision, just as it presupposes the collision. Immediately there is no collision, but mediately it is present.6 Consciousness is collision. Consciousness is mediation. Thirdness is mediation. To approach it by way of a different metaphor, thirdness is the solution in which both the first and the second are suspended, the solution which allows them to constitute, and be constituted by, thought, experience, and what Peirce refers to as ‘every state of the universe at a measurable point of time.’7 Put simply, thirdness is relation. At various points, Peirce characterizes as thirds: process, moderation, sympathy (‘that by which I feel my neighbors feelings’), signs, representations, generality, infinity, continuity, diffusion, growth, intelligence, dynamics. Thirdness itself is relative, always a product, an effect; and at the same time, a stimulus, a provocation and a facilitation of the first and the second. 3 There is no absolute third, for the third is of its own nature relative, and this is what we are always thinking, even when we aim at the first or second.8 So, even an encounter with firstness is – due to its nature as encounter – an encounter with thirdness. This is not to suggest that Michelson’s readings of Peirce and Morris should be jettisoned completely. For one thing, her insight into the theological nature of the notion of presence is invaluable. She rightly sees Modernism, too, as partaking of – or wishing to partake of – this theological presentness. Michelson displays great critical instincts in attempting to read Morris vis-à-vis Peirce. But she doesn’t take the interaction between the two, between Peirce’s theory and Morris’s praxis, far enough. The entirety of Morris’s output of the 1960s constitutes a powerful investigation and advocacy of the primacy of thirdness (if that is not oxymoronic); of process, of relation, of encounter, in the gallery arts. Michelson claims that the effect of Morris’s work in the 1960s, was to ‘renew the terms in which we understand and reflect upon the modalities of making and perceiving.’ Morris achieved this renewal by ‘[d]eveloping, sustaining a focus upon the irreducibly concrete qualities of sensory experience.’9 This suggests an effect on thirdness through a manipulation of firstness. And while Peircean phenomenology, would allow for such an effect, Michelson’s emphasis on the senses, on the concrete, on firstness, seems misplaced. It might be more illuminating to focus on the active form of the gerunds ‘making’ and ‘perceiving,’ on the relations inherent in these activities between artist, material, and convention, on the one hand, and between beholder and what Morris called the ‘situation,’ on the other. In other words, Morris’s 1960s output might best be considered in terms of thirdness. It is easier to think in the mode of firstness when considering the work with which Morris is most associated: the gray-painted plywood, steel mesh, fiberglass, and mirrored polyhedrons he made between 1961 and 1968. These sculptures 4 (supported by a series of essays Morris published in Artforum, under the title, ‘Notes on Sculpture’ parts 1 – 4) aligned him with the burgeoning movement of sculptural minimalism. Michelson was, of course, parsing Morris at the same time she was coming to grips with the meaning and importance of minimalism, judging the work as it was happening without the benefit of critical hindsight. Her perspective helped to forge the consensus on Morris and minimalism. Not only is Morris now accepted as a bonafide high-minimalist, but phenomenology is also regularly employed as the critical crowbar for cracking open his oeuvre and the truths of the movement. This holds even for Maurice Berger, whose book represents an explicit attempt to recuperate Morris’s politics from his formalist reception. Morris’s phenomenological games hoped that the relationship between the art object and the viewer might be more or less democratic – free of the social and cultural hierarchies of art world institutions such as the museum.10 What Berger is indicating is a revision of the structure of aesthetic relations (thirdness), removing the museum from the position of principle power and replacing it with more egalitarian interactions. Berger’s concerns throughout the book have little to do with phenomenology – in Michelson’s sense of Peircean firstness. Accordingly, for Berger, he does not write strictly of phenomenology, but of ‘phenomenological games,’ and, elsewhere, of a ‘phenomenological imperative’ necessitated not by a loyalty to Peirce or Merleau-Ponty, but by a commitment to ‘Herbert Marcuse’s radical concepts of freedom and desublimation.’11 In retrospect, it seems useful to think Morris through the Peircean notions of thirdness and relation, aligning his sixties work not so much with Donald Judd and Tony Smith (with whom he has often been compared and grouped), but with John Cage, conceptualism, performance, and relational aesthetics. 5 As early as 1961 – well before his unitary forms – Morris had tested the boundaries of sculpture. His Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making, expands its ‘situation’ and relationships in time, at least as much as it tests them in space. The Box, as its name suggests is a walnut box, nine and three quarters inches in each dimension. The box contains a small speaker which plays a three hour audio tape of a recording of the sounds of the box being constructed by Morris. The history of Box includes two notable events. It debuted, so to speak, as a kind of musical performance at a concert organized in 1961 by Henry Flynt at Harvard which also included works by La Monte Young and Richard Maxfield. That same year, Box was also the focus of a private audience with John Cage, who came to see it in Morris’s apartment and apparently sat through the entire three-hour recording.12 The expanded situation in which Cage would have found himself would have been one in which he, the spectator, would shuttle back and forth in time, between the time of viewing/listening and the time of making. This is a situation in which ‘the object is but one of the terms in the newer esthetic.’13 For Morris, it is important that the viewer be ‘more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from varying positions and under varying conditions.’14 In the case of Box, these varying positions would be positions in time, rather than space; moving between conditions of production versus reception. Past and present, making and perceiving, become conflated in experience. This situation would seem to parallel Husserl’s notion of phenomenological ‘adumbration,’ in which an object is perceived from multiple perspectives, yet understood – precisely because of the constancy of certain features – to be one and the same object with a set of essential qualities. However, this parallel is limited by disjunctions between spatial and temporal perspective. In Husserl’s adumbration, the subject must change position relative to the object. Whereas in the kind of time-based adumbration initiated by Morris’s Box, the shift in perspective is a product of the inexorable movement of time. Neither the subject nor the object must act upon intention; neither must move or shift. With Box, Morris discovers that sound 6 recommends itself as an ideal medium for such temporal adumbration. Sound initiates its own non-intentional, perspective-neutral, shifts in the relation of subject to object. Because sound is immersive, it inevitably creates an environment (a ‘situation’) that is simultaneously and irredeemably a product of an interaction between spectator/auditor and object/sound-source: a perfect medium for Peircean thirdness. Children cupping their hands over their ears or tilting their heads against sea shells attest to our instinctive awareness of sound’s interactional nature and of our ability to effect it. The series of letters Morris exchanged with John Cage between 1960 and 1963 testify to Morris’s explicit interest in Cage’s aesthetics.15 But even without such evidence, it would be easy to connect the dots. As an alternative to Greenbergian specificity, Cage sought to blur boundaries between music, theatre, installation, dance, painting, and poetry. Morris’s Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making is both the sound of a sculpture and a sculpture of sound. It is a very early – if not the earliest – example of a sound sculpture; of a work existing simultaneously, equally, as sculpture and as sound work. As such, it also provides the earliest example of how such heteromedial work might constitute its ontology. Similarly heteromedial, Morris’s ‘Blank Form,’ is a manifesto-as-artwork (or vice versa) from 1961, originally conceived for inclusion in La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low’s, An Anthology of Chance Operations Concept Art Anti-Art Indeterminacy Improvisation Meaningless Work Natural Disasters Plans of Action Stories Diagrams Music Poetry Essays Dance Construction Mathematics Compositions.16 (Morris, disenchanted with the burgeoning Fluxus movement – with which Young, Mac Low, and consequently An Anthology, were associated – pulled his contributions from An Anthology before publication.17) ‘Blank Form’ is a text piece: both a set of instructions for making something and something that has been made. In this sense it functions like the text scores and works being produced by Fluxus-associated artists, and others, around the same time. In its manifesto mode, ‘Blank Form’ agrees, in large part, with the attitude voiced six years later in ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 2.’ 7 So long as the form (in the broadest possible sense: situation) is not reduced beyond perception, so long as it perpetuates and upholds itself as being objects in the subject’s field of perception, the subject reacts to it in many particular ways when I call it art. He reacts in other ways when I do not call it art. Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness as art.18 In addition to its agreement with Morris’s later ideas on the expanded situation of the circumstances of artistic encounter, ‘Blank Form’ also exhibits some of the same recursivity evident in Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Both works are simultaneously the product of a process, the documentation of that process, and a set of instructions for the replication of that process. Both might be seen as an example of what might be called, retrospective composition, in which the act of composition follows the act of performance (which is, itself, an act of protoreception). In Box the ‘score’ for the sound material of the work is only available (constructable) after the performance/production of the box. This conundrum is produced by the intrinsically problematic nature of the idea of a score. The investigation of this problem, initiated by Cage, reveals the implicit a posteriori ontology of the score, which must always follow from some material realization of itself (even if that realization is immaterially located in the mind’s ear of the composer). The score as a founding document of re-creation, has no stable temporal status. It is both precedent and antecedent of realization. The score always arrives after the fact, to dictate the fact. The ostensible, unwritten, score for Box (something like: ‘record the sound of building a walnut box and play the recording back from inside the box’) is indeterminate relative to the material realization of the project. The score generates unpredictable material results which – taken for sound, or in Cage’s expanded sense, for music – seem to demand their own score. In concretizing the specific values of the resulting sound (pitch, duration, dynamics, placement in time, etc.) a secondary score would negate the fundamental ontology of the 8 piece, which is not a generator of specifically-organized sounds, but a box which contains the sound of its construction. Such a secondary score would, in fact, be revealed as merely a recording, and any performance following such a score would be revealed as an act of mimicry; of ‘covering’ – in the musical sense – the original. Performing a score, on the other hand, is not seen as an act of covering an original, but of reanimating inert matter. Each act of performing a score is seen as a new – if second order – act of creation. Cage implies what Morris’s Box makes explicit: the score is never simply an initiation, but always also an iteration. This is yet another aspect of the mythic nature of originality, deconstructed so thoroughly by Rosalind Krauss.19 The musical heritage of repertoire is highly unoriginal. Which is to say, it is, like all other modes of artistic production, a process of assimilation, reflection, and correction; of response to, and commentary on, the cultural, political, and aesthetic currents of the times and places in which it is produced and received. It would seem easier to think in the mode of thirdness about a piece like Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making than about a piece like Column, both from 1961. Column is a rectangular plywood column, painted grey, eight feet by two feet by two feet, and seems to have more to do with Morris’s so-called minimalist works. Both Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making and Column are, at first glance, geometric sculptural forms made of wood. Considered visually, they diverge at the level of surface or finish. Box is unpainted, its seams undisguised, the screws of its construction clearly visible. Column, on the other hand, is painted and finished to hide its seams and screws. Box is apparently handmade, Column appears manufactured. At another level – one we might call experiential – Box obviously differs from Column due to the audio recording playing from within its geometry. But the experiential status of Column is more complicated than a photograph is able to convey. The first exhibition of the piece took place as part of a concert organized by LaMonte Young at the Living Theater in New York on 5 February 1962. The sculpture was assigned a seven-minute performance slot in the program of the evening’s activities. Column started off standing vertically on 9 the stage. After three-and-a-half minutes, Morris, positioned offstage, toppled it with a string, bringing the sculpture to a horizontal position, where it lay for the remaining three-and-a-half minutes. As Berger has noted, Column engages much more than form and phenomenological percept. The notion of temporality and passage would contribute to the dissolution of formalism’s romance with idealized form and time. In the end, Morris’s metaphoric toppling of the pillars of late Modernism announced an important shift within the American cultural scene as the art object appeared to be dissolving into a field of choreographic gestures.20 As it turns out, Column, a seemingly straightforward geometric sculpture, engages thirdness in very explicit ways, introducing performativity, experiential duration, physical movement, temporal form, memory and anticipation, into the sculptural encounter. Echoing Michelson’s keyword, Berger cites these introductions as ‘transgressions’ of sculptural Modernism. From a different aesthetic/ideological position, Michael Fried would agree, referring to these transgressions as ‘theatrical’ and fretting over their implications. Michelson’s assessment of Morris is an attempt to dissuade Fried of his concerns. She argues that Morris maintains a relationship with formalism predicated on an engagement with ‘epistemological firstness’ – a term which could be translated into Greenbergian terminology, as something like ‘material specificity’ or, at a basic level, simply as ‘formalism.’ Fried’s worries are about thirdness. Theatricality is, most certainly, an example of thirdness. Michelson argues, against Morris’s theatricality and for a firstness which would, ironically – given her emphasis on transgression – bring Morris back into the Greenbergian/Friedian fold. 10