Robert Morris: Tactility and its Discontents

Robert Morris' Blind Time drawings include a small, handwritten colophon explaining the procedure followed in making the drawing. The colophon is the generative kernel; the graphite marks are the indexical traces of the actions it describes. To experience the work as a whole, the view must imagine the extended process of translating words into marks with closed eyes.

You might consider the Blind Time drawings as an ironic restaging of Harold Rosenberg's 1952 essay "The American Action Painters." Describing the recent work of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Rosenberg wrote that: "The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him." Rosenberg's emphasis was on the spontaneous give and take between the artist and the composition coming into being on canvas. Morris experienced this give and take in the late 1950s, when he was painting in an abstract expressionist style. After moving to New York in 1961, however, he abandoned painting in favor of the construction of enigmatic objects. Some of these objects - the large, geometric boxes painted light gray- became defining statements of Minimalism.

These were formal similarities between Morris' objects and the contemporary box-like sculptures of Donald Judd: a shared insistence on symmetry and repetition. But the similarities concealed profoundly divergent intentions. Judd aimed for a kind of Platonic perfection in his sculptures. In contrast, for Morris, the object was less important in itself than as a stimulus to a heightened awareness of the process of perception. "The better new work," he wrote, "takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision." Confronted with a nondescript gray cube, viewers would immediately recognize that it was a cube - and then, more slowly, become aware of its relationship to the surrounding room, notice the play of light and shade across its surfaces, and perceive its changing appearance when viewed from different angles and different distances. Instantaneous apprehension was replaced by an extended experience of discovery.

For Morris, this temporality of perception was inherently tragic. As new aspects of the object came into view, other aspects were lost. The pure cube remained a concept, not something that the viewer could perceive. This tragic sense was also evident in Morris' neo-Dada objects, which typically proposed an ideal only to demonstrate its failure. (Three metal rulers, hanging side by side, are each marked to indicate a span of 36 inches; but the rulers are all different lengths.)

In his Blind Time drawings, Morris transfers temporality and failure from finished object to working process. The instructions for one drawing (fig. 1) read:

With the eyes closed and using rubbing below and discrete strokes above as the two methods for marking elapsed time, the right hand begins below at the left and rubs towards the right, attempting to increase the pressure in proportion to the distance from the left - increased pressure being thought of as an analogue of increasing numerical value for the estimated lapsed time. Meanwhile int he above area the left hand attempts to make 5 counting strokes per second. The colophon concludes: "Time estimated: 60". Error: 0".

The result is two irregular gray bars, one floating over the other like the sun and earth of one of Adolph Gottlieb's Imaginary Landscapes.

In the upper bar, the counting strokes made by the left hand are dark, vertical, and discrete, counting off increments of time. They grow taller and shorter, in no apparent pattern. Despite Morris' announced intention of making five strokes per second, there seem to be around sixty strokes in all: one per second, not five.

In the lower bar, Morris' right hand has left a series of semi-circular smudges. These are in fact two adjacent series of marks, one seemingly made by his forefinger, the other made by his thumb.

The first smudged marks, at left, are small and widely spaced; then they grow larger and closer together. Rather than steadily increasing pressure, as he intended, Morris seems to have picked up speed. The furious cloud terminates in a diaphanous burst of gray.

Looking at the drawing, the viewer imagines the challenge of making two different kinds of marks at the same time, like a drummer beating out 4/4 time with one hand and 3/4 time with the other. Morris' failure to achieve some of his original goals - to make five strokes per second, to use pressure as an analogue for elapsed time - becomes part of the work's meaning, acknowledging the inevitability of failure.

This tragic awareness is even more evident in another drawing from the series (fig. 2). Here, Morris sets himself a different challenge:

With graphite on the hands, the eyes closed, and estimating a lapsed time of one minute, both hands attempt to tape the page to the wall so that the top and bottom edges are level. Later, two red lines are drawn at true level.

Anyone who has hung a picture on a wall is familiar with the frustration embodied in Morris' drawing. Standing a few inches from the wall, trying to gauge whether the picture is level, you are forced to rely on the kinesthetic information from your raised hands. This invariably turns out to be misleading. (Perhaps this is because most people are either right-handed or left-handed; our two hands respond differently to weight or stress, so that their sensations are incommensurable.) Trying to judge with eyes closed exacerbates the problem.

The crisply drawn red lines at the top and bottom of Morris' drawing, descending sharply from left to right, quantify exactly how far his kinesthetic determination of "level" differed from reality. The frustration of the process is conveyed by the graphite traces of the artist's fingertips, palpating the borders of the sheet and rising up like clawing hands form the lower left and right corners. The frustration also seems to have thrown off Morris' sense of duration, as the colophon concludes: "Time estimation error: +7 seconds."

If the Blind Time drawings express Morris' fatalistic (and sometimes dyspeptic) view of life, they also speak to fundamental questions about how we know the world. In his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke rejects Plato's contention that we are born with innate ideas corresponding to the true forms of objects. Rather, Locke argues, all knowledge is built on sensory experience. Within the realm of experience, it is tactile sensation that directly communicates information about objects. Visual sensation provides only indirect knowledge; the newborn infant must learn to translate the mutable play of light and shadow into information about the fixed qualities of bodies and objects.

Locke's ideas played a foundational role in art history. Bernard Berenson, in his influential 1907 book The Florentine Painters, wrote that:

"Psychology has ascertained that sight alone gives us no accurate sense of the third dimension. In our infancy, long before we are conscious of the process, the sense of touch, helped on by muscular sensations of movement, teaches us to appreciate depth, the third dimension, both in objects and in space... Later, we entirely forget the connection, although it remains true that every time our eyes recognize reality, we are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile values to retinal impressions."

Berenson used this theory of "tactile values" to explain the greatness of Giotto, whose seemingly crude shading "conveyed a keener sense of reality, of lifelikeness than the objects themselves!"

From Vincent Van Gogh to Willem de Kooning, modern artists in the expressionist tradition detached tactility from the task of representation, making it into a quality of the paint surface rather than a quality of the bodies and objects in the painting. The Blind Time drawings pose an even more profound challenge to Locke's theory of perception. Morris demonstrates that touch, deprived of guidance of sight, becomes a radically undependable guide to the world around us. It is sight that allows us to discern the shapes of bodies and objects and their positions in space. Reversing Berenson's account, the blind learn to use touch to compensate for the absence of light. However, a sighted person, deprived of guidance of sight, gropes hesitantly for landmarks in a suddenly unfamiliar terrain. Morris' Blind Time drawings evoke the panic and exhilaration of finding oneself in this alternative universe, co-existing invisibly with the one we think we know.