Getting the Picture: Donald Davidson on Robert Morris's Blind Time Drawings IV (Drawing with Davidson)

Donald Davidson is of course supremely well known for his contributions to several areas of philosophy, particularly the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. Perhaps less renowned are a cluster of articles that deal with topics that do not seem to fall directly within the purview of the analytic philosopher. Here the very unusual (and for the analytic philosopher somewhat unexpected) collaboration with Robert Morris published in Critical Inquiry comes readily to mind. ¹

Davidson's essay on Morris presents the outline of a philosophical account of the act of artistic production that deserves closer scrutiny than it has received to date. I shall look at Davidson's account and then present my own version of what is possibly going on in Morris's blind paintings, bearing in mind the context supplied by Davidson's writings, including those that deal with subjects that do not bear directly on these paintings. My primary concern will be with perception and visual fields and, perhaps more centrally for my argument, touch and its connection with bodily awareness and spatiality. Davidson tends in his commentary on Morris to overlook these (for me) two essential features of any plausible treatment of the phenomenon of painting blind. I shall also try to do something that modesty prevents Davidson from doing, namely, to see what Morris might want to accomplish by resorting to this philosopher's formulations in the course of executing the Blind Time Drawings IV (Drawing with Davidson). This necessarily will be a somewhat speculative and hit-or-miss undertaking, especially when the studied elusiveness of Morris's own response to Davidson's commentary is borne in mind.

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In his essay on the Blind Time Drawings IV, Davidson begins by saying that he is a bit puzzled as to why Morris should want to include excerpts from his writings in these pictures—pictures that belong to a series that Morris, painting blindfolded, has returned to in a number of cycles since 1973 (the second series was made in 1976, the third in 1985, and the fourth in 1991). Davidson, while professing mild bemusement at the artist's likely motives, nonetheless makes a serious attempt to characterize, in terms of his own formulations, the very evident philosophical dimensions of Morris's Blind Paintings IV: the artist, by inscribing excerpts from Davidson's writings in the drawings as their legends, is clearly trying, through the more or less orchestrated enactments that constitute picture making, to exemplify some of Davidson's substantive positions on intention, agency, representation, metaphor, mental causation, psychological states, and so forth. Morris, in other words, uses his blind drawings to find ways to depict the structure of the act of picture making and employs Davidson's philosophical positions to develop what is in effect a metatheory of painting that he will incorporate into the structure of the Blind Time Drawings. ²

This kind of depiction, which is not simply a by-product of painting with one's eyes shut (though that is necessary for its accomplishment), is not usually attempted, and this not for any specifically technical or practical reasons. After all, the centrality of the act of picture making for any remotely cogent account of painting as performance is typically acknowledged by historians and theorists of art, often in the proverbial blink of an eye. But this act is almost always viewed by these historians or theorists in terms of the exercise of a particular kind of mastery, characteristically involving the deployment of a repertoire of skills, and treatments of the act of painting tend invariably to focus on this mastery and the analysis of its accompanying dispositions, as well as on how these dispositions manifest themselves in the making of a picture. Given this emphasis, there is an inevitable tendency for these writers to...