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Ghost

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GHOST

by

Benjamin Echeverria

_______________________________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(Art and Curatorial Practice)

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Benjamin Echeverria
2

Table of Contents

Abstract 3
Introduction 4
The Implication and Registration of the Body 9
The First Mode 15
The Second Mode 19
Deliberation 22
Conclusion 31
Bibliography 33

3

Abstract

New materialism, a relatively recent, contested, and evolving philosophy, is here used to
examine the current meaning and experience of Robert Morris’s sculpture, Box With the Sound
of Its Own Making. There is a reciprocal relationship in which new materialism reveals the Box
and the Box reveals new materialism.

4

In 1961 Robert Morris (1931-), influenced by Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and what historians
have asserted as motivations to take the modernist agenda to an extreme while simultaneously
undermining it, made one of his first known sculptures, Box With the Sound of Its Own Making.
The multi-media and durational sculpture, historically designated a subversive artwork in terms of
modernism, could also lend itself to the subversion of binary structures, one of the main ambitions
of new materialism.
1
The Box, typically discussed in relation to the aforementioned influences, has
rarely been examined through a contemporary lens, one that might suggest a continued, yet new
and more complex relevance of the work. I am interested here in its significance in relation to new
materialism and theories of embodiment, labor, and process. My primary question is: from a
phenomenological perspective how might the Box have anticipated insights of new materialism by
50 years?

Assigning philosophical frameworks to artworks can be problematic and is generally best avoided.
Determining meaning in relation to artworks is always a bit troubling, often devolving into some
form of representation or classification that compromises the complexity and directness of an
artwork. Most often a conservative approach to meaning dominates in which interpretation takes
place through assumptions about the artist’s “intentions” directly linking the work of art to the
artist’s supposed thought. However, new materialism’s emphasis on plurality instead of otherness,
simultaneity rather than difference, and materiality and processes of materialization opens the

1
Rick, Dolphijn and Iris van der in their e-book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies
(2012), explain that new materialist philosophers Rosi Braidotti and Mauel DeLanda pose “dual
oppositions as their main target. Reworking and eventually breaking through dualism appears to
be the key to new materialism.,” p 97.
5
possibility of an awareness of the potential problem in attempting to link art and thought and offers
a new way to understand subjectivity in relation to the materialities of visual art.
2

The Box With the Sound of Its Own Making is a six-sided wooden object. Until recently the
sounded sculpture was displayed on a narrow rectangular pedestal. This mode of display was
amended by the curator at the Seattle Art Museum, which owns the piece, who reasoned that the
pedestal was “too phallic.” The Box is now displayed when in its permanent home at the Seattle
Art Museum on a four-legged table slightly larger than the object. Concealed within the walnut
box is a speaker that plays a recording of sounds created as Morris engaged in the physical process
of constructing the box. Before Morris began to construct, he set up a tape recorder in the studio to
record himself as he moved around the room handling materials and using various tools and
machines during the object’s three and half hour construction. The soundscape contains long
periods of silence and unintelligible noise as well as sawing and sanding, sounds closely linked to
specific activities, and other sounds vaguely discernable.

The box is nine inches cubed, crafted from solid walnut; butt-joined seams hold the individual
planks of wood together at the four corners and where the top and bottom connections are made.
The execution and craft are tight. Looking at the sides and top of the actual box, one notices

2
Rick, Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012) in their e-book New Materialism: Interviews and
Cartographies (2012), explain that new materialist thinking “starts its analysis from how these
oppositions (between nature and culture, matter and mind, the human and the inhuman) are
produced in action itself. It thus has profound interest in the morphology of change and gives
special attention to matter (materiality, processes of materialization) as it has been so neglected
by modernist thought.” See: Section 5, “The Transversality of New Materialism”.

6
something not readily apparent in photographic documentation of the sculpture: the circular ends
of wooden dowels flushed to the surface that either pin the butt-joints in place or simply obscure
the hardware that fastens the sides of the object together.

Someone with experience in woodworking and knowledge of the materials, processes, and tools
used might be able to decipher the origins of the individual sounds—differentiate what tools,
machinery, or processes are associated with the specific sounds—as well as the results of the
making process (such as the function of the dowels). It is possible to imagine correlations between
sounds and the progression of the Box’s construction, visualize the various states of the Box during
the making process and experience, vicariously, Morris’s physical implication in the
transformation of the raw material into the refined object. The final object conveys the accuracy of
the tools, machinery, and techniques used in its fabrication; The Box’s refinement and elegant
finish minimize it traces of the artist’s body’s implication in the construction of the Box.

On the lower backside of the box, roughly an inch from the base, a single mono RCA jack, into
which the cord from the tape player plugs, protrudes about 3/8 of an inch from the wooden surface.
When the box was made in 1961 audio equipment of this kind was so large only the speaker could
fit inside the box.
3
The tape player was originally positioned within the pedestal made for the box
to rest on.

3
This information was sourced from an interview with Robert Morris in the monograph on the
artist Jeffery Weiss and Clare Davies, “Things Moving and Things Stopped” Robert Morris,
Object Sculpture, 1960-1965, New Haven, London, Yale University Press (2013). In this
interview Morris also reveals the decision to use walnut: “the smell reminded him of a walnut
tree in the yard of his childhood home,” stating that “[John] Cage listened in absolute stillness to
3 ½ hours of the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and then leaving,” and makes note that
the Box has been refabricated twice for the purposes of exhibition, p 84.
7
In 1963 the box was exhibited at the Green Gallery in New York City. In 1965 it was acquired by
Seattle-based collectors Virginia and Bagley Wright. The work remained in their private collection
until 1983 when it was gifted to the Seattle Art Museum.
4
The box has been exhibited numerous
times over the past 55 years, lending its conceptual and formal versatility to a multitude of
international thematic exhibitions with provocative titles ranging from exhibitions whose titles
allude to phenomenological concerns as: The Sense of Reference (1975), The Tao of Contemporary
Art (1990-91), and The Mind/Body Problem (1994-5), to exhibitions that emphasized craft, labor,
and materiality as: Masterworks in Wood (1975), Against the Grain, Wood in Contemporary Art,
Craft and Design (2012-13), and Work Ethic (2003-4).
5

4
Information sourced from a complete catalogue of information (including provenance)
pertaining to Box With the Sound of Its Own Making. This information was received from the
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington on February 11, 2016.
5
Ibid.

8

Robert Morris’s Box With the Sound of Its Own Making (1961). This scan of an inkjet print
shows the RCA port that connects the speaker within the box to the audio player concealed with
the sculpture’s pedestal.

9
The Implication and Registration of the Body

Empiricism was a sort of disbelief in the things, an underestimation of the coherence of the
things. The sensible thing is not simply a “wandering troop of sensations”; it holds together
of itself and can be recognized when it returns. Intellectualism is the recognition of the
immanent unity of things: the constituent moments of the thing are not simply contingently
contiguous to one another; they are internally, intentionally or meaningfully related to one
another. Only thus can sensuous data announce or manifest a thing—or, at least, that internal
principle, that essence, by which it is one thing and by which it is recognizable. In the midst
of the sensuous experience there is an intuition of an essence, a sense, a signification. The
sensible thing is the place where the invisible is captured in the visible.
Alphonso Lingis, 1968
6

Around 1960, according to Alex Potts in his book The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative,
Modernist, Minimalist, Ad Reinhardt quipped, “[s]culpture is something you bump into when you
back up to look at a painting.”
7
Potts goes on to describe this statement as the summation of a
“long standing prejudice against sculpture, which for centuries had been considered an art that was

6
See “Translator’s Preface” written by Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp, 41. This quote is relevant insofar as
empiricism as it is relevant to phenomenology which is relevant to New Materialism. Sections
from this quote are used in the following pages. I have also included this quote to suggest that
New Materialism is an empirical way of observing the world.

7
This Ad Reinhardt quote, as cited from the introduction in Alex Potts’ art historical text The
Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (Yale University Press, 2000), p.1, has
been making its way though the channels of art historical rhetoric for years. The quote is well
known, but the origin of the quote remains unconfirmed and its exact language as cited can vary.
10
distinctively inferior to painting.”
8
Adamant about the superiority of painting, there is little doubt
that Reinhardt was questioning the integrity of sculpture. More interestingly though, judgments
about what constitutes “significant” art production aside, is that Reinhardt’s quote taken quite
literally has meanings that Morris’s Box begins to articulate a year later in 1961: specifically,
sculpture’s relationship to the activity of the body. Reinhardt unintentionally reveals a significant
insight into the potential and origin of sculpture that I am compelled to apply to art more generally.
Most obviously, he raises the question of what constitutes an artwork’s materiality, meaning, and
location, and perhaps slightly less obviously and even more intriguingly art’s complex and
interdependent relationship with the body. Reinhardt suggests the body’s implication in the
realization of sculpture as well as its reception for certain, but also painting’s dependence on
embodiment, both in terms of its making and viewing. Reading between the lines a little further
one might deduce that Reinhardt is, surely inadvertently, suggesting that art has the potential to
catch you off guard, while your focus is directed toward another objective.

If we humor this concept, and take Reinhardt’s statement literally, it encourages a more complex
and phenomenological awareness of both painting and sculpture. In this precise and literal reading
of Reinhardt’s logic, material forces (i.e., the painting, the body, the body’s movement, and the
space within which these materialities come into contact with each other), sometimes unexpectedly
are all elements of equal importance wrapped up within the event of recognizing a sculpture and
viewing a painting. These elements are “the constituent moments of the thing,” and, “are not
simply contingently contiguous to one another; they are internally, intentionally or meaningfully

8
Ibid.
11
related to one another.”
9
In Reinhardt’s anecdote, the sculpture would not have been stumbled
upon in the absence of the painting, and of course this scenario would not be possible at all in the
absence of the body. It could be argued then that, though often overlooked, the body is critical to
the realization of an artwork. Even when it is seemingly non-existent within the visually articulated
forms of an artwork, the body remains constituent within its realization. The body is often the
subject of an artwork, depicted as its content, or even enacted, as in performance art. The artist’s
body’s implication in the actual making process makes the body integral, ever present, yet this is
overlooked in art criticism and contemporary art in general. The work, labor, and physical
processes of the body are too often overshadowed by or in service to the idea or concept in which
the artist is invested, or the context in which the work is historicized. Rarely do we come into
contact with an artwork like the Box that so seamlessly collapses embodied labor processes and
material into the experiential content of the work. The Box With the Sound of Its Own Making
proposes and demonstrates that labor is perhaps animate material, as it is contingent on the body
which is, in the end, material. Ironically the discourse around the Box has yet to take on issues of
embodiment and materiality directly, focusing instead on its expressive significance within an art
historical context.

Examining how the Box has been portrayed historically, I am keen to dislodge the work from
traditional discourse, and by returning to and building upon the writing of Robert Morris articulate
new ways of reading its reception in relation to its materiality, and the impact this work has had on
the subject who experiences it. How might we be able to understand the significance of the work at
the present moment? Is it possible to consider new phenomenological, metaphorical, and

9
Lingis, “Translator’s Preface,” pp 41.
12
materialist ontologies that arise from the experience of the work in regard to the work’s sonic
performative qualities, and its three-dimensional physicality? In what ways do process, labor, and
embodiment register in the work or come to be reinstated after the fact through interpretation?

In 1970 Morris published his article “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search
for the Motivated.” He wrote: “To focus on the production end of art and to lift up the entire
continuum of the process of making and find in it ‘forms’ may result in anthropological
designations rather than art categories.”
10
New materialist theories diverge from the categorization
of knowledge and experience toward the cartographic charting of it in a manner that is similar to
Morris’s argument for a shift in focus that might result in “destinations rather than [...] categories.”
New materialism questions the notion of the human subject as paradigmatic and, with the
development of new materialism over the past twenty years, there has been within contemporary
art discourse a resurgence of issues of the embodied subject in relation to other materialities.

New materialism provides a theoretical framework that in some ways extends phenomenology in
the emancipation of philosophy from determinism and from transcendental methodologies of
material and signification. New materialism is grounded in the idea that material is unstable and
argues a reinterpretation of the world as what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant materialities,” refusing
the opposition between “animate” and “inanimate,” or “animal” and “human.” This questioning
parallels Morris’s notion or, in his words, “breaking down”, and in terms of the Box, isolating and
bringing to the foreground the “[...] bond between the artist and the environment.”
11
From a new

10
See “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated” Artforum
(April 1970) pp 42.
11
Ibid., pp 43.
13
materialist perspective, the bifurcation of the interior and exterior, or of knower/perceiver and
known or interpreted object, is false. In terms of crafting knowledge, new materialists argue that
what is in the world and what is known about things in the world cannot be separated, instead they
are constantly informing and shaping one another. This position suggests an inherently unstable
thus generative potential within the critical framework, meaning that material, and correlatively the
experience of materialities, are not fixed.

Instead of improving existing theories, new materialism cultivates neglected histories in an effort
to undermine the problematic nature of mind-matter and culture-nature dualities. New materialist
theorists Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, the authors of one of the first monographs
specifically on the theories of new materialism, have critiqued the body-mind dichotomy and have
argued for the impossibility of the separation of the two, of considering one in the absence of the
other. This is not a new concept, however, as Dolphijn and van der Tuin point out: “Benedict
Spinoza, already in 1677, claims that the mind is the idea of the body, making the body necessarily
the object of the mind. The mind and the body are the same thing, as he stresses repeatedly.” For
Dolphijn and van der Tuin, “[t]his [statement by Spinoza] is a most interesting contribution to new
materialist thinking.”
12

The terminology of new materialism has yet to lend itself to the critical discourse regarding
Robert Morris’s artistic practice, which encompasses writing, performance, and sculpture. It is
possible at this moment to separate the reception of the work of the artist into two modes. The

12
Rick, Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies,
Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities.

14
first mode asserts that at the crux of Morris’s oeuvre is a critique of modernist conventions. It
reinforces a literal and art historically relevant explanation of his work and emphasizes Morris’s
intentions to undermine assumptions, transcendent logic, order, and the purported centralized
meaning and experience of art affirmed in modernist discourse. The second mode, largely
articulated by Morris, characterizes his work as centered around phenomenological inquiry, as
exploring the interdependent relationships between embodied action and form. This second
mode, as it originates in Morris’s early writing, has significantly informed my argument that a
phenomenological reading in conjunction with new materialist perspectives forms a more
complex awareness of the Box, as well as reciprocally casting light on the uses of
phenomenology and new materialism for understanding contemporary art. The following two
sections will explore the limits of the first mode and then argue in favor of the potential of the
second mode.

15
The First Mode

Exemplifying the first mode of analysis, Hilde Van Gelder explains in her 2004 essay “Fall From
Grace” that Morris’s Box With the Sound of Its Own Making” is first and foremost an overt and
deliberate violation of modernism’s separation of the genres, by using sound in an aesthetic
domain—the visual arts—that traditionally has been condemned to silence.”
13
Also in this
category is Leanne Carroll’s evaluation of the work of Robert Morris in her 2008 essay “The
Artist as Critic: A Parodic Reading of Robert Morris’s Writing and Minimalist Sculpture”.
Central to Carroll’s thesis is Morris’s 1991 public admission that his essay entitled “Notes on
Sculpture I,” a standard-bearing text for the Minimalist movement published in 1966, was in fact
essentially a parody of the formalist criticism pervading art and art discourse of that time.
14

Both Van Gelder and Carroll claim the meaning and significance of the Box and Morris’s writing
lie in its oppositional and didactic positioning in relation to modernism. These ways of knowing
favor a historical framing of the work rather than cultivating a broader, arguably more open-
ended awareness of the work’s significance in relation to embodied or material experience.

The reading of the work as parodic stages a binary relationship between the work and
modernism, which makes it difficult to generate new perspectives around the work. As can be
understood through French philosopher Michel Serres’s argument in relation to what feminist

13
Hilde Van Gelder “The Fall from Grace. Late Minimalism’s Conception of the Intrinsic Time
of the Artwork as Matter” Interval(le)s—I, (2004) 83-97. Available online at:
http://labos.ulg.ac.be/cipa/wpcontent/uploads/sites/22/2015/07/vangelder.pdf
14
See Leanne Carroll, “The Artist as Critic: A Parodic Reading of Robert Morris’s Writing and
Minimalist Sculpture, University of Toronto Art Journal. Vol. 1 (2008) p 1.
16
theorist Lynn Hankinson Nelson terms “unreal dichotomies” and “non-exhaustive oppositions,”
“[a]n idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign.
The more you oppose one another the more you remain in the same framework of thought.”
15
If
we resist the impulse to consider the Box as solely oppositional to modernist tenets, refusing that
thinking all together, we can begin to observe the work’s complex relationship to the imprint of
labor and the body on material. As Amelia Jones states in her 2015 article “Material Traces”:
“New materialist theory provides a key method to examine how the complex of materialities in
the art ‘works’ to produce endlessly shifting meanings and values.”
16
The oppositional
interpretations of Carroll and Van Gelder do not begin to reveal the complexities among
material, embodiment, and labor reactivated by the Box and relevant to new materialism; the Box
articulates its process of making through the phenomenology of the work itself. Their readings
neglect to address this dimension, the way in which the Box is a sculptural manifestation that
illustrates what new materialist Bruno Latour calls a “new settlement,” itself offering a new way
of understanding the relationship between discourse and matter that does not privilege the former
to the exclusion of the latter. As Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman argue, discussing Latour’s
term, this is a key argument in materialist feminisms, to move “beyond discursive construction
and grapple with materiality.”
17
The essence of the Box then, in terms of material feminisms
“[..]accomplishes a deconstruction of the material/discursive dichotomy that retains both
elements without privileging either.”
18

15
Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, pg. 4
16
See Amelia Jones, “Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of
Agency,” TDR (The Drama Review), volume 59, #4 (Winter 2015) p 7.

17
Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman, ed. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press, (2008), p 6.
18
Ibid.
17
The Box is a performative work, as well as being resolutely material: the sonic traces emerging
from the box are indexical residues of the labor of making the box. If we consider the Box
through a new materialist frame work, then, we can also begin to understand that the sculpture,
as Amelia Jones describes, is perhaps an “art[work] that is not lodged in or as only a final object,
but that, in its performativity also involves materialities clearly manipulated and fore-grounded
with the processes of artistic making indicated or marked through these materials.”
19

In this way, the Box offers signs of the performance of itself being made, as if it is sculpture
performing itself. However, there exists one slight and very interesting complication in regard to
the registration of that performance within the work. Without considering the Box’s sonic
components for a moment, and considering only the highly refined geometric structure, the
walnut box, from which the sound of its making emerges, we see the limits of performativity in
relation to it. This box is indicative of what Jones cites in her essay—Karl Marx’s observation
that “‘man’s activity’ [...] assisted by ‘instruments of labor [...] effects an alteration [...] in the
material worked upon’ such that the process disappears in the product.”
20
Aside from the sonic
dimension of the Box, the viewer can see very little obvious trace of the performative or
otherwise embodied labor that in effect produced the walnut box. It was produced in such a way
that, as Marx described, the “process disappears into the product.”

The capture of the sonic traces of the embodied process necessary to the Box’s construction was
premeditated by the artist. The sculpture’s performativity—its enactment of the process of its

19
See Jones, “Material Traces,” p 6.
20
Ibid.
18
“having been made”—was recuperated into the work. Because the record of performance, i.e.,
the traces of the activity of the Box’s having been made are heard instead of visually apparent, I
would argue that the Box maintains a close proximity to what Marx describes above as the
erasure of “man’s activity.” Simply by looking at the Box, with its polished surfaces, precise
corners, and hard edges, the bodily activity that made the object is difficult to detect. Instead the
precision of the tools’ execution is relayed to the viewer, mechanical processes that enhance the
body, like a prosthesis, while simultaneously erasing the hand of Morris. The performativity of
the sculpture is expressed in a different form of media (sound). This creates a hybrid situation in
which the box exists in a transitional space, both emphasizing the process (through sound) and
erasing process (through the visual and material form of the object). The fleeting nature of the
performance (of the labor of making) is captured, catching up with the object it created, not in
order to dominate, but to co-exist. The durational characteristics of labor are conducive to the
durational nature of sound.

19
The Second Mode

In the mid 1960’s Morris began to propose an approach to art making in which there was little
conceptual or formal distinction among the final state of the work, the process that created it, the
physical properties of the materials, and other environmental circumstances.
21
One of Morris’s
objectives was to level the playing field among the different factors that converge when making an
artwork by giving equal footing to and eliminating the hierarchical structure between the process
and end product. The objective was to produce an object that clearly conveyed the process that
made it. In his article “Some Notes of the Phenomenology of Making,” Morris makes a crucial
point: “Much attention has been focused on the analysis of the content of art making – its end
images – but there has been little attention focused upon the significance of the means.”
22
How an
artwork was made should be emphasized within its final state. Morris remarks, “I was making
objects that were involved with some kind of process or literary idea of history or state that an
object might have other than a visual one.”
23
A synthesis of the inherent conditions of the body,
material, and environment would create a reciprocal and inseparable contingency between the ends
and means of an artwork in relation to the viewer’s experience of an artwork and the meaning it
proposes.

One method of achieving what Morris referred to as an “ends-means hookup” was through
systematizing—setting into motion a procedure of making in which the nature of material, bodily

21
See Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” pp 43.
22
Ibid., pp 62-66.
23
See Robert Morris, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, p 51.
20
activity, and environment were informed by and responsive to one another.
24
Morris argued that
the lacing together and interdependence of ends and means created a system that is open to
contingency of new bodies, new interpretations, and new situations.

Morris was not the first to take on these issues and was arguably expanding on the ideas and
work of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913-14 created Three Standard Stoppages, a multi-faceted
hybrid between “image” and “object” in which the artist dropped three threads, each a meter
long, onto a cloth surface, attached the threads to the cloth, cut them into three separate
rectilinear shapes, and mounted them behind glass. This work uses an idea to set into motion a
process, a process which creates the work’s form and a meaning that is grounded in the inherent
tendencies of the converging variables such as the height from which the thread was dropped, the
impact of air currents, and the friction between the thread and the surface on which it fell.
Duchamp’s use of a systematic process functions in tandem with the end product and is related to
and perhaps a precursor to Morris’s ambitions for “system-seeking” art making “where order is
not sought in a priori systems of mental logic but in the ‘tendencies’ inherent in a
materials/process interaction.”
25
Rather than a benign channel between two points—the initial
idea and its predetermined end point—Three Standard Stoppages echoes Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s argument about the “chief gain” of phenomenology: to “unite” extreme subjectivism and

24
See Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” section II, pp 62-6, where he
argues that what is systematic about a work of art comes out as information, while reducing the
arbitrariness of a works meaning.
25
Ibid., pp 62-66.
21
extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. “Rationality is precisely
proportioned to the experiences in which it is disclosed.”
26

26
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated by Colin Smith,
1958. (New York: Routledge, 2002), p 22.
22
Deliberation

In both works—Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages, and Morris’s Box With the Sound of Its
Own Making—the activity inherent in making is often implicated in the experiences of the work,
and thus imbedded in the work’s meaning. However, this implication of activity does not mean
that content and ideas are not at play; rather the location and the role of idea has shifted from a
place of definition to one of initiation, or what I will call an “idea-initiating” or “idea-defining”
process. In terms of an idea-defining practice, the work of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei
is exemplary. In this artist’s work the role of the process and action within the practice is in
service to the urgency of predetermined depiction of a political topic, theme, or issue. For
example, in March of 2016 Weiwei hosted a performance in a barren field adjacent to the
Idomeni refugee camp on the Greece-Macedonia border for a 24 year-old Syrian pianist, Nour Al
Khzam, who had been displaced by the conflicts in Syria.
27
The young performer played music
on a white mini-grand piano; the piano was situated on green artificial turf under a opaque sheet
of plastic held up by Weiwei and others to deflect the rain in a barren field adjacent to what
appeared to be temporary shelters in the distance on the Idomeni refugee camp on the Greece-
Macedonia border.
28

27
The Telegraph, “Refugee plays piano for the first time in three years after Ai Weowei brings
instrument to Idomeni camp,” March 12, 2016.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/12192212/Refugee-pianist-
performs-for-Ai-Weiwei-at-Idomeni-camp.html).
28
The twenty-minute performance echoed scenes from both Help and Magical Mystery Tour,
two Beatles movies from the 1960’s. In Help, the band, pursued by a militia and surrounded by
military vehicles, performs two numbers in a desolate field of green grass under a grey sky
before abandoning their instruments after a series of explosions. In Magical Mystery Tour John
Lennon performs I Am the Walrus on a white grand piano on an abandoned tarmac.
23
The actual experience of listening to the music and the performative activity of the pianist are
appropriated, situated within Ai Weiwei’s broader political and aesthetic concerns. The
performativity becomes only a symbolic gesture oriented toward conveying a political idea—the
current crisis in Syria. The success of the work lies in the execution of a predetermined
expression, informed by very specific political goals. The work’s meaning arguably resides in its
semiotic conveyance of an explicit political message. This approach to meaning is very different
from that of Morris and Duchamp. Both artists’ works point inward toward concerns of how
meaning is composed through the making process, in contrast to Ai Weiwei’s almost reverse
approach, in which a composition of signifiers point outward toward addressing a specific social-
political conflict.

Both Duchamp and Morris emphasize they are invested in the phenomenological tendencies of
materiality as relating to aesthetics. One way of aiming for this objective was through the
performative nature of both Three Standard Stoppages and the Box With the Sound of Its Own
Making. Morris cites Duchamp as stating “art making has to be based on other terms than those
of arbitrary, formalistic, tasteful arrangements of static forms. This was a plea as well to break
the hermeticism of ‘fine art’ and to let in the world on other terms than image depiction.”
29

These ideas Morris borrows from Duchamp link up with key concepts in feminist new materialist
theory. For example, Karen Barad emphasizes performativity as a challenge to representational
approaches to meaning. Barad argues that a move away from thinking in terms of representation

29
Marcel Duchamp as quoted by Robert Morris in his essay Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the
Phenomenology or Making,” pp 62-66.
24
and toward performativity “shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between
descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of
practice/doings/actions.”
30
This is not so far from Duchamp’s plea to “let in the world on other
terms than [...] depiction.”

Barad provides a new way to grasp the discursive elements inherent in
the Box and the challenge to representational approached to meaning that it poses. It becomes
possible to read the Box as an acute “move toward” what Barad calls “performative alternatives
to representationalism” [that]… shifts the focus from questions of correspondence [...] to matters
of practices/doings/actions.”

I am suggesting in this thesis that a phenomenological reading supported by the tenets of new
materialism—the second mode of interpretation I’m examining here—can provide a more
adequate, appropriately complex, and perhaps evolving way to theorize about the elements key to
how the Box actually functions and what it sets forth and examines, including relations among
process and product, labor and material, body and mind. Such a reading points to the limits of the
tendency to interpret the piece only in relation to modernism, as a postmodern subversion of
modernist values—the first mode examined above. The Box does not represent its making, it re-
performs its making every three-and-a-half hours as record intrinsically and indexically linked to
the original activity of its “being made.” The Box echoes what Barad has described above, as
Morris has used performativity to challenge representational approaches to meaning.

30
Karen Bared, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes
to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, 3 (spring 2003).
25
Because of how the Box functions as a work in time and space, as the elements of labor and
process, and material and product come within proximity of each other, there is a tendency to
interchange them. The term labor carries very different connotation from that of process. Labor is
much more politically charged. Neo-Marxists value labor and argue that neo-capitalism ignores
and effaces the role of labor and its signs. Therefore, labor is typically used pejoratively. Terms
like day-labor, slave-labor, and child-labor are evocative of physical and mental discomfort,
alluding to a compromised social-political status. The word labor used in this way insinuates a
profound lack of personal agency and a situation of exploitation. Process on the other hand
implies far greater agency, choice, and personal creativity—specifically in relation to art
production and art discourse. Artists choose to make art, which requires some form of labor, so
labor in this sense is far more glamorous, unless of course it is not the artist doing the heavy lifting.
Many artists outsource the less desirable, or physically challenging tasks to workers with less
agency. Furthermore, the question arises: are these practices where artistic labor is emphasized,
i.e., “labor intensive work” really about labor any more that any other task or is such a term simply
making mention of the physical effort invested into the material?

One ambition behind both new materialist theories and the phenomenological models that often
inform new materialism is to ground language in the experiences of the material world. Barad
emphasizes that this can be achieved through a “relational ontology” and a refusal of “the
representationalist fixation on ‘words’ and ‘things’ and the problematic of their relationality,
advocating instead a casual relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as
specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather
26
than ‘words’) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather that ‘things’)”
31
Through
Barad’s lens we can again understand the Box as a configuration of “specific material
phenomena,” linked causally to discursive practices. Through the first mode of reception of the
piece, as I have explained above, the Box’s meaning is positioned within a depiction of
modernist critique. This is not unlike Ai Weiwei’s recent Idomeni work grappling with the Syria
crisis, which the artist depicts. In contrast the second mode of interpretation complicates and
enriches the meaning of the Box. The work’s meaning is experienced through ongoing
“relations”, i.e., negotiation, between the labor and material phenomenon rather than a
subversive “thing” grounded in representation and signification.

Continuing to build on the notion of “relational ontology” put forth by Barad, I would like to
consider the relational ontology of the Box With the Sound of Its Own Making. Through the
perspective of relational ontology, the relations between entities are more fundamental than the
entities themselves. Entities are the synthesis of relations, i.e. relations are primary. The Box is
exemplary of relational ontology—material and labor, process and product are emphasized
simultaneously. The ontology and thus the experience of the Box and its meaning are contingent
on these relations.

There are a least two significant relationships at play with the Box, first the relation between
labor that is performed and captured and the object that is the result of that labor, and second, the
relationship between two different forms of media, one being the rigid and geometric box and the
other the recording that emerges in the form of sound waves. The latter relationship I have yet to

31
Ibid.
27
consider and it seems important to examine it in order to investigate how the box is functioning
phenomenologically on the most basic level, as an object one encounters from which sounds
emerge related in some way (without being too specific) to the object from which they emerge.
The object is rigid, geometric, precise; the sound emerging from the object is changing, i.e.,
animated and performative—one’s experience of it is temporal. It is possible to consider the
phenomenology of the Box to be similar to that of shelled life-forms. Gaston Bachelard explains
in his Poetics of Space that, in the case of a shelled organism, “[l]ife begins less by reaching
upward, than by turning upon itself.”
32
The Box, is too, in a sense turning in upon itself, with its
inanimate geometric outer shell concealing its animate innards. Bachelard goes on to emphasize
that, “[e]verything about a creature that comes out of a shell is dialectical. And since it does not
come out entirely [in the case of Morris’s Box the speaker playing the audio remains situated in
the box] the part that comes out [the sound waves] contradicts the part that remains inside.”
33

Bachelard argues that this “coming out” is part of the phenomenological process of “emergence.”

In terms of the Box what it is (i.e., processes, body, labor, machinery), that which made it (i.e.,
the walnut box) is sonically emerging while also encapsulated within what (i.e., the box) it (i.e.,
processes, body, labor, machinery) made. The contradictions played out within the box might be
pushed further in the direction that the inanimate/spatial and animate/temporal aspects of the Box
express essentially the same thing, and are part of the same trajectory collapsed together.

32
10. Gaston Bachelard. "Shells." In Poetics of Space, Mass: Beacon Press, 1969. p 109.

33
Ibid.
28
The fully realized relational ontology between the temporal and spatial aspects of the Box as
expressed earlier is key to new materialist thinking. From this perspective, where the relation
between the temporal aspects of an entity maintain an almost seamless proximity to the spatial
aspects of an entity, a perceptual collapse takes place. This suggests images as viscerally
provocative as (to use Bachelard’s words), “animals that have their heads and tails fastened
together.” It also recalls an article written by Daniel Birnbaum on Matthew Barney’s
CREMASTER cycle in Artforum in 2002, at the time of Barney’s retrospective at the Museum
Ludwig in Cologne, where the writer, explaining the culmination of the series of films made over
a nine-year span, argues,

we can now see that the vicious circle thus brought into
being is of a kind found in other mythological systems. This
kind of dazzling serpent not only chases its tail [...] but
devours large parts of its body. Chewing, digesting and
excreting its own revolving essence, it represents a system
[not unlike system-seeking art making ambitions of Morris]
in which each element seems to refer to other parts integral
to the cycle.
34

The circuitous nature of the Box and its continuous reference to the complexity of its origin as an
artwork is easily positioned within Morris’s system-seeking creative aspirations.
35
In his early

34
For further reading see: Daniel Birnbaum, “Master of Ceremony: Matthew Barney,” Artforum,
(September 2002). pp 181-186.
35
Robert Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making,” p 64.
29
writing Morris argued that considerable attention has been given to the form and content of art
making and very little to the means, and to how those means inform content. Morris stated, “I
believe there are forms to be found within the activity of making as much as within the end
products. There are forms of behavior aimed at testing the limits of possibilities involved in that
particular interaction between one’s actions and the materials of the environment.”
36
Morris
emphasizes that historically a separation was continually reinforced between ends and means. One
way of achieving this goal of reconciliation is through what Morris defines as system-seeking art
making, which includes artworks in which traces of information pertaining to the methods and
processes of the work’s production are accessible to the viewer.

In the Box the relationship between object and sound shifts quickly between materiality and
processes relating to the manipulation of materiality. This kind of relationship is the cornerstone
of new materialist theory. It is difficult to convey the experience of the actual sound of the box
being made. I was moved by the physical presence of the body (Morris’s body) evoked in the
recording; listening to the sounds of Morris making the box was an uncanny experience. The
profound sense of embodiment is perhaps impossible to articulate in writing or grasp through a
textual analysis of the work.

In the Box With the Sound of Its Own Making Morris has collapsed time, fusing the production
process that preceded the object and a material realization of form as content into a
present-moment experience. Through bridging the opposite ends of the same spectrum, the
process and the static object resist full integration but are given equal emphasis. The recording is

36
Morris, “Some Notes on the Phenomenology or Making”, p 64.
30
somewhat like a temporal drawing, an audio schematic, an intangible inscription of the animate
forces that made the “inanimate” box. There is a perceptual collapse.

31
Conclusion

As I have noted in seeking to articulate a new and fuller reading of the Box, in contrast to its
historical understanding as a rebuke of modernism, new materialist thought offers a fresh
perspective. New materialism also benefits from the exchange. The Box functions as a possibly
paradigmatic articulation of the relatively recent and still developing theory, expanding its
intellectual domain.

The insights of new materialism assist in the recovery of, and build upon, the phenomenological
perspectives articulated by Morris in his early writing. Through this recovery, the meaning of the
Box becomes less literal and limited to historical and contextual interpretation as a disruptive and
subversive object—not simply an attempt to shut down or defeat modernism. What is achieved
through new materialism is a generative and meaningful understanding grounded in the work
itself that emphasizes its experiential nature. It becomes a beginning instead of an ending,
ruminating on the nature of things and how they relate. This read maintains a critical proximity
to the elements making up the work and does not position the work. Through new materialism
and phenomenology we can understand the sculpture less as as a didactic illustration and more as
a system of interdependent elements forming one another. By focusing less on context and more
on elements of material, performance, and labor, through the lens of new materialism
interpretations of the Box are freed from from interpretations largely reliant on depiction and
representation. The Box can truly function as it was perhaps intended to by Morris and in its
sheer nature as a work. Through a basic understanding of new materialism, the performative
animate life of material is underscored, and we can get more out of the work; and the simple
32
objective to “stuff time back into the object” that Morris was made by hand is maintained and
given new life.
37
The Box and new materialist thought can help us reconsider the act of making
not in terms of judging what types of making are considered significant or superior, but rather in
terms of the origin of making, not so much as why but how, through its many material,
performative, seen and unseen contingencies.
All of this serves as an excellent example of how specific artworks are interpreted and positioned
changes over time. In this instance a fifty-year old piece comes to have its meaning enriched
while also offering an insightful explication of a relatively new intellectual theory. We find that
a piece such as the Box can take on a plurality of meanings over time and maintain a critical
relevance. It is a reminder of our constant need to respect the fluid, always evolving, nature of art
and its interpretation.

37
Jeffery Weiss. Robert Morris, Object Sculpture, 1960-1965, New Haven, London, Yale
University Press, 2013. p 13.
33
Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Heckman, ed. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press. 2008.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1958), tr. M. Jolas. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon
Press, 1969.

Birnbaum, Daniel. “Master of Ceremony: Matthew Barney,” Artforum (September 2002), pp
181-186.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia, ed. Robert Morris. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press/October
Files, 2013.

Carroll, Leanne. “The Artist as Critic: A Parodic Reading of Robert Morris’s Writing and
Minimalist Sculpture,” University of Toronto Art Journal, Toronto, Canada: University
of Toronto, 2008.

Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann
Arbor, MI: Open Humanities, 2012. E-book available online at:
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cartographies.pdf?c=ohp;idno=11515701.0001.001; accessed April 20, 2016.

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967), pp 12-23.

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UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1991.

Jones, Amelia. “Material Traces: Performativity, Artistic ‘Work,’ and New Concepts of Agency”
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34
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract New materialism, a relatively recent, contested, and evolving philosophy, is here used to examine the current meaning and experience of Robert Morris’s sculpture, Box With the Sound of Its Own Making. There is a reciprocal relationship in which new materialism reveals the Box and the Box reveals new materialism.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Echeverria, Benjamin (author)

Core Title Ghost

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 08/04/2016

Defense Date 08/02/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Ad Reinhardt quote,Ai Weiwei,Amelia Jones,Box with the sound of its own making,Carroll Leanne,Cremaster,Duchamp,embodiment,Gaston Bachelard,Hilde Van Gelder,Iris van der Tuin,John Cage,Judy Lockheed,Karen Barad,Karl Marx,Maurice Merleau-Ponty,new materialism.,OAI-PMH Harvest,Painting,phenomenology,process art,Reserve Ames,Rick Dolphijn,Robert Morris,San Francisco Art Institute,Sculpture,Seattle,Seattle Art Museum,The Beatles,The Poetics of space,Three standard stoppages,USC,Why matter matters,Yale

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