In Terms Of

Tag: Marcel Duchamp

  • Make American Art Great Again

    “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art” with James Little
    Wednesday, November 15, 2017
    Lunchtime Lecture Series, Art Students League, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, New York

    James Little (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience gathered in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery of the Art Students League, a midtown Manhattan art school founded in 1875, was mostly middle-aged folks and senior citizens, with a scattering of younger people who were probably students. They arrived to see and hear James Little, an abstract painter and professor, give a lunchtime talk. I was unaware of him prior to the event—I did not know if he was a critic, an artist, or some other art professional before showing up. Born in Tennessee in 1952, Little earned his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art in 1974 and two years later received an MFA from Syracuse University. June Kelly Gallery has shown his work since the late 1980s.

    Today’s wordily titled topic, “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art,” felt like a time warp—meaning Little’s complaint was decades old. He characterized the current situation of contemporary art critics as a decline of quality that he likened to an “unedited book.” Critical debate, he claimed, has diminished since Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), Hilton Kramer (1928–2012), and Robert Hughes (1938–2012) were actively writing. An attitude of confusion was manifest in the most recent Whitney Biennial, he said, which included a 2016 artwork by Dana Schutz, whom he referred to as “Schultz,” that caused a controversy. Protesters accused Schutz, a white woman, of playing around with—and profiting from—the suffering of African Americans. “There was a big uproar about the fact that she did a painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket,” Little said. “The whole time, nobody said anything about the quality of the work. It was never mentioned…. What I recognized was that the critics weren’t stepping up, the artists weren’t stepping up, and we were just accepting this, accepting what they were feeding us, with no debate, with no criticism.” Little’s speaking style avoided complete sentences or thoughts. The supporting arguments behind his statements lacked substance.

    Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, oil on canvas, 39 x 53 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    I was puzzled and wondered how much reading Little had done on the controversy. Coco Fusco avoided the topic of quality in a Hyperallergic essay, focusing instead on censorship. Calvin Tomkins, though, noted the “deftly brushed colors at the top” of the painting in his New Yorker profile last April. Elsewhere in the long read Tomkins wrote, “The horror is conveyed in painterly ways that, to me, make it seem more tragic than the photograph, because the viewer is drawn in, not repelled.” A New Republic piece by Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye compared the painting’s formalism with its subject matter; it also contextualized Open Casket within Schutz’s oeuvre, noting the artist is not known for her solemnity. These three examples are the first ones I read while writing this review. If I had followed up with dozens more articles on the subject, I’d surely uncover further discussion of the painting’s formal qualities. Little declared that criticism is essential, that it improves art, provides direction for artists, and even offers them something to resist. Criticism can only do these things if a person reads it, which Little seems not to have done. I wondered if he actually saw Schutz’s painting in person instead of online.

    Chris Ofili’s painting Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in the traveling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, provoked New York’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani to call for censorship and defunding. “Nobody talked about the quality of that painting,” Little exclaimed. “Nobody said whether it was a good painting or a bad painting. Or if it was despicable. They didn’t say that. He made the guy famous. And that’s my point.” Later during the Q&A, Little agreed with an audience member that if Schutz had the skills, fewer people would have complained. “Dana Schultz was one of shock value. And she got it. She was in the right place to get shock value, and she got it in the Whitney. If she was a better painter, it could have been different. If it had been something, a personal experience of hers, it could have been different.”

    The matter of a white woman painting a lynched black boy had little to do with the work. For Little, closeness to the subject matter is important. That an artist needs to experience his or her subject matter firsthand is an odd stance to take, considering that few painters in the Italian Renaissance witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the beheading of John the Baptist. Maybe Little meant that an artist depicting current or recent events should bear witness to them, implicating an early text-based work by the artist Glenn Ligon, who riffed on the “I am a man” posters created in the wake of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, which Little lived through as a teenager—though his recollection of basic facts of the event were faulty in several important ways. Nevertheless, Little was there but the appropriator was not, and therefore Ligon trivialized the situation.

    Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864, oil on canvas, 29 7/8 x 60 3/8 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Little paired a slide of Open Casket with a work by Mary Cassatt—the first in a series of comparisons of art influenced by pop culture, the media, consumerism, and novelty (which was bad) with art connected to tradition (definitely a good thing). Contrasted here next were Paul Cézanne’s apples and Carl Andre’s bricks, then Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864). Little showed an installation of rocks by Joseph Beuys called The End of the Twentieth Century (1983–85) and a painting from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series (1890–91). Little wondered how we got from one to the other without any critical debate, positive or negative. Once again, I was perplexed about this alleged dearth of debate. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the evolution modern art. Bringing this specific painting by Manet was confusing. The artist had painted a bull in the picture, but critics wrote that it looked like a rat. Manet cut down the canvas and saved only the bullfighter. Does Little support critics having the power to force an artist drastically alter even a finished and exhibited painting?

    Little periodically read passages from the writings of Greenberg, Kramer, and Hughes—critics whom the art world generally recognizes as having conservative views. The quotes were meant to buttress the artist’s “I am not a Duchampian” stance. Fair enough. Not every artist should embrace the readymade. Little further articulated his position: “I don’t think idea is enough to constitute art. I think art has to have vision, content—emotive content. It has to serve a purpose to humanity. It’s essential for our spiritual and mental health.” For Little, Andre is minor art, and “minor art is not major art.” Minor art that proliferates today is evidence of a cultural decline. “When art gets better, everything else gets better.” In other words, the relationship of art to life is a matter of trickle-up economics.

    Jacob Lawrence, panel 35 of The Migration Series: They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, 1940–41, casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (artwork © Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation)

    Little said he felt nothing upon seeing Duchamp’s urinal or Beuys’s Felt Suit in a museum, but he marveled at Manet’s fallen bullfighter. “I had an aesthetic experience,” he said of his episode. “What I mean by aesthetic experience is the experience that you have when you see a great piece of art. It’s a life-changing thing.” Little’s definition of the aesthetic experience was wholly subjective, even tautological. You not only know it when you see it, but it’s completely explains itself. “Rembrandt is Rembrandt” was what Little stated to demonstrate the self-evidence of greatness. Art “has to offer something,” he continued. “It has to enrich my life and my experience in order for it to be art. It has to give me something I didn’t have in the first place. It has to take me further along in this journey.”

    The three photographs comprising Ai Weiwei’s action Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) fail to meet his criteria for art, but paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941) do. Lawrence’s paintings speak for themselves as art, Little said, through a connection to the past, their color and composition, and their narrative. “An idea alone does not create an aesthetic experience,” Little reiterated. “An idea alone does not create art.” Little was agog at why Ai would drop a two-thousand-year-old Chinese vase, when a quick Google search would have turned up the answer. Sometimes an artwork doesn’t reveal itself immediately. Don’t we check the museum wall label to see who the subject of a portrait is? Does the iconography of ancient sculpture of Egypt or the Americas reveal itself to a nonspecialist? It needs interpretation.

    Cady Noland, Industry Park, 1991, zinc-plated steel chain link fence, 100¼ x 216 x 3 in. (artwork © Cady Noland; photographer unknown)

    I sympathize with Little’s disbelief that a destructive act can be creative. I agree that rigorous formal training is a necessary precursor for a certain kind of artist—but not all artists. What puzzles me is how Little started the lecture by lamenting critical discourse, but then began condemning art he doesn’t like and pleading for a return to reason. I understood where he was coming from but failed to grasp a coherent argument. A photograph of Cady Noland’s Industry Park (1991), which consists of an unaltered chain-linked fence displayed in a gallery, was projected onto the screen beside him. People don’t see their lives improved by this art, he said. Art needs rigor to make. “We can no longer allow for the public to feed us stuff that we don’t understand, or don’t really matter to us in our daily lives.” Description, novelty, and consumerism has infiltrated criticism, and Little finds the writing of Robert C. Morgan, Karen Wilkin, Mario Naves, and James Panero to alleviate this. Is it because they praise art he likes and denounce art he hates?

    A chain-linked fence does not reach the masses, Little remarked during the Q&A. Noland’s work does not provide an aesthetic experience. It’s only utilitarian. The Art Students League has provided traditional artistic training for decades, he reminded the audience, educating Jackson Pollock, Louis Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. “We can’t throw this [tradition] out the window, you know, because somebody decides they want to go out here and take a chain-linked fence and put it up in the Museum of Modern Art. And we look at it like it’s some, you know, revelation. No, it’s not a revelation! That’s what I’m saying! I’m gonna go get me a chain-linked fence when I leave here, and I’m gonna put it in my backyard. Is there any difference? Well maybe it’s Earth art.” Little has seen art exhibitions of trash swept into a corner—a clichéd insult that is ironically based on real life—and a room full of grocery carts. (Could the latter show be Josh Kline’s recent solo outing at 47 Canal?) Little admitted he was a conservative formalist, which he confidently understands as meaning “I know what I’m doing.” He obviously demands high craft and skill from artists, who make their work by hand, with a vision, and a sense of history. Further, Little feels he belongs more to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the twenty-first. He does not make art for himself but rather is concerned what others think and feel about it, including his fellow artists.

    An audience member speaks during the Q&A (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the Q&A an audience member asked about the connection between Rembrandt and Pollock. Thomas Hart Benton, Little replied, served as the lineage of formal training, which includes studying classical art and knowing the figure. “Where [Pollock] took it was another place.” Pollock had “developed a relationship with the medium” of paint and expressed himself through paint. Rembrandt was connected to Titian, El Greco, and Leonardo. “Look, if you gonna built a house, would you build it without a foundation? I guess not.” Someone else argued that Duchamp and Beuys attempted a dialogue with the past. “What you just said is right on,” replied Little. “They were trying to do that. I’m saying that they didn’t do it…. The others, they weren’t trying to do it—they did it.” Little returned to Beuys’s Felt Suit. “When I walk past this suit, at the Walker Art Center, it did not do anything for me. That’s just the way it is. It just didn’t do anything for me.” The work presented a conundrum. “Why is this here?” he wondered. “Why is there not an outcry against this art? Critics have failed us. I pray for another Clement Greenberg, and Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes. I pray for it because we don’t get that.” Little contented that we have failed to uphold standards. That “we” includes artists, scholars, curators, museum professionals, and the public. Little was not surprised that art mocking middle-class values has found an audience among the wealthy elite who fund art museums and serve on their boards. One attendee remarked, “Whose interest does that serve?” The lecture thankfully ended before a discussion of collecting practices began.

    Earlier this year Bomb interviewed Little for the magazine’s Oral History Project. “His paintings are guided by intuitive responses to form, color, and feeling,” LeRonn P. Brooks wrote in his introduction to the piece. “This approach is not overly calculated, though its complexity may suggest so.” Little was interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail in 2009 and profiled by ARTnews in 2011. In the latter, he described his process in detail, describing how he applies layers of paint (made from powdered pigment and mixed with varnish and beeswax) to his surfaces to produce a high sheen. Though I disagree with most of what he said, Little’s views did not put me off. In fact, I am curious to see his paintings in person, to understand why he believes the things he does and how his vision for art manifests itself in his own production. I don’t wish to persuade him of accepting the value of Duchamp, Beuys, and Noland. How he feels about his own art is of greater interest and importance.

    In Terms Of count: coming soon.

  • Conversation with the Sound of Its Own Unraveling

    Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 | Robert Morris, Julia Robinson, Jeffrey Weiss
    Wednesday, April 16, 2014
    Artist Dialogue Series Event
    New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, New York

    Jeffrey Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (2014)

    The legendary artist Robert Morris doesn’t often participate in live interviews, whether in public, in person, or on the phone, so a recent appearance by him at the New York Public Library was a rare treat. Indeed, as the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss noted at the outset, “Agreeing to speak is not something he does too freely.” But when Morris, Weiss, and the art historian Julia Robinson gathered in celebration of Weiss and Clare Davies’s new book, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), the ensuing conversation was a frustrating affair.

    How could such an experienced crew bungle this rare opportunity? It certainly wasn’t the fault of the articulate, soft-spoken Morris. Rather it was the disorganized and unprepared Weiss and Robinson, whose cluttered thoughts belied the sharp focus of the book. Weiss, a senior curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, fumbled with his faulty microphone for several minutes as the conversation began and demonstrated a serious “um” and “uh” problem throughout the event.1

    What’s worse, though, is that he and Robinson, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at New York University, had great difficulty asking a simple, straightforward question, as both were plagued with the malaise of offering a garbled comment in place of a question. When a question finally did come out they immediately tried to answer it themselves, offering several possibilities before Morris could even respond. Furthermore, the pair constantly stumbled when describing and interpreting the images of the artist’s work projected on the screen behind them. This was all a pitiful shame considering Weiss’s excellent, insightful articles recently published in Artforum on the refabrication of Morris’s classic 1960s work and on the value of damaged and destroyed art objects through the lens of two recent exhibitions of them.2

    Despite the obfuscating efforts of Weiss and Robinson, Morris told entertaining and informative stories about his early career, the period covered by Weiss’s book. The artist confirmed with Simone Forti, a dancer, choreographer, and his wife at the time (who was sitting in the front row of the audience), that they had arrived in New York in late 1960. Even though he had been painting through the late 1950s, Morris didn’t consider himself to be an artist during his initial time in New York, when he was studying art history at Hunter College. “I spent a lot of time reading,” he said. It was inexpensive to exist in Manhattan back then. Living in large lofts with no heat and hot water, Morris said he was poor but comfortable.

    Julia Robinson gestures wildly at Robert Morris (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    At Weiss’s prompting, Morris talked about the first two works he made in New York—Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Column—both created in January 1961. The former is a nearly 10-inch-cubed wooden container that encloses an audio recording of Morris building the work with carpentry tools. The latter was an eight-foot-tall rectangular box built with plywood salvaged from the street and stored uncomfortably in his room, whose ceiling reached only seven feet high. “This might have given me the idea of permuting this work,” he joked of the decision to re-create the piece several times from the lost or discarded original. A garbled comment-question from Weiss attempted to address the size of, and process involved in making, the two works, and the curator seemed astounded that Morris could simultaneously produce large and small works (and unrelated ones at that). “Just literally making them,” the curator gushed, “in and of itself, reflects a certain level of…” before trailing off.3 Did the two bodies of work intersect, the curator asked? “I never felt obliged to think much about the connection,” Morris responded, who went on to say something about the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s concepts regarding the self that was not picked up by Weiss. In fact, Morris’s deep knowledge of Western philosophy was an area that Weiss and Robinson should have fervently pursued but, sadly, did not.

    Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961 (artwork © Robert Morris)

    Robinson mumbled something about how the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making performed or demonstrated temporality and also literalized time. Painting was static then, she claimed, but process brought time back. This may have been a cue for Morris to describe his processed-based works from the 1950s, for which he spread a canvas on the floor and moved across it while sprawled on a short scaffold. “I was just using oil paint,” he said, “putting it on with my hands.” (Does this work still exist?) Robinson stated her interest in Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of the action painter as well as Allan Kaprow’s 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” She knows her book art history. “Activating work with time was a way out,” Morris said to appease Robinson. Because he didn’t resolve the issue of time, he quit making this work. Among other reasons, Pollock had succeeded where he had not. While Morris failed to recognize these paintings as performance, he did acknowledge a “temporal involvement.”

    Weiss asked Morris if he had a series in mind when making Box and Column. Not yet, the artist replied. “The large works had a kind of apparent continuity … in form,” he continued, “whereas the small objects didn’t.” (Weiss and Davies’s book presumably gives the smaller pieces, which Weiss calls “object sculpture” but Morris identified as “process type objects,” that missing continuity.) Box for Standing—or was it Column?—was a leftover from a Forti performance. “I had this box,” Morris slyly recalled. “It kept getting in the way. I kept moving it around the studio. Finally I decided I would expropriate it and make a sculpture. It was really very easy because it was already there.” The works from the early 1960s “were much more contingent than they appear today,” he mused.4

    Morris, Robinson, and Weiss talked about the avant-garde milieu in San Francisco and New York, which featured characters such as Forti, Anna Halprin, Henry Flynt, and LaMonte Young. Robinson simultaneously asked and told Morris about his own history—while offering her own interpretations of it—a strategy that resulted in a confused, fragmented chronology. Moving on, Morris told the story of when the radical composer John Cage visited his Upper West Side apartment, where he asked to listen to the entire three-and-a-half-hour recording of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Robinson commented to Morris: “Did you ever ask him later, ‘What the heck was that?’” Did she truly find it incredulous that Cage would want to listen to the complete tape?

    Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in Simone Forti’s See-Saw, December 1960, Ruben Gallery, New York (photograph © Robert McElroy)

    Morris recollected several experimental dance performances in which he took part. For one Forti piece he pretended to be a rock. For another he was directed to remain on the floor (“Whatever happens,” Forti had told him, “you gotta lay flat on the floor”), while another performer, Robert Huot—a man twice Morris’s size—was instructed to tie him to the wall. “A battle occurred,” Morris declared, “and that was the movement…. A fight with a rope, two guys—I mean, there wasn’t any expression there at all, just defense and scratches and bumps.”

    The conversation dragged when Robinson pressed Morris about the mysterious, nefarious controllers of a bifurcated Fluxus scene of artists, dancers, and musicians surrounding Young in New York. Morris admitted that he had written texts for the group that are not widely read because he pulled out of the scene. “I find it really hard to give a reason for that,” Morris mused. “I must have been feeling especially hostile.” Regarding the writing, he explained, “I was using language to make drawings.” The nature of this discussion wasn’t clear, but the three speakers seemed to be in the know. Maybe it was all just gossip.

    “You became a pretty serious critic pretty fast,” Robinson noted. She also noticed a difference between Morris’s private writing in notebooks and his published words in the 1960s. “The need to go on record became important,” the artist said. And he liked doing it, even though he considered himself to be a lazy writer who didn’t produce articles often enough. In fact, his advisor at Hunter College, William Rubin, kept bugging him to finish his thesis on the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, even after the professor had left the school for a curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art. “I usually wrote about things after finishing a body of work,” Morris said.

    Three views of Venus of Willendorf, ca. 28,000–25,000 BCE, limestone, 4¼ in. tall (artwork in the public domain)

    Halfway through the conversation Morris loosened up, while Weiss and Robinson continued to grope erratically. The artist recalled the artist Ad Reinhardt’s famous class on Japanese art at Hunter, which he said didn’t follow typical chronological or geographic lines. Instead, Reinhardt showed slides from different eras, periods, and locations, saying “That’s classic. That’s baroque. That’s early classic.” Reinhardt would show “five hundred slides a night,” Morris remembered. When showing an image of the Venus of Willendorf, Reinhardt deadpanned “That’s really primitive.” A student exclaimed, “That’s not primitive—that’s pregnant!” The professor, Morris punchlined, did not reply. Morris also recalled that Reinhardt’s slides of monuments and artworks from foreign lands—once a year he traveled to another country, by himself—were frontal and bilateral. Many students, Morris said, declared these photographs so well taken that they depicted the actual sites better than seeing them in person.

    In the early 1960s Morris worked in the Art Office of the New York Public Library, in room 313, where he answered mail, filed things, and used the card catalogue. It was during this time when he conceived of Card File (1962), while drinking coffee one day in the library. Weiss felt Card File is neglected, misrepresented, and singularly understood as a form of categorization—perhaps because we never can actually read the cards filed into it. (Weiss read a few of them aloud; his book publishes transcriptions of each one.) “It’s unending, theoretically,” Morris said of the work, but “it has a narrative.” It’s also, Robinson added, “indeterminate.”

    Robert Morris speaks, as Simone Forti listens attentively (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The influence of narrative, Morris revealed, came from Marcel Duchamp, in particular the focus on text and language found in Robert Lebel’s 1959 book on the French-born artist.5 For Morris, Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) represents process—materials and their transformation—through a puerile story about the proverbial bride and nine bachelors, a metaphor, Morris said, of the Artist screwing Art to become Famous. Morris also admitted the influence of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) when creating works like Three Rulers (1962), for which he estimated imperial measurements by eye. The hand-drawn inch was intentionally a “mistake,” Morris said, claiming that Duchamp had become the “new standard of measurement” for artists.

    The classic gray-painted plywood boxes from 1964, Morris said, “were competently made but not expertly made.” It was easier for him to construct them for exhibitions and toss out afterward than to build permanent works. “I said at some point there are no originals of these,” he noted. “There are only reproductions. Nobody [back then] wanted to hear that.” One time he sent assembly instructions for the pieces to a museum, whose workers “built them too well—and that offended me. If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.” These sculptures presented preexisting forms in the world, Morris explained, such as columns, benches, and gates; he also used materials other than wood. Although fiberglass works well for the curves of a boat, the artist said he was disappointed with the material’s response to edges, which became frayed. “It was a mistake” to use the material, he said, “but it has a certain quality that’s different from plywood.”

    Robert Morris, Box for Standing, 2011, walnut, 77 x 12 x 26 in. (artwork © Robert Morris)

    For a private exhibition at SurroundArt in Brooklyn in 2012 and a public exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Manhattan in 2014, Morris instructed fabricators to use quality woods such as walnut, cherry, oak, poplar, European beach, and maple when making replicas of older work—or in his words, “recent work that recollects earlier objects.” For example, Box for Standing went from pine in 1961 to walnut in 2011, and Wheels (2012), first made in 1963 with street lumber, was reconstructed in cherry wood at a slightly larger scale. These fabrications are obviously salable pieces for private collectors and museums, but Weiss and Robinson didn’t engage Morris about these cash cows. Instead, the artist offered an alternative view: “I have a compulsion to revisit some of these things.”

    New York Art Strike, 1970

    During the audience Q&A, a woman sitting behind me pestered Morris with several questions about Duchamp, which the artist answered with good nature. “Did Duchamp really smoke a cigar?” was the last one she got in before the library’s representative, Arezoo Moseni, judiciously cut her off. When an artist stood to lament (in a kind of calm hysteria) the state of the New York art world today—the dispersion of artistic centers, the lack of easy living, and finding a voice in an art world in which everything has seemingly been done—Morris recanted a story about the New York Art Strike, which took place outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 22, 1970, when approximately five hundred people sat on the steps to protest war, racism, and repression. After the ten-hour event ended, a few stragglers remained to clean up the steps. While sweeping up cigarette butts, the artist Carl Andre remarked to Morris, “You never know how good an artist you are, but you always know how good a sweeper you are.” Morris said that life was hard back then but leisurely so: you could see your friends and think about things. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, the artist declared, “Creativity is the residue of wasted time.” It’s certainly unfortunate we don’t have that kind of time today. And although this story sidestepped the audience member’s concerns, Morris seemed to suggest that she work at her own pace and within her own competencies.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Similarly, speakers at any level of experience must simply get over their fear of amplification. Likewise, academics should be required to learn about microphones, projectors, and PowerPoint as an integral part of their jobs.

    2 See Jeffrey Weiss, “Eternal Return,” Artforum 52, no. 6 (February 2014): 174–81; and “Things Not Necessarily to Be Viewed as Art,” Artforum 51, no. 7 (March 2013): 220–29.

    3 During this time Morris also made what he called performance switches. A fourth body of work was the set of boxy plywood structures first exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in 1964.

    4 From the audience, Forti recalled that Morris had made two boxes; he only remembered making one.

    5 Lebel’s book was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton in that same year. Duchamp’s notes from The Green Box were published in 1960.

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