Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to ...

OCTOBER made as the mere displacement of traditional modes of artistic production by anew aesthetic of the speech act ("this is a work of art if I say so"). And in markeddistinction from the Conceptualists' subsequent exclusive focus on the unassistedreadymades, Morris had, from the late 1950s when he discovered Duchamp,been particularly engaged with work such as Three Standard Stoppages and theNotes for the Large Glass (The Green Box).Morris's production from the early 1960s, in particular works like Card File(1962),Metered Bulb (1963),I-Box (1963), Litanies, and the Statement of AestheticWithdrawal, also entitled Document (1963), indicated a reading of Duchamp thatclearly went beyond Johns's, leading towards a structural and semiotic definitionof the functions of the readymade. As Morris described it retrospectively in his1970 essay "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making":There is a binary swing between the arbitrary and the nonarbitrary or"motivated" which is . . . an historical, evolutionary, or diachronicfeature of language's development and change. Language is not plasticart but both are forms of human behavior and the structures of onecan be compared to the structures of the other.15While it is worth noticing that by 1970 Morris already reaffirmed apodicticallythe ontological character of the category "plastic" art versus that of "language,"it was in the early 1960s that his assaults on the traditional concepts ofvisuality and plasticity had already begun to lay some of the crucial foundationsfor the development of an art practice emphasizing its parallels, if not identity,with the systems of linguistic signs, i.e., Conceptual Art.Most importantly, as early as 1961 in his Box with the Sound of Its OwnMaking, Morris had ruptured both. On the one hand, it dispenses with theModernist quest for medium-specific purity as much as with its sequel in thepositivist conviction of a purely perceptual experience operating in Stella's visualtautologies and the early phases of Minimalism. And on the other, by counteractingthe supremacy of the visual with that of an auditory experience of equal if nothigher importance, he renewed the Duchampian quest for a nonretinal art. InBox with the Sound of Its Own Making, as much as in the subsequent works, thecritique of the hegemony of traditional categories of the visual is enacted notonly in the (acoustic or tactile) disturbance of the purity of perceptual experience,but it is performed as well through a literalist act of denying the viewerpractically all (at least traditionally defined) visual information.This strategy of a "perceptual withdrawal" leads in each of the works fromthe early 1960s to a different analysis of the constituent features of the structuredobject and the modes of reading it generates. In I-Box, for example, theviewer is confronted with a semiotic pun (on the words I and eye)just as much as15. Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,"Artforum, vol. 9 (April 1970), p. 63.