Have I Reasons

Robert Morris (b. 1931) is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College, The City University of New York. His art has been shown around the world, including in retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato. He has been widely published in periodicals including Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Art in America, and October. His essays from the 1960s through the 1980s are collected in Continuous Project Altered Daily.Nena Tsouti-Schillinger is an art historian and art critic. She is the author of Robert Morris and Angst.Robert Morris (b. 1931) is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Hunter College, The City University of New York. His art has been shown around the world, including in retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato. He has been widely published in periodicals including Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Art in America, and October. His essays from the 1960s through the 1980s are collected in Continuous Project Altered Daily.Nena Tsouti-Schillinger is an art historian and art critic. She is the author of Robert Morris and Angst.

• List of Illustrations viiAcknowledgments xiIntroduction 1Indiana Street (1993) 17Writing with Davidson: Some Afterthoughts after Doing Blind Time IV: Drawing with Davidson (1993) 41The Art of Donald Davidson (1995) 51Steam (1995) 61Professional Rules (1997) 63Thinking Back about Him: On the Death of Richard Bellamy (1998) 101CÉzanne's Mountains (1998) 103Size Matters (2000) 121Threading the Labyrinth (2001) 137Solecisms of Sight: Specular Speculations (2001) 148Thoughts on Hegel's Owl (2002) 163Maybe the Angel in DÜrer (2003) 167From a Chomskian Couch: The Imperialistic Unconscious (2003) 171Toward an Opthalmology of the Aesthetic and an Orthopedics of Seeing (2004) 186Notes on Less Than (2004) 203The Birthday Boy (2004) 205Jasper Johns: The First Decade (2005) 225Chronology 257Bibliography 267Index 271

“Have I Reasons is a complex collection of writings. The book challenges the reader on many levels . . . [and] affords an insight into the mind of an influential artist of our time.” - BrontË Coe, M/C Reviews “Morris is an extremely good writer. . . . It is written so skilfully that when the essay stops there is a feeling of disappointment similar to reading an unfinished novel. . . . Many artists and writers have written about the influence of childhood on artistic work, but this is by far the most elegant and subtle I have read. . . . This is a very rich but open book. . . . [T]his book is a must have, written by an artist whose work has contributed to some of the most significant shifts in art practice of our time.” - Edward Allington, Art Monthly “Morris has consistently been one of the most well read, articulate, and intensely self conscious artists in the last one hundred years. . . . Readers of Morris’s second volume of writings will be struck by the explicitly political viewpoint of such essays, as well as by the deft handling of philosophy and prose that graces even Morris’s more polemical writing in his old age.” - Melissa Ragain, Criticism “[Robert Morris’s] career is most remarkable. And this book provides perhaps the largest reason why; he successfully navigated his way from art making to art theory with the development of a new genre of writing.” - Ben Schacter, Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts “Have I Reasons is the authoritative text for the study of Robert Morris’s later work and for the historical reconsideration of his earlier work. Unrelentingly provocative and entertaining, the writings reflect his wonderfully quirky mind, his gift for narrative, his wide learning and curiosity, and his cool, laconic style combined with mordant outrage and irony.”-W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry and author of What Do Pictures Want? “Robert Morris is one of the most important postwar American artists. Have I Reasons is a valuable resource for an understanding and reconsideration of his work and the postwar neo-avant-garde production in which it played such a pivotal role. Compared to his seminal earlier writings, those from the 1990s and beyond collected here are more insistently autobiographical, more overtly and straightforwardly political. This transformation is one that, at least in part, reflects a transformation in his visual art.”-Branden W. Joseph, author of Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde “Have I Reasons is a complex collection of writings. The book challenges the reader on many levels . . . [and] affords an insight into the mind of an influential artist of our time.” - Brontë Coe (M/C Reviews) “[Robert Morris’s] career is most remarkable. And this book provides perhaps the largest reason why; he successfully navigated his way from art making to art theory with the development of a new genre of writing.” - Ben Schacter (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts) “Morris has consistently been one of the most well read, articulate, and intensely self conscious artists in the last one hundred years. . . . Readers of Morris’s second volume of writings will be struck by the explicitly political viewpoint of such essays, as well as by the deft handling of philosophy and prose that graces even Morris’s more polemical writing in his old age.” - Melissa Ragain (Criticism) “Morris is an extremely good writer. . . . It is written so skilfully that when the essay stops there is a feeling of disappointment similar to reading an unfinished novel. . . . Many artists and writers have written about the influence of childhood on artistic work, but this is by far the most elegant and subtle I have read. . . . This is a very rich but open book. . . . [T]his book is a must have, written by an artist whose work has contributed to some of the most significant shifts in art practice of our time.” - Edward Allington (Art Monthly)