As evidenced in various ongoing discussions running through Dispatx we are always seeking ways to open up the creative method to further scrutiny, as well as questioning how it might actively generate new work. In relation to specific processes at work in a number of projects in the current edition, as well as to the creative method in general, a recent encounter with texts by the American artist Robert Morris might be of interest. Connections with certain projects in the Appropriation in Creative Practice edition are obvious – such as the shared appropriation of a theoretical text in Aiden Boulder's Building on a Country Path – but there are other, less obvious commonalities too, not least in Scott MacLeod's Betaville project, where acknowledged gaps, lulls and obstacles in our engagement with the creative process place the work on a fertile border between openness and impenetrability.



Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings, an extended series of works started in 1973, together with references to texts published in relation to them, might offer a perspective on the complex exchanges between author, work and audience. The fourth installment of Morris’s series is subtitled Drawing with Davidson, in reference to Morris’s appropriation of the work of the American philosopher Donald Davidson. Several extracts from Davidson’s writing, which the author himself says are concerned with the “general nature of action,” are presented alongside Morris’s own texts and the “blind” drawings themselves. The Blind Time series involved the artist (though not exclusively) carrying out a set of formal instructions, usually using graphite on paper, whilst being blindfolded and timed. Each resultant drawing is accompanied by a descriptive text outlining an account of the intended action, as well as clearly stipulating a ?time estimation error’.

Both Morris and Davidson published articles about the work in the journal Critical Inquiry (Summer 1993), with Davidson’s text having been included in an exhibition catalogue the previous year. Morris, writing for the most part in the third person and with a wry inflection to his voice, openly questions what was happening in Blind Time IV and asks what Davidson’s texts, "excerpted and out of context," were there to do. Morris offers simultaneous claims for rational and irrational processes at work here, granting them equal weight and validity whilst at the same time making clear that such reasons aren’t, so to speak, reason enough. “We will never find reasons both sufficient and necessary for actions,” he writes, before going on to simply state that “reasons for actions are not always easy to locate." Davidson, in his article The Third Man, makes clear that he “does not know what (Morris’s) reasons were,” before offering his own explanations for “what he was doing there.”



Beyond the “prepared narrative” that Morris claims he has ready when asked about the series in general –summed up as “a desire to find a basis for drawing other than straightforward representation or nonrepresentation,” moving through constraints on the body before leading (unreasonably?) to drawing blind – Morris asserts that any assumed renunciation of control and judgment in the work is related more to a resistance against the privileging of the visual and its dominating presence in the language of understanding. Morris, it seems, hopes to insert a wedge into this kind of equation by blocking off the faculty entirely and leaning the oddly ?unmoored’ action that then unfolds against different registers of accompanying text. He seems to posit another kind of “scheme of interpretation” to account for what might be happening in the lapse he has introduced into the process – a constraint that forces the mechanism to jar somehow, like a bubble of water injected into an oiled machine.

By working blindly in what he calls an “underworld of darkness,” Morris’s concern would seem to be to force the establishment of a subterranean register of complexities behind events and actions – a frame of reference that can be compatible with, or can accommodate, what he calls “dark reason,” perhaps beyond definitions of rationality and irrationality. The juxtaposition of Davidson’s philosophy with both Morris’s own statements and the darkness of his visual marks seems to constitute something of a combinatory trace concerning intention, disruption (of events, desires and beliefs) and outcome. The enforced swing toward a privileging of the unseen is, therefore, toward an action that is attested to without the mediation of the visual, aiming at the bypassing that well-trodden path. The question is put forward as to how the logic of why do we do what we do (even the resolute logic of irrational desire) can be located, disrupted, examined and reused. The demand, it seems, is to be open to any search for reasons and causes – where, of course, Morris is careful to posit the search for “causes that are not reasons,” as well as acknowledging the necessity for “reasons that are causes.” However, all this effort scrabbling around in the dark is ultimately refuted when the drawings are subsequently selected or rejected by the artist with his blindfold removed – in the cold light of day and in the brightness of doubt.



The explorations undertaken by Morris in these sightless exercises – where an isolated period of time for the artist, so to speak, is put forward – would seem to be concerned with an attempt to postulate an indexical cross-referencing between intention and outcome, between expectation and reception. What is alluded to are the delicacies of what is ?learned’ through a given durational experience, as well as what is ?lost” through the sieves and blockades inherent to and embedded in the temporal process of an action’s execution. There are no doubt connections here to numerous aspects of the creative process – as if Morris were holding a magnifying glass up to it and allowing us to speculate on its discontinuities – as well as to the foregrounding of the creative method and its documentation. It also brings to mind Robert Smithson’s insistence on the interest in the way the artist thinks, irrespective of any tangible result, and the sustainable validity in following ?blind alleys’.

It may be a connection too far, but it’s tempting to make correlations to the period of development that takes place in Dispatx Make, where there are similarities in some of the referential structures set in place (here I’m thinking about the crosses and targets that Morris occasionally uses in order to somehow anchor his blind efforts). There are inevitably certain constraints on the methods used to present work in progress on the Dispatx site, but these formatting systems offer opportunities for practitioners to force them to reverberate with and serve their own work. Furthermore, the inevitable gaps in what is shown as creative method attest to the irresistible, perhaps inexhaustible array of actions and thoughts, both with and without supporting reasons (& here I can recall something I heard the British artist Keith Tyson say at an artist’s talk, which for some reason has remained in my memory… at last I can stick it somewhere: “…behind every thought is a sponsoring thought…”).



Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning a kind of impersonality that seems to be present in Morris’s work – an impersonality that is arguably present in both Betaville and Building on a Country Path, though in slightly different ways. The appropriative methods and materials used in both projects immediately set up an exchange mediated at another remove – an extra layer of padding that may prevent a certain sharpness of articulation (in terms of getting a sense of an underlying armature of cause/reason), but which might conversely offer an altogether different sense of scale, proportion or form of the project. It does seem clear that, given the amounts of material that have been presented so far, the absorption of the artists’ temporal process is of importance. A substantial investment of time and labour, one that can be half-measured in the allusive content itself, is intertwined throughout these layered stacks of material and is further emphasized by the systematic processes that are being followed.

Davidson’s comment that Morris’s Blind Time drawings set up a kind of measure of error and success, or truth and falsity, through which the viewer might “triangulate” himself, testifies to his assertion that a common conceptual space can be opened up in the interstices of imagery and text – again relating strongly to Dispatx’s emphasis on the creative method. For Davidson, the drawings “bring the act of their making into the works themselves” in a particularly rich and complex way, but, beyond that, they also present fundamental questions concerning the how distance between intention and outcome might be evaluated or engaged with. The richness of this question is testament to the potential of the creative and reflexive exploration we all hope to encourage at Dispatx. When Davidson claims that Morris has “put his viewers in a position to triangulate with him the location of his creative acts,” it also can be read as an indication that the demands on the Dispatx platform, if it is to fully undertake a sustained inquiry into the creative method, seem enormous – we clearly have a lot more work to do. All manner of reasoning – rational, irrational or otherwise, both dark and light – is already sown throughout the projects stored on the website, and this will continue to expand as more input and variety of approach are brought into its orbit.

The two articles mentioned above are as follows:

Robert Morris – “Writing with Davidson: Some Afterthoughts After Doing Blind Time IV: Drawing with Davidson” Critical Inquiry, 19 (Summer 1993), pp.617-627

Donald Davidson – “The Third Man” Critial Inquiry, 19 (Summer 1993), pp. 607-615