First-Person Authority

It should come as no surprise to those familiar with the artist Robert Morris that the title of his new collection of work and writings, Have I Reasons, invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: "Have I reasons? The answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons" (65). Wittgenstein, after all, was a major point of reference in Morris's first collection of writings, Continuous Project Altered Daily (1993), as the theorist who spoke most directly to Morris's concern with the suppression of the linguistic dimension of art by modernist criticism. Morris transforms the "I" of Wittgenstein's interrogation into the declarative of the book's title, implicitly offering the authority of first-person narrative and to promise "reasons" behind the Morris oeuvre. Wittgenstein is joined in this second volume by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Donald Davidson; the latter's linguistic philosophy is addressed directly by two essays, and his influence is felt in several others. This interest in the theoretical underpinnings of language is also no surprise; Morris has consistently been one of the most well read, articulate, and intensely self-conscious artists in the last one hundred years, and as Tsouti-Schillinger argues in the introduction, "any complete analysis and assessment of Morris's total artistic contribution would prove inadequate without consideration and inclusion of his copious writings." What is surprising is the powerful presence of the words of others in these pages, and not only from the recurring voices of his favorite theorists. Morris repeats pet quotations throughout the book (Elizabeth Bishop's remark that the twentieth century was "the worst so far" appears in at least three essays) as well as numerous epigrams, block quotes, and intersectional quotations. This idiosyncrasy crescendos in his essay for the National Gallery's recent Jasper Johns retrospective, which carries a list of citations to rival any academic article.

For those in search of the artist himself, the opening account of Morris's childhood in Kansas City, "Indiana Street," seems to offer just the tidbits of artistic origin that typically fill artists' biographies. Describing the physical terrain of Indiana Street, for instance, Morris writes, "It was with secret pleasure that I squeezed my body between the pole and the side of the garages, making my passage usually at dusk. Although unnamed, and perhaps unnamable, such spaces, of which there were many around the neighborhood, took on a special character. I would usually visit each once a week" (22). Under the sway of such evocative images, what art historian can resist picturing Robert Morris squeezed inside of Passageway, the narrow semicircular channel of painted plywood he installed in the entrance to Yoko Ono's loft in 1961? And who can help finding the many faces of Morris's career prefigured in the characters that populate his memory? The Morris who would grow up to dance with Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti of "youthful strength and delight in physical grace of movements" (29) seems already personified in the neighborhood ice delivery man. The wraithlike Turtle Bill trolls the streets in a cart full of rags and scrap iron that prefigures Morris dressed in rags for his performance of War (1963). Morris's late references to autism are presaged by the mentally handicapped boy, who "with the inertia of what the others termed his 'simpleness,' seemed to have dropped through the insulation of their linguistic repressions to move against some clammy, sexual membrane that pulsed hidden and unmentioned just below the surface of those lives on Indiana Street" (28). But what binds together the myriad phenomenological, socioeconomic, political and sexual awakenings related in this opening gambit is the trusted voice and coherent identity of Morris the Author.

In the two essays that follow "Indiana Street," Morris uses his knowledge of linguistics to reflect on the role of the artist in the writing of his own history as well as the role of reason in artistic...