Writing through Space: the Literal Practices of Robert Morris and Vito Acconci

1Traveling the works of Robert Morris, we are led to discover that metaphors and labyrinths are inexorably intertwined. In the text accompanying the Five Labyrinths prints of 1993, we learn that a labyrinth is an image that is both form and metaphor: metaphor for our tortuous passage through life, form of the passage of time and the constitution of memory, it reverberates with Gnostic preoccupations.1 We read that labyrinths have to do with truth, and that their walls erect as truth the sum of human relations or social practices that have passed into fixed, canonical and binding form. Yet we are warned about the pitfalls of relativism, and the real dangers that lie in wait for those who dally with the truth status of language. Looking back to the stockyards where his father worked, one Kansas City labyrinth of his childhood, Morris recounts his own dangerous navigation of that razor’s edge.

I was stopped from taking a short cut through a pen containing a single bull. “Don’t go in,” a man said. Retracing my steps half an hour later I came upon a group of men discussing the best way to extract the body of a man who lay dead at the feet of this massive black bull in the pen I had nearly entered. He had not heeded the warning and had been gored to death.2

2The labyrinth is also an image of the search for the rational; it maps the edge of thinking, that groping attempt to catch the thread to a chain of truthful propositions. Such is the labyrinthine status of questions raised by Morris in his practice, and described in a footnote that reflects on its own oblique referencing: questions that, “if announced, [are] seldom articulated; if articulated, seldom followed up; if followed up, seldom answered.”3 As you see, we enter without much of Ariadne’s thread to take us far.

3Investigating these premises, we will consider labyrinths as images of complex social practices. Such images abound in Morris’ work and grow increasingly more complex: the soundtrack to the 1963 performance Arizona recounting the stockyards of Morris’ childhood—a man’s world of animals, dust, danger and stench where his father was more himself than he was at home—the early labyrinth prints from the 1970s that depict what Morris has called the “present tense of space” as it becomes memory, the 1993 labyrinths laying square, circular, ovoid or triangular shapes of social practice onto paper, the 12 prints In the Realm of the Carceral with their titles evocative of disciplinary regimes. Morris has constructed labyrinths of stone, wood, cloth, and language, and an art historian’s totalizing impulse could draw its shape in the entirety of Morris’ work.

4Since Plato’s cave, Morris tells us, Western thought has kindled the desire for all “dark and shadowy metaphor to die, and be resurrected into the light of rational truth.”4 Now what is a metaphor, that labyrinthine complexity of shadows we want to replace with rational truth? For Donald Davidson, there is nothing shadowy there: “Metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more.” We must listen to this nothing more. It can show us which path to take, or at least, point out that in attempting to understand metaphorical truths, we were heading in the wrong direction. “No theory of metaphorical meaning or metaphorical truth can help explain how metaphor works… What distinguishes metaphor is not meaning but use.” Once acknowledged that there is nothing more, and weary of our steps, we can avoid the error of defining metaphorical meaning, and say along with Davidson that “A metaphor does its work through other intermediaries… Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight.” Inspiring or prompting the insight means that we pass from linguistic meaning to showing. At issue is asking the correct question. Trying to find meaning in metaphor is asking a question about propositions when we seek an answer that is not propositional in character. “Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.”5

5Let me sidestep this logical development and turn my attention to Vito Acconci for a moment. Acconci begins his career as a poet; in this role, the metaphor and other linguistic oddities constitute the rhetorical devices that he uses as impetus for his linguistic production. Acconci discovers a use for the strangeness of ordinary language as part of a “program of defamiliarizing poetics.”6 By this, I mean that he starts interfering with metaphors, figures of speech, and idiomatic expressions very early on.

His hand was raised and
(and then) in a manner of speaking and
(and then) he put his foot in his mouth7

6Such a poem remains within the realm of the proposition; it only plays at moving in and out of textual space, space in which we encounter a raised hand, a manner of speaking, and then come upon the idiomatic expression “he put a foot in his mouth.” Such an expression can be explained as a metaphor, although no longer active, based on a homology of relations (the same relation exists between a inopportune comment interjected into a conversation, for example, than between a foot inserted in a mouth) rather than on an analogy, as is the case in classic metaphors. If we follow Davidson’s logic, what we should see at the end of the poem, what the metaphor nudges us into noticing is thus not of a propositional nature. In fact, we should actually see something like this, (Fig. 45) or this (Fig. 46), except that it’s a foot in his mouth and not a hand. If what a metaphor does is show in the mind, here what I will call the “literally metaphoric” does in space-time.

45. Vito Acconci, Trademarks, September 1970, Photographed activity/Ink-prints, reproduced in Gregory Volk, ed., Vito Acconci. Diary of a Body, 1969-1973 (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2006), p. 204.

46. Vito Acconci, Hand and Mouth, May 1970, Super 8 Film, black & white, 3 minutes, reproduced in Gregory Volk, ed., Vito Acconci. Diary of a Body, 1969-1973 (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2006), p. 185.

7It is this literal slip of the metaphor that Acconci will continually emphasize, and that will eventually bring him out of the specifically linguistic labyrinth and into performance and body art. In a letter to Clayton Eshleman (March 26, 1969) he writes:

[…] words have charge, they develop an orientation in the reader.
Therefore it is the work of the art situation to jolt the reader out of that orientation. That work cannot be accomplished by playing up to that orientation, by repeating that charge.8

8This continuous jolting of readers out of their orientation will end up by jolting Acconci himself into another kind of practice altogether. But before that final jolt pushed him off the page, let us look more closely at an intermediary stage of the transition.

That day, the pen I used was made of plastic, you see.
The writing could be stretched in any direction—“elastic,” they said.
That didn’t refer to the words so much
As to me, while writing, at my desk, with my desk-chair, desk-blotter, desk-top, desk-toy, desk-ball, etc., I mean.9

9The charge of this text directs us in such a manner that we see the writing becoming stretched in any direction, ‘“elastic,” they said,’ and so elastic that it moves from the page to Acconci’s own body, sitting at his desk, with desk-chair, desk-blotter, desk-top, desk-toy, and meaning. As he plays with the multiple meanings that can be ascribed to words, and the contexts between which of these meanings incite us to switch, Acconci himself starts doing what language does, that is, meaning or issuing propositional statements.

10And so to return to the case at hand, to our rational groping forward, I will latch back onto Davidson’s thread and ask “What kind of intermediaries does the metaphor conjure to do its work?”10 What happens when the metaphor does not simply nudge us into noticing, but actually forces the transformation, going from meaning to showing. I posit that at this point it is helping us navigate the labyrinth. If the labyrinth is an image of thought (a form or a metaphor, as was stated at the beginning of this text), it is also the form of that ancient disquiet “between the image and the word, the propositional truth of verbal statement and the elusive and illusory visual depiction.”11 And further, it maps the sinuous transformations not only from the linguistic to the visual, but between sense media as well. And of course so does the work of Robert Morris.

11In a letter to John Cage in February 1961, we find a project for what was entitled a “Frugal Poem:” “On a page of dark paper the words ‘words words words’ are written, filling the entire page.” Morris’ description goes on to specify that “When read aloud one substitutes the word ‘talk’ for ‘words.’”12 Furthermore, “A tape was made of the scratching of the pencil as [the poem] was written—it is intended to be several superimposed images, i.e., drawing and/or poem and/or musical score and performance.” The poem “talk, talk, talk” is a labyrinthine form of the metaphor in its process of becoming literal. If a metaphor is what allows us to show in language, and the literal form of the metaphor the actualized passage from one medium to another (in this case from text to speech), then Morris’ poem as “several superimposed images” involves actualizing multiple metaphoric processes at once.13 Its multiple images (drawing, poem, musical score and performance) are the intermediaries that the metaphoric usage of language works with as it moves off the page.

12Vito Acconci, introducing the 2006 reprint of the magazine 0 To 9 co-edited with Bernadette Mayer in New York City between 1967 and 1969, provides a description of each of the 6 numbers of the magazine to have been published. As indicated by its title, the magazine was meant to run from number 0 to number 9, but Acconci stopped being a poet before he could finish the series. The six numbers of the magazine provide an empirical map of the environment Acconci moved in as a poet, before he jumped from work strictly limited to the written word to work that came to encompass conceptual art, performance, video, film and architecture. By the time issue number 5 comes around in January 1969, Acconci explains that he “could only use words to make a place on the page, could use words only so that they could be negated, could write only what had already been written by somebody else.”14

13This negative stance inaugurates a point of rupture. That nothing more could be done within language except negation, that linguistic activity could only occur on the borders or against certain conventions of literary production (the production of meaning and of narrative; the convention of the author as creator of the work) precipitate Acconci’s jump off the page as it is performed in issue number 5 of 0 To 9. Staying within the propositional usage of language, that is, staying within the metaphor in language would have led to language turning in upon itself, or against itself. The issue will not cease to haunt Acconci, and will be developed in the problematics of violence that runs throughout his work. Indeed, the performance Rubbing Piece, that I might provisionally entitle the danger of the metaphor, attests to the damaging effects of remaining within impermeable disciplinary boundaries (scriptural practices as opposed to visual ones, poetry as opposed to performance, etc.). Unnoticed in a crowded restaurant, rubbing obsessively at the skin of his forearm until he develops a sore (Fig. 47-48), Acconci is performing the violence of stalled transformation and the quiet social approbation it receives.

47-48. Vito Acconci, Rubbing Piece, May 1970, reproduced in Gregory Volk, ed., Vito Acconci. Diary of a Body, 1969-1973 (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 2006), p. 178.

14Precisely where does the jump off the page occur? The table of contents of issue number 5 of 0 To 9 mentions two Acconci pieces. The first is entitled “Four Pages,” and consists of just that, four pages of Acconci’s experimentations in literal usage of language as was his practice at the time. These pages remain within the confines of the propositional, even though they rub up against those confines.15 The second piece is entitled “Act 3, scene 4”, and runs from pages 65 to 70 of the issue. It consists of a series of white pages, the line “across the lake region, the middle Mississippi Valley, and” printed on page 68, and the note, appearing on the bottom of page 70, “(The line you have read is the 208th line of a 350 line piece; the rest appears in the other 349 copies of 0 To 9 number 5).” The content of the entire poem is a broadcast of hourly New York telephone weather reports running from sunrise December 26th, 1968, to sunrise January 2nd, 1969. Although the language is in no way metaphorical, the poem has sutured itself to the form of the journal, and has thus left the two dimensionality of the page to open onto three dimensionality in another way than through linguistic reference or metaphorical showing.

15But there is a third poem in this issue of 0 TO 9 that is not mentioned in the table of contents. This invisible poem can be taken as a token of the parting of the ways with the propositional. It is a “moving” poem that runs throughout the magazine, a kind of viral structure that repeats the last word of the text printed on the page on which it appears. Mobile within the magazine issue, it also travels locally in space along the arc of the page flipped over as it read. On pages 61 and 62, for example, two elements of the poem, “moving lightning” and “moving warehouse,” appear (Fig. 49). The section printed on the right page works in a literal way, as it is turned during reading. On the left, the literal movement of the line is lost, and its action remains only within the propositional meaning of the phrase “moving lightning.” However, in one segment of this issue-long poem, a semantic echo combines to push the words into contradictory actions. Thus, in the syntagm “not moving,” which is Acconci’s capture of the last word of John Perreault’s three performance scripts (Match, Tate Event, Rainbow) printed on page 11 of issue number 5, the word “not,” asserted as immobile in the proposition, literally moves as you turn the page. Let us take this negative “not” as the event that pushes propositional meaning away from metaphoric “seeing as.”

49. Vito Acconci and Jack Anderson, 0 To 9, no. 5, pp. 60-61, 0 To 9, The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969, edited by Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006.

16I am aware that I have been using a fairly loose conception of metaphor. I am aware that I should inquire as to the diverse contexts of its use, distinguish what forms are dormant, dying, submerged, absolute, implicit or extended. But that is not my issue here. My question is, what happens when metaphoric use of language passes into the literal? With metaphor, as we have seen, we pass “from seeing that to seeing as.” Rorty notes that metaphors are gaps in logical space. Let us consider Robert Morris’ article “Threading the Labyrinth” as a case in point.16 This text builds on Morris’ earlier text on labyrinths, the aforementioned text accompanying “Five Labyrinths” in 1993. But where the latter consisted of five neatly partitioned sections, the former spins in one uninterrupted thread a maze of geodesic surveys, mirrors, Chomskyan axes, Duchampian standard stoppages, Kantian categories, ethics, esthetics and “extreme fluidity of theory.” The gaps in logical space of this labyrinthine thread are where we can see the whole of Robert Morris’ work reflected.

17And yet, if these gaps mark the passage from one medium to another, or between different logical spaces, why then is the labyrinth of the metaphor always so dark? Why is death lurking at its center as the myth proclaims? Metaphorically perhaps, the labyrinth puts us in a state of blindness, groping along in thinking, as we look for a way out from within. With Ariadne’s thread as our only guide, we are led back to where we started, inside, endlessly treading the same domain. The labyrinth is the confinement to a single medium, whether it be language, the visual, the haptic or art itself. And yet the possibility that it may contain its own exit, the passage from “seeing that to seeing as,” is at hand, provided we can extract ourselves enough from our horizon to even contemplate the possibility of another through the gaps.

18In “Threading the Labyrinth,” Morris writes that it gives the spatial representation of the pathway we meander to try to represent ourselves. Kant’s a priori schematism of understanding is invoked, as is Chomsky’s rationalist position in the language-acquisition debate. The labyrinth gives us the form of a structural impossibility, for we can never discover the real mode of activity of this a priori schematism, this art “concealed in the depths of the human soul.” That self-representation may be terminally foreclosed is that labyrinthine difficulty, for which, as Morris tells us, the mind may not be wired at all. As such, the labyrinth is the spatial form of that thwarted desire to bring to light the workings of our understanding, inasmuch as that understanding can allow us to represent ourselves.

19Morris’ Blind Time Drawings take the shape of this difficult reflexivity. Let us look at an example from the 1985 series Blind Time III (Fig. 50).

Working blindfolded for an estimated 7 minutes, a grid is attempted in the lower left area. Then the left hand applies twice the amount of pressure as the right in an estimated one-third area of the page. The right hand follows the movement of the left, expanding and elaborating on its motion.
Searching for a metaphor for the occupation of that moment between lapsed time and possibilities spent on the one hand, and an imagined but un-occupable future on the other, both of which issue from that tightly woven nexus of language, tradition and culture which constructs our narrative of time.
Time estimation error: -35 sec.17

50. Robert Morris, Blind Time III, 1985, Mixed media on paper, 38.2 × 50 inches (97 × 127 cm), Cabinet des estampes du Musée d’art et d’histoire.

20According to a metaphorical reading, the drawing with the left hand, executed with twice the amount of pressure than with the right, reads as a representation of lapsed time and spent possibilities, darkness. The opening on the right, still metaphorically, reads as the imagined but un-occupable future. The process of the drawing is the search for a metaphor for itself: the present in that gap between the action of the two hands. In this metaphorical reading, if the right hand, following the left, represents the future, then it cannot carry with it any significant change. The future in that case is but a repetition of the past, less of its substance spent, more ethereal and open. Neither of these two forms, staying at they do within the nexus of language and simple repetition, can show or represent anything about the present. Let us metaphorically posit that the tight grid in the lower left corner is a form of the labyrinth, a form of the control exerted over what is beyond our control. It is thus precisely a metaphor standing in place of the labyrinth, and the reason for our wanting out.

21And yet, Morris writes that what metaphors lead us to see, which is often not of a propositional nature, is what opens onto the creative and that distinguishes them from the truth.18 Let me give you Morris’ argument, leading us back to Davidson. The metaphor does not mean anything; it leads us to see something, but this is not simply a novelty that might fall back into habitual understanding. “In its context, a word once taken for a metaphor remains a metaphor on the hundredth hearing, while a word may easily be appreciated in a new literal role on a first encounter. What we call the element of novelty or surprise in a metaphor is a built-in aesthetic feature we can experience again and again.”19 And so we arrive at the vexed question of the esthetic. From the article “Threading the Labyrinth,” can we infer that the esthetic is that art of a priori categories on which we can exert a molding hand before they are hardened into truth? Is the esthetic our capacity to rewrite a fiction for our structures of inhabiting space-time? Is the element of novelty in esthetics what allows us to move in fact out of rigid media delimitations, thus finally out of the metaphor into the literal and out of the labyrinth? Robert Morris’ moving through the labyrinth, even in essayistic form, does not necessarily provide answers to these questions. Neither does this particular labyrinthine thread we have followed up till now. And perhaps these meanderings are failures, and I have overlooked some perilous gaps in their logical space. The illusion of control is what recurs under the form of the labyrinth. I could pull all of its logical strings tight, but there is no getting out of it, as Francis Ponge writes, firmly anti-metaphorically. I must let myself be guided by I don’t know what.