Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)


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The Homometrics of eInterviews / Brian Winkenweder

 

Abstract:Robert Morris treats the artist interview as a critical component of his studio practice. Morris conflates speaking and writing about his art by consenting only to interviews that are conducted through email, refusing to be recorded in a real-time, face-to-face dialogue. Throughout his career, Morris has published numerous theoretical essays, and it is not surprising that he would embrace email as a way to conduct an interview. Email signals a historic shift in the manner in which artists, critics and scholars communicate with one another. Therefore, we must examine the advantages and disadvantages of the eInterview. This paper asserts that eInterviews are a hybrid mode of communication, flexibly located between conversations and letters, and therefore should not be seen as the equivalent of a conventional interview. Through analysis of Morris's embrace of the eInterview, I will show how email has the capacity to dialectically synthesize the directness of speech with the circumspection of writing. eInterviews provide Morris security in what Roland Barthes called the "trap of scription" whereby the casual innocence of speech is exposed and, through writing, we censure ourselves, editing out blunders and misleading statements. Like Morris, Barthes was uncomfortable with the constraints of the recorded interview; he claimed "speech is dangerous because it is immediate and can not be taken back" (Barthes, 4). What Barthes sought was a "homometrics" whereby there is "a correct metric relation between what one has to say and the way one says it." I contend that the eInterview, for Robert Morris, provides him "homometric" equilibrium, allowing him to discuss his work and ideas in a forum that benefits from both the immediacy of speech and the reflexivity of writing.

 

Because of its action in extending our central nervous system, electric technology seems to favor the inclusive and participational spoken word over the specialist written word. Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio, and TV. Perhaps that is the reason why many highly literate people in our time find it difficult to examine this question without getting into a moral panic.

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 85

<1> In 1964 Marshall McLuhan described the dissolution of print communication in lieu of electronic media that offered immediate and convenient means for social interaction (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 85). During the following decades, his prophecy seemed prescient as the practice of letter-writing seemed to be slowly vanishing.[1] McLuhan was probably unaware that the year following the publication of Understanding Media, email began to take shape at MIT through such rudimentary file sharing programs as MAILBOX (Peter, "Email"; Abbate, 106-110). Twenty-five years later, literary historian John Brown corroborated McLuhan's claim:

The letter, it seems, is dying; but its deathbed is surrounded by an unprecedented number of specialists, who find the moribund of great clinical interest, and every one of them seems to have a diagnosis of his own. All agree, however, that the health of the letter has been undermined and finally dealt a final blow by the telephone, the telegram, the cassette, the fax, and other technical innovations that have deprived it of its raison d'etre. The written word has been vanquished by the audiovisual. The authentic "personal letter" (factitious as this can often be) has been further devaluated by the rise of computerized mail (Brown, 215). [2]

Clearly, Brown underestimated the elasticity of email as a communications forum, enabling its users to adapt it for wide-ranging activities--from composing heartfelt love-letters to deleting pornographic spam. Certainly, McLuhan and Brown had reason to lament the apparent death of letter-writing, but the seeds of its revival were sown at the very time Understanding Media was pronounced by critics as an influential oracle for the electronic age, and thriving by the time of Brown's "Reflections on the Fate of the Epistolary Art in a Media Age." In Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing before Telecommunications, William Merrill Decker claimed: "[I]t is undeniable that electronic correspondence has taken the place of much old-fashioned letter writing at the same time it has innovated the conception and possibility of epistolary communication" (Decker, 236).

<2> During the 1990s, email, as a medium for epistolary exchanges, engineered a communications renaissance as it became one of the common uses of personal computers. In 2008, the Internet Society reported more than 1.4 billion internet users (Internet Society, "Internet Usage Statistics"). Of those users, the Pew Internet Foundation reported that 91% of internet users send and read email and 56% do so daily (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 11-12). Today, email functions as one of the most essential tools people use to communicate with one another. Moreover, for academics, email offers a convenient way to conduct interviews with other scholars, artists, theorists, and critics. Understandably, then, email confirms McLuhan's key insight: "the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium--that is, of any extension of ourselves--result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology" (McLuhan, 23). Although McLuhan may have prematurely announced the diminution of written communications in the electronic age, email messages collapse space and time--the key impediments to the utility of "snail mail" granting us the capacity to share conveniently and immediately texts (and images) with others around the world: "Email has also emerged as a means of communication where nothing was easily available before--such as between professionals...for whom the cheapness of the medium is a godsend" (Crystal, 126).

<3> This paper assesses the benefits and detriments regarding the "personal and social consequences" of email, especially when it serves as a tool for conducting interviews for academic purposes. Beginning to research my dissertation topic concerning the influence of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations on the origins of conceptual art, I conducted an eInterview with the visual artist Robert Morris that began in late 1999 and ended in early 2001.[3] Morris first came to acclaim during the early 1960s and is considered an influential figure associated with such seminal twentieth-century art movements as conceptual, performance, and installation art. His "Notes on Sculpture" remains one of the most salient definitions of Minimalism. Since the 1960s, Morris has enjoyed a successful career as an internationally recognized artist and writer. The subject of numerous major exhibitions, dozens of catalogues and several monographs, Morris has also published many theoretical articles in such leading publications as Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, and October. For the past decade, Morris has refused to be recorded via video or audio; he only consents to interviews conducted by fax or email. The results of many of these eInterviews have since been published conforming to a transcript's graphic conventions. Morris insists that an interview is not a conversation; but, it is also not an epistolary exercise. To an extent, Morris has adopted the interview process as a part of his artistic practice--not only have many of his eInterviews been published, but he often incorporates dialogues into his essays an art.[4] Located between these discursive processes, eInterviews are neither spoken nor written but an amalgam of both. [5] Therefore, they are unlike conventional interviews. Email, given its immediacy, synthesizes the directness of speech with the circumspection of writing, producing a new discursive arena in which artists and scholars can interact. [6]

<4> Increasingly, eInterviews have emerged as an acceptable means for conducting fieldwork. [7] Clearly, there are many advantages to conducting an interview via email, but researchers must not make the mistake of considering eInterviews the equivalent of conducting a face-to-face interview in real time. There are numerous psychosocial differences, such as the elimination of body-language and eye-contact that distinguish these two means of gathering information. Likewise, conducting an interview via email is not the same as a phone interview since vocal-inflections cannot shade the words with connotative meanings in email. In fact, tone is notoriously difficult to gauge due to the informal conventions of email. Further, interviewers must not confuse eInterviews as the equivalent of exchanging letters with interviewees, for "snail mail" and email rely upon very different time/space dynamics and protocols. The eInterview, therefore, is neither equivalent to real-time, face-to-face or phone interviews nor is it an epistolary exchange. Rather, this mode of information gathering suggests a unique hybrid borrowing from each of these more traditional means of information gathering.

<5> I first wrote to Robert Morris by "snail mail" and asked: "Would you be willing to meet me and discuss my project?" He replied via email: "Your questions I can best respond to by e-mail. This seems the easiest and fastest way for me. Of course I'll be happy to meet with you in NYC." [8] In my e-mailed reply, I took the opportunity to ask a few questions regarding his experiences as a semi-professional baseball player and philosophy student at Reed College, an elite liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon:

I read that you played semi-professional baseball? Where did you play? What position did you play? ...I am curious about your days at Reed College. Were you exposed to Wittgenstein at this time? Philosophical Investigations was not published until 1953, so it seems unlikely you would have been exposed to it in a philosophy course, but perhaps you read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus there. And how did a young man from Kansas City land in Portland, Oregon?

A few days passed before he responded in a polite, if terse tone. Many of his answers were incomplete sentences: "I played baseball in the midwest. Position was catcher... Read Merleau-Ponty at Reed but not L.W. Although Pragmatism was the big ticket out there at the time I didn't take to Dewey. Learned of Reed from a friend." [9] I quickly realized that extracting long-winded exposition from Morris would require deft skill and delicate, if not lucky timing.

<6> Broaching the right topic at the right time made all of the difference for how energetically Morris would respond; the key required limiting the number of topics and questions per email. Part of the advantage an eInterviewee gains is a beneficial shift in subtle social mores. That is, to respond in curt or one-word answers in a face-to-face dialogue can quickly devolve to the point of rudeness, as the effort on both parties needs to be proportional if the interview is to generate any substantive energy and interest. As I conducted this formal eInterview with Morris, I also met with him informally on several occasions. During our first meeting we engaged in a long-lasting, broad-ranging conversation. Inevitably, information that I gleaned during this conversation catalyzed my subsequent e-mailed questions and eliminated the need to ask about critical issues.

 

The Interdicted Interview

 

<7> At some point during the early 1990s, Robert Morris all but stopped conducting interviews in real-time, face-to-face settings. However, he granted numerous interviews, a few of which were subsequently published. At this time, Morris began to experiment with the interviewing process, treating it as a supplement to both his artistic and theoretical praxis. Take, for instance, his "interview" with art critic Roger Denson (I use safety quotes here because to call the resulting text an interview is to stretch the definition of interview past its denotative function). By indirectly responding to thirteen queries, submitted in writing by Denson, Morris manipulated the conventional artist interview to produce an original, unique artist's statement. Instead of systematically answering Denson, Morris wrote an essay in which the questions appear as supplements exerting little or no influence on the artist's commentary. The resulting text, entitled "Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson (or Is That a Mouse in My Paragone?)," is unprecedented as an interview of an artist. The final essay in a collection of Morris's writings, Continuous Project Altered Daily, its publication coincided with the artist's 1994 retrospective at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  

<8> In his reply, Morris compartmentalized diverse aspects of his oeuvre into nine, cleverly-named alter-egos such as Body Bob, Major Minimax, Lil Dahlink Felt, Mirror Stagette, Dirt Macher and Blind. He also appropriated the brick-hurling Ignatz Mouse from George Herriman's comic strip Krazy Kat as rhetorical flourish to enhance his written answers to Denson's questions.

Hey, what's going on, Ignatz? Everybody is rolling on the floor and laughing. I've never seen such a hysterical gang of assassins. What, you read that ticket about our 'new tone of ironic self-reference?' And what? Body Bob threw the I-Box at the Major who then bent Stagette out of shape with the Corner Piece and Blind smeared cup grease on Dirt Macher's ... wait a minute, Ignatz. You started this bedlam by throwing bricks at everyone, I bet....Get Body Bob out of that Kraut helmet immediately...No, I did not give it to Lil Dahlink Felt with the Card File. How could you think such a thing, Ignatz? You are so surly today. Why don't I punch my own ticket? (Morris, 1993, 307).

The text reads as a sustained series of intertextual jokes referencing many of his most well known works of art. As a part of one question, Denson asked "And has your work addressed this progression with its new tone of ironic self-reference? Have you-or the art world as a whole-moved closer toward self-parody or a parody of history?" This question appears near the top of page 290; seventeen pages before Morris's essay quotes it directly-one of the few instances in the text in which a direct correlative between Denson's questions and Morris's response can be located.

<9> Given this experimental approach to answering Denson, Morris emasculates his interlocutor. Denson is granted no agency in the interview because the potential for conversation is forsaken; creative monologue replaces interrogative dialogue. That is, by responding in private to questions submitted in advance, Morris eliminates the frisson and appeal implicit in real-time, face-to-face interviews. This empowered position grants Morris a safe locus whereby he can simultaneously participate in an interview and yet shield himself from unguarded moments. Moreover, this rhetorical space, facilitated by today's electronic resources, I argue, offers a dialectical resolution between speaking and writing.

 

The Homometrics of eInterviews

 

<10> Roland Barthes explored the interplay between writing and speaking within the context of interviews; his neologisms help contextualize Morris's discomfort with the taped interview. Barthes described his own unease:

Now, why don't I enjoy interviews? The basic reason has to do with my ideas on the relationship between speech and writing. I love writing. I love speech only within a very specific framework ...I'm always uneasy when speech is used somehow to repeat writing, because then I have an impression of uselessness: I could not say what I want to say any better than by writing it, and to repeat it by talking about it tends to diminish it (Barthes, 322-3).
This, too, is Morris's dilemma; although his quandary suggests a double-remove, for his customary practice is to create art, and after a period of reflection, write essays about it. To speak about that which he has initially created, and subsequently written about, suggests the law of diminishing returns. For Barthes, interviewees experience a peculiar kind of anxiety-we could call it aphasiaphobia-in which one is at a loss of words at the very moment when their commentary is expected:
What purpose does an interview serve? I know that it's a rather traumatic experience that provokes in me an "I have nothing to say" response, a more or less unconscious defense. ...All that has to do with the rightness of writing and speech, or to use a pedantic word, "homometer," where there is a correct metric relation between what one has to say and the way one says it (Barthes, 323).
Barthes claims the interview is an "inescapable social game" (Barthes, 322). That is, intellectual workers, be they writers, artists, critics, have an unspoken obligation to allow for a degree of accessibility with their audience, especially after publishing a book or opening an art exhibition. The interview, in short, is a part of the game of publicly presenting one's work, no matter how awkward or trivial this activity may seem. Therefore, to avoid aphasic dissonance, Morris embraces the eInterview because it grants the possibility for homometric equilibrium.

<11> To this end, eInterviews offer artists and writers a forum whereby they can grant access to their audience and yet maintain a safe distance from them. The chance to respond to questions in the comfort of one's home or office without the interviewer hanging on an interviewee's every word alleviates aphasiaphobia. Since long stretches of time can elapse between communications, interviewees can initially draft and subsequently re-write their responses with confidence that their message will be accurately conveyed. On one hand, as a detriment to eInterviews, spontaneity is sacrificed; on the other hand, a benefit gained is the elimination of the trauma implicit with real-time, face-to-face interviews (Bampton and Cowton, 8).

<12> Moreover, email offers interviewers and interviewees an opportunity to explore issues in a manner that real-time conversations cannot replicate. Just as eInterviews foster immediacy, they also enable participants to reflect and research before responding to one another. For instance, a year after our eInterview began, I asked Morris about his installation of a triangular labyrinth included in the Hirshhorn's 10th anniversary exhibition in 1984. I wrote: "in some of your previous labyrinths (or at least the one constructed for the Hirshhorn in the mid 80s) you placed a mirror above the structure, granting the viewer/participant a sense of their position vis-à-vis the whole...Do you think mirrors placed in such a way ironically serve to disorient the viewer, creating a sensation of further entrapment? Are they to inform the viewer or to create a kind of Panoptican of (self) surveillance?" Less than seven hours later, he responded:

A Labyrinth with a mirror!!! Perish the thought. Was this actually done at the Hirshhorn? I thought they only installed mirrors above beds in certain motels of questionable repute. I've always liked to have a place where one could climb up to look over the labyrinth...But never a mirror. The two experiences-seeing the plan, being inside-should be separate. Maybe the mirror was some security guard's idea. I know that after the Philadelphia Labyrinth was finished and about to open the fire department appeared and insisted that a passageway be cut from the outside to the center, but apparently somebody paid them off since this was not done. [10]

An hour later, I replied with the citation and a quote from my source, an Artnews review:

Morris has created a gray triangular maze in which no wrong turns are possible. A mirror on the ceiling above the work offers the visitor the reassurance of being aware at all times of where he is in relation to the entire piece. Yet as he moves toward the small room at the heart of the maze, through narrow corridors wide enough for only one person, he begins to sense that no mid route escape is possible. The corridors seem to turn on and on within a space impossibly small to contain them all; the mirror's reflection no longer provides any real comfort (Fleming, 87).
The following morning, Morris wrote back disparagingly: "As for the mirror. I guess it happened. It is painful to contemplate.[11] "

<13> These exchanges reveal the advantages of an eInterview; I was able to provide my interviewee with irrefutable evidence about the exhibition of his own work of which even he was unaware. In turn, he responded with a tone conveying honest, sincere shock. A few months after this exchange, I conducted archival research at the Hirshhorn and read notes regarding this exhibition compiled by Joseph Shannon, then Chief of the Department of Exhibits and Design (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, record Unit 516; Box 10 of 11). No mention was ever made regarding the decision to mount a mirror above Morris's labyrinth. If the mirror was a concession to a fire marshal, this decision, understandably, may not have a paper trail. For my research, this anecdote revealed a gap between an artist's intention for an installation and an art institution's execution of the same installation done in the artist's absence. More importantly, the medium of email, given its capacity to collapse space and time-or, in McLuhan's terms "the extensions of man"-I was quickly able to resolve a disparity between Morris's intention, and what had actually transpired. Had our interview taken place in real time or through "snail mail" the issue would likely have remained unresolved (due to time constraints) or forgotten (due to long lapses in time between letters received).

 

Scription's Trap

 

<14> Shortly after I began my eInterview, Anne Bertrand, a scholar working on behalf of the contemporary art museum in Lyon also began to conduct an eInterview with Robert Morris. While I was interviewing Morris as a primary component of research for my dissertation, Bertrand's interview was intended for publication in an exhibition catalogue. On January 10, 2000, Morris emailed Bertrand: "For the past decade I have done interviews by fax whenever possible. That is to say, I receive the questions by fax (although email is just as good) and reply here at my word processor rather than in to a microphone. . . .[A] conversation is not an interview, and an interview can never be a conversation." (Morris, 161). He goes on to tell her that he is not an artist for whom

words seem to erupt ...like a gushing spring. . . . I, on the other hand, am at the other end of the scale--being both wary and enamored with the precise linguistic formulation. I've always seen the relation of the visual to the verbal as conflicted. . . .For me, that exquisite torture of trying to find a precise answer to a given question is best done in solitude (Morris, 2000, 161-2).
A curious aspect of this publication is that Bertrand's questions were replaced by bold-face headings whereas Morris's replies to her absent questions were reproduced in full. Here, the e-interviewer is not only neutered, she is virtually erased from the exchange.

<15> Further, we have no indication how this text was edited. An e-interview can be a-temporally packaged for a reading public since the "thread" need not be published based on the chronology of the emailed exchanges. The elasticity in which an eInterview can be presented differs substantively from traditional interviews, especially as they are transcribed. This distinction, then, suggests an advantage for eInterviews; since they are not transcribed, they need not be ensnared by another Barthesian concept: "the trap of scription." Barthes explains:

[W]e lose an innocence; not that speech is in itself fresh, natural, spontaneous, truthful, expressive of a kind of pure interiority; quite on the contrary, our speech is immediately theatrical, it borrows its turns from a whole collection of cultural and oratorical codes: speech is always tactical; but in passing to the written word, it is the very innocence of this tactic. . . that we erase; innocence is always exposed; in rewriting what we have said we protect ourselves, we keep an eye on ourselves, we censure and delete our blunders, our self-sufficiencies (or our insufficiencies), our irresolutions, our errors, our complacencies, sometimes even our breakdowns. . .speech is dangerous because it is immediate and cannot be taken back (Barthes, 3-4).
And, yet, the immediacy of speech is precisely what is forsaken by the eInterview. Scription, located between writing and speech, the rhetorical mode of the eInterview, does not foster uncensored spontaneity; it prohibits the risk of blunder, those moments in which an artist may speak openly without keeping an eye on themselves. [12]

<16> The first interview Morris conducted via fax (the telecommunications equivalent of email) was with W.J.T. Mitchell and published in Artforum. Mitchell's introduction claims: "I taped an interview with Robert Morris a few hours before the February opening of his current retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. . . . Mercifully, most of this conversation turned out to be inaudible on the tape. Instead, we offer here an edited sequence of the faxed exchanges that occurred in the days just before and after the opening" (Mitchell and Morris, 86). The operative adjective "mercifully" suggests that much of the conversation was not worthy of publication (even if that was the rationale for recording). And, what does "edited sequence" entail? It could mean typos were fixed and grammar was polished, or that questions and answers were altered or eliminated. Perhaps, even the sequence of faxes was rearranged. Unlike face-to-face interviews, eInterviewees have complete control over how revealing they will be. The influence of genteel manners functions differently in written exchanges than with spoken exchanges. It feels rude to ask variations of a basic query via fax or email once the artist has responded to a topic, even if only superficially. However, in conventional interviews, questions can be asked organically whereby the potential for digging deeper into the intentions and motivations of the artist exists due to the psychological tension of face-to-face exchanges-a tension eliminated by eInterviews. Certainly, most interviewers come with prepared questions, but sensitive interviewers understand the value of straying from their scripts to prod and cajole the interviewee into revealing insights not yet articulated.

 

The Art of eInterviews

 

<17> Mitchell begins by asking Morris why he hates interviews. Since this line of questioning initiates their faxed exchanges, it suggests that the "taped interview" was a ruse justifying their idiosyncratic, collaborative text. Morris's answer, however, validates his on-going refusal to be taped:

I hate interviews because, (a) if verbalizing about the work, I would rather write; (b) they're part of the being-an-artist game; (c) they are performances, pretending to be conversations.... This interview might become an artwork if we worked on it long enough-revised, rewrote, added, subtracted, etc" (Mitchell and Morris, 87).
In Morris's mind, not only are conversations not interviews, but interviews are a kind of performance. Oddly, though, the eInterview has the potential to become a collaborative work of art, if the interviewer and interviewee "worked on it long enough." Unstated, but implied, is the depth of sincerity; Morris implies that the performance-interview is insincere because of both party's hyper-awareness of the presence of a recording device, whereas the eInterview, if it is labored over long enough, could become a sincere work of art because the written exchanges might rise to the level of literature.

<18> In June 1995, Art in America published "Robert Morris: Formal Disclosures," an interview between the artist and art historian Pepe Karmel. In the introduction, Karmel explained the manner in which the interview was conducted:

Morris decided that he did not want to do a spoken interview but preferred to respond to my questions in written form. ...It seems to me that Morris's responses to my questions reveal a kind of alternation between the urge to reveal and the urge to conceal-and that this ambivalence...constitutes an essential element in Morris's work (Karmel, 88).
Just as importantly, conducting an interview in this manner eliminates extra-literary modes of communication: vocal inflections, hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language. While these features are not manifest in transcripts from real-time dialogues, they do exert an impact. Barthes recognizes this loss as an element of the "trap of scription"--for editing out the "uhms" and adding punctuation alters the spoken word by eliminating the body: "It should be understood . . . that what is lost in transcription is quite simply the body--at least this exterior (contingent) body which, in a dialogue, flings toward another body, just as fragile (or frantic) as itself, messages that are intellectually empty, the only function of which is in a way to hook the Other and to keep it in a state of partnership" (Barthes, 5). A sensitive interviewer can gauge an interviewee's mood and ascertain when more probing questions will elicit new information or perhaps when a deadend has been reached which the subject will reveal no more on a topic. That is, the inorganic aspect of eInterviews prohibits phenomenological triggers, the extra-literary features of human interaction that provide emphasis, shape reactions, and influence connotations.

<19> The isolation between the participants of an eInterview shifts the power dynamic. An interviewer has a surplus of control in a real-time discussion as s/he is empowered to ask the next question, change the subject, incorporate non-sequiturs, or re-state previous questions; therefore, the interviewee is at the mercy of the interviewer who directs the conversational flow. Interviewers, especially in the "gotcha" mode of mass media, can easily abuse this power. Barthes claims: "a somewhat sadistic relationship is established between the interviewer and the interviewee, where it's a question of ferreting out some kind of truth from the latter by asking aggressive or indiscreet questions to get a reaction out of him" (Barthes, 323). Certainly, such power inequity is eliminated by the eInterview, as the interviewee need not respond to all questions and his extra-literary reactions are not witnessed. But, does the electronic arena foster an equal dispersal of power? At its essence, the interviewee possesses privileged information, especially regarding intention, influence and motivation; the interviewer succeeds when s/he solicits kernels of information not already in the bibliographic record. Morris's insistence on conducting interviews via email enables a calculating control by the interviewee over the interviewer; in many ways eInterviews inversely distribute power.

<20> The need for authority in the work of Robert Morris was articulated by Donald Kuspit in his incisive essay "Authoritarian Abstraction." Analyzing the Castelli-Sonnabend poster of Morris wearing the clichèd props of sadomasochistic bondage, Kuspit claimed: "The apparent sincerity of the self-portrait is belied by its self-advertising character, which makes clear that it is propaganda for Morris's art-self" (Kuspit, 34). In the context of eInterviews, this image functions as a graphic metonym for Morris's projected self as an interviewee usurping the interviewer's agency. Kuspit suggests: "In his vanity--and perhaps by reason of it--Morris is an authority figure, exhibited for our acclaim. But he appears to us in chains, which however theatrical they may appear in the context of an art exhibition, suggest a troubled, self-flagellating, imprisoned--at least in the role of artist--authority figure" (Kuspit, 36). Speaking of this image, Morris in his interview with Mitchell claimed: "As for memorable images, one I consider a total failure and mistake, the 1974 poster of myself with chains and a Nazi helmet, seems destined for a Guggenheim T-shirt" (Mitchell and Morris, 87). If destined for overt commercialization, why is it a mistake? It appears as though Morris's self-effacing irony also serves as shameless self-promotion. [13]

<21> In 1997, Art Monthly published "Cut Felt" an interview between Robert Morris and Richard Williams, a British art historian. Although Morris was in Leeds for the opening of an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute and to give a lecture at the University of Leeds, he insisted that Williams conduct the interview via email. Their eInterview unfolded during the course of four days, from May 23-26, 1997. Yet, the publication of this eInterview is not presented as a series of emailed exchanges. Rather, the text is repackaged to look like a conventional transcript, as if the exchanges occurred in real time. Indeed, one section even reads as if the interviewer interrupts the interviewee to clarify a question. Morris writes: "Maybe I'm not picking up on what sense of representation you have in mind here ..." and the text trails off with an ellipsis. Williams responds: "I was thinking of the interview you did with Rosalind Krauss in 1995 for artpress" (Williams and Morris, 9). In this case, the script suggests seamless unfolding in time, but that was clearly not the case. Just as the "trap of scription" irrevocably alters the recording of an interview for publication, so too do eInterviews undergo a transformation to correspond with the graphic conventions of published interviews.

 

eInterviews as Art

 

<22> The lecture Morris delivered at the University of Leeds, "Professional Rules" was previously published in Critical Inquiry. In this essay, Morris incorporates two distinct voices defined by the roles of "you" and "I". He explains:

In the studio I ask myself this question: What will happen if I do a and then b? After that I ask further, Now what happens after c and then d? ... And you--that is to say, R. Morris; and I will adopt the you to address him from here on in--want to say that your questions in the making not only preceded the object but resulted in it? (Morris, 1997, 299).
Interrogating the performance of interviews as imagined through the rhetoric of a hypothetical conversation, Morris seems to realize his suggestion to W.J.T. Mitchell that an interview could become a work of art. In this eInterview, Williams asks: "Watching you deliver 'Professional Rules' . . . I was interested in to what extent it might be regarded as a form of performance." Morris responds: "Of course delivering any lecture is a kind of performance . . . since a number of people came up to me afterwards with requests to read the text, I just assume that as a lecture it was probably a failure" (Williams and Morris, 7). Curiously, the performance was not a failure, only the lecture.

<23> Indeed, Morris treats the artist interview as a critical component of his studio practice. Imagine my surprise when I received the following unsolicited email from the artist. Not only is this email fashioned as a dialogue, but the interviewee turned the tables on me by becoming my interrogator. Issuing an enigmatic challenge, he framed our relationship as a Wittgensteinian "language game," assigning me the task of explaining it in my reply:

Chapter 1
A and B meet. They speak about things that have to do with art. They ask and answer each other's questions, tell stories, make judgments, agree and disagree. What they do might be described as a language game that only those familiar with art can play.

Chapter 2
B goes home and makes an object, X.

Chapter 3
A and B meet again.
A asks B, "What is that X?"
B says, "That X is art."
They speak about things that have to do with X. They ask and answer each other's questions about X, tell stories, make judgments, agree and disagree about X.
Then A says, "The production of X is like what we're doing here."
B says, "Huh?"
"Art game," says A.
"Huh?" says B.
"I'll explain in Chapter 4 which you will find in your email when you return from Europe," says A.

You are A. [14]

Given that time and space constraints are not a part of the eInterview a conundrum emerges with such an exchange. Is this a part of the interview? Certainly, this is not a letter. It is unlikely to occur in a face-to-face conversation; rather, a missive like this suggests the elasticity of email, opening up a new form of communication between artists and scholars. Therefore, one must ask, are all emailed exchanges between artists and their interlocutors a part of the interview?

<24> Morris repeatedly uses dialogues in his work. Morris's most recent publication, "From a Chomskian Couch," consists of a script in which he plays the role of an analysand and casts Noam Chomsky as his psychoanalyst (Morris, 2003). Like the numerous eInterviews Morris has allowed to be published, this essay suggests one who enjoys talking about his art and yet fears doing so. This fictional dialogue examines the psychological difficulties artists face when attempting to make meaningful art after 9/11:

Robert Morris: It was nothing we consciously signed up for. It was just a tradition, this scouting of the [mega-image]...We never had a name for it. Now I'm trying to find one. But if I found it could I say it? Would it be a part of a private language that everybody from Wittgenstein on said couldn't exist? Maybe I could whisper that name to Mary or to Peter...
Dr. Chomsky: Successful communication between Peter and Mary does not entail the existence of shared meanings or shared pronunciations in a public language...
Robert Morris: But we wanted to be public. We believed in it. Something open to all. Nothing hidden, private. Everything above board and transparent ... (Morris, 2003, 689).
While the context for this exchange involves how artists might be enlisted to help heal our collective trauma after 9/11, Morris simultaneously articulates the necessary conditions for successful communication, be it in the form of a text, spoken words, or a work of art. And, more importantly, he reveals the cultural value of openness and transparency in communications. To this end, Morris's use of textual dialogues in general, and his insistence on eInterviews in particular, suggests the power of a new rhetorical hybrid that email fosters--homometric equilibrium--a text simultaneously spoken and written.

<25> In another email to me, Morris wrote:

I think my art has always been a kind of therapy, or even a kind of prophylaxix [sic] against constantly sensed threats--just an endless labor of putting up hex signs to ward off the terror. Primitive, semi-magical fetishes and totems to hide behind. Didn't Nietzsche say something about when we look down we can see beneath our thoughts that which is always simpler, darker?[15]

In this passage, homometric equilibrium is achieved. For the interview, when successful, circumvents the hex signs, and produces moments of clarity for both the interviewer and the interviewee. Morris lets down his guard with me, and in conversational tone, writes honestly about his psyche as an artist. Here, he acknowledges his authoritarian defensiveness, exposes his vulnerability, and offers a synthetic equivocation between them. Nonetheless, while Morris requires this electronic forum to transcend the insincerity of the interview-performance masquerading as conversation, my experience suggests the eInterview cannot replace the traditional interview. Like speech, email is immediate and ephemeral; like writing, email is circumspect and reflexive. eInterviews promote homometric equilibrium by operating in the interstice between speaking and writing, but they do not benefit from the space-time limitations that traditional interviews require to elicit concise, unexpected insights. The extra-literary features of face-to-face interviews enable a mode of verbal communication that eInterviews do not replicate. Conversely, eInterviews produce discursive forums in which interviewers and interviewees might interact with immediate spontaneity and innovation as well as lexical precision and circumspection.

 

Works Cited

 

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

Angell, David and Heslop, Brent. The Elements of Email Style, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Bampton, Roberta, and Cowton, Christopher. "The E-Interview." Forum: Qualitative Social Research 3.2 May 2002:
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-02/2-02bamptoncowton-e.html.

Barthes, Roland. Grain of the Voice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Brown, John. "What Happened to Mme. De Sevigne? Reflections on the Fate of the Epistolary Art in a Media Age" World Literature Today 64.2 (Spring 1990): 215-221.

Collot, Milena and Belmore, Nancy. "Electronic Language: A New Variety of English," in Jan Aarts, Pieter de Haan, and Nelleke Oostdijk, Eds. English Language Corpora; Design, Analysis and Explanation, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.

Crystal, David. Language and the Internet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Decker, William Merrill. Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1998. 233-4.

Fleming, Lee. "Issues are the Issue." ARTnews January, 1985: 84-89.

Hale, Constance and Scanlon, Jessie. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, New York: Broadway Books, 1999.

Internet Society, "Internet Usage Statistics" 2008: www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.

Karmel, Pepe. "Robert Morris: Formal Disclosures." Art in America June, 1995: 88-95, 117.

Kuspit, Donald. "Authorial Abstraction," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36: 1 (1977): 25-38.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Mitchell, W.J.T., and Morris, Robert. "Golden Memories." Artforum April, 1994: 86-91, 133.

Morris, Robert. "Robert Morris Replies to Roger Denson (Or Is That a Mouse in My Paragone?)" Continuous Project Altered Daily. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993: 287-315.

---. From Mnemosyne to Clio: The Mirror and the Labyrinth. Milan: Skira, 2000.

---. "Professional Rules," Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter, 1997): 298-322.

---. "From a Chomskian Couch: The Imperialistic Unconscious," Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer, 2003): 678-694.

Muller, John P. and Richardson, William J. Eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Naughton, John. A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999.

Nialta, James. "The Use of Email Interviewing as a Qualitative Method of inquiry in Educational Research," British Educational Research Journal 33 (December, 2007): 963-976.

Peter, Ian. "Email" Nethistory, 2004: www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html.

Pew Internet and American Life Project. "Data Memo. Re: Home Broadband Adoption" (John P. Horrigan and Aaron Smith) June, 2007: www.pewinternet.org.

Williams, Richard and Morris, Robert. "Cut Felt," Art Monthly July-August, 1997: 7-10.

 

Notes

 

[1] Letter writing will never completely vanish; however, the illusory collapse of time and space that telecommunications create alter the function of personal letters. An expert in the history of letter-writing, William Merrill Decker suggested: "If the era of telecommunications begins long before the hand inscribed exchange shows signs of receding, the perpetuation of older forms of correspondence extends well into the twentieth century and, despite the common perception that 'nobody writes letters anymore,' the older forms remain with us still....Affordable long-distance telephone has undoubtedly reduced the volume of family letters and correspondence between friends committed to sustaining relationships over distances that prevent regular meeting. Moreover, the letter has become increasingly occasional and automated, as the genres of the greeting card and the Christmas family newsletter prove. Changing conditions in the experience of space and time have meanwhile lowered the intensity of the letter's older, genre-reflexive themes" (Decker, 233-4). [^]

[2] Brown makes this assertion in a special issue of World Literature Today devoted to the death of letter writing. In his "reflections," he concludes: "In this agitated and uncertain time of rapid and dramatic change, the decline, indeed the demise of the letter constitutes one of the minor, less spectacular signs that we are entering, or have entered, a new "electronic" phase of world history. ...Still, its ghost never ceases to haunt a minority among us. And perhaps, who knows, one day it may rise again from the tomb"(Brown, 221). Although my essay suggests that email is such a "ghost rising from the tomb", the main emphasis focuses on how this forum for conducting qualitative, unstructured interviews differs from both spoken and written forms of exchange and offers new opportunities. [^]

[3] Given that our replies generated a continuous "thread"-I came to conceive of all our emailed exchanges as part of a single "interview", even as it spanned several years. [^]

[4] Key essays using dialogue as a rhetorical device include "Professional Rules" and "From a Chomskyian Couch." Key uses of dialogue in his art include Hearing (1972) which incorporates a three-and-one-half hour audiotape of a mock congressional hearing format; Voice (1974) which consists of a three-and-one-half hour sound-montage derived from a script for eight voices; and The Birthday Boy (2004) which relies on two art historians lecturing on Michelangelo's David. [^]

[5] Numerous scholars studying the internet have made similar observations. Email has been described as "faster than a speeding letter, cheaper than a phone call" (Angell and Heslop, 1); "a strange blend of writing and talking" (Naughton, 143); and "a cross between a conversation and a letter" (Hale and Scanlon, 3). [^]

[6] Curiously, two researchers have suggested email shares many discursive similarities with the rhetorical conventions of public interviews-see Collot and Bellmore. [^]

[7] Professional journals such as Learning Disability Practice and Mental Health Practice publish email interviews in each issue; recently, James Nialta advocated email interviewing as a productive means of conducting fieldwork as "the method increas[es] reflexivity by providing both time and space for academics to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience" (Nialta, 963). [^]

[8] Email from Robert Morris, 4 December 1999. [^]

[9] Email from Robert Morris, 8 December, 1999. [^]

[10] Email from Robert Morris, 24 March, 2000. [^]

[11] Email from Robert Morris, 25 March, 2000. [^]

[12] This point parallels issues raised by the "debate" between Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida regarding Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter" (1844). In this discourse, key post-structuralist positions in general and deconstruction in particular, are staked out, especially regarding the polarity between speech and writing. Irene Harvey wrote: "This structure is, not by chance, precisely that of Western metaphysics' notion of sign and, in turn, of its concept of writing as merely a sign for speech. Derrida's early work, in particular, is focused on the target of changing the concept of the sign, of representation and of writing. He insists that the definition of the sign as merely a sign for something else does not adequately represent or illustrate what a sign actually is and does" (See Irene Harvey, "Structures of Exemplarity in Poe, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida" in Muller and Richardson, 253). [^]

[13] This image has been widely reproduced. See the exhibition catalogue Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, New York: Solomon Guggenheim, 1994. 257; a picture of the T-shirt was reproduced on the first page of "Golden Memories" (Mitchell and Morris, 86). [^]

[14] Email from Robert Morris, 16 February, 2000. [^]

[15] Email from Robert Morris, 9 February, 2000. [^]

 

 

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