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October Books
Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris
Robert Morris is best known for his significant contributions to minimalist sculpture and antiform art, as well as for a number of widely influential theoretical writings on art. Illustrated throughout, this collection of his seminal essays from the 1960s to the 1980s addresses wide-ranging intellectual and philosophical problems of sculpture, raising issues of materiality, size and shape, anti-illusionism, and perceptual conditions.
Included are the influential "Notes on Sculpture" which in four parts carefully articulates the shifting terrains of sculpture during the 1960s, tracing its movement from the gestalt-driven unitary forms of minimalism, through permutable pieces to the formally dispersed process-oriented antiform art that appeared later in the decade, and Morris's landmark essay on "Anti Form," which marked a departure from art as object. In "The Art of Existence," Morris deftly and humorously invents three artists, who in their movement away from object-art and toward the extra-visual, reveal the limits and conditions of modern sculpture. Essays of the 1970s and 1980s reveal Morris's preoccupation with the broad conditions of memory and space, which were explored in his experiments with land reclamation and land art, with labyrinthine environments and carceral imagery. In the later essays, Morris looks at modern art's development in America, based on a framework of strategies produced by Duchamp, Pollock, and other key figures. And in a clever refiguration of an interview with Roger Denson, Morris acts out a subtle mockery of himself and his art, collapsing the high seriousness of the intended format into a playful scheme.
The Notes on Sculpture (Parts 1-4). Anti Form. Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making. The Search for the Motivated. The Art of Existence. Three Extra-Visual Works in Process. Some Splashes in the Ebb Tide. Aligned with Nazca. The Present Terms of Space. Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation. American Quartet. Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories (Or Interruptions). Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson (Or Is That a Mouse in My Paragon?)
Included are the influential "Notes on Sculpture" which in four parts carefully articulates the shifting terrains of sculpture during the 1960s, tracing its movement from the gestalt-driven unitary forms of minimalism, through permutable pieces to the formally dispersed process-oriented antiform art that appeared later in the decade, and Morris's landmark essay on "Anti Form," which marked a departure from art as object. In "The Art of Existence," Morris deftly and humorously invents three artists, who in their movement away from object-art and toward the extra-visual, reveal the limits and conditions of modern sculpture. Essays of the 1970s and 1980s reveal Morris's preoccupation with the broad conditions of memory and space, which were explored in his experiments with land reclamation and land art, with labyrinthine environments and carceral imagery. In the later essays, Morris looks at modern art's development in America, based on a framework of strategies produced by Duchamp, Pollock, and other key figures. And in a clever refiguration of an interview with Roger Denson, Morris acts out a subtle mockery of himself and his art, collapsing the high seriousness of the intended format into a playful scheme.
The Notes on Sculpture (Parts 1-4). Anti Form. Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making. The Search for the Motivated. The Art of Existence. Three Extra-Visual Works in Process. Some Splashes in the Ebb Tide. Aligned with Nazca. The Present Terms of Space. Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation. American Quartet. Three Folds in the Fabric and Four Autobiographical Asides as Allegories (Or Interruptions). Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson (Or Is That a Mouse in My Paragon?)
- GenresArt
332 pages, Hardcover
First published January 10, 1994
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About the author
Robert Morris
9 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This is Robert Morris (1931- )
This is Robert Morris (1931- )
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 21, 2008
I read from this book often. It is one of few written works to coherently explore the fundamentals of an object/sculpture.
I often consider tattooing on to my forearm the Tony Smith quote with which he open the second chapter.
Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument.
Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making and object.
-Tony Smith’s replies to questions about his six-foot steel cube.
I often consider tattooing on to my forearm the Tony Smith quote with which he open the second chapter.
Q: Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?
A: I was not making a monument.
Q: Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?
A: I was not making and object.
-Tony Smith’s replies to questions about his six-foot steel cube.
November 20, 2025
There is a case to be made for Morris as one of the finest prose-writing sculptors. This is essentially a requirement for anyone interested in process as a framework.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews