Yes, you seem to have been anything but an iconophile in your enterprise which is piled as high with words on one side as with images on the other. Robert Morris, “Professional Rules” By investigating the prolific oeuvre of Robert Morris via the prism of writing, this collection of essays provides an incisive lens into the work of a central figure in the visual arts since the 1960s, associated in turn with minimalism, postminimalism, conceptualism, and land art. Morris has often been labeled a theorist, although his writing mobilizes a wide variety of genres. He has espoused the style of art criticism, the verve of the polemic, as well as the forms of prose fiction and autobiography. But beyond his writerly craft, he has incorporated text into prints, sculptures, performances, installations, weaving a tight net between text and visual practice. This book brings together contributions from art historians, literary scholars, philosophers, filmmakers, and writers to shed light on an important yet overlooked aspect of Morris’ work. Illustration : Robert Morris, Investigations: Could I also Represent Hope in this Way? Hardly. And What about Belief?, 1990. Graphite on vellum, 18 × 18 inches (45.7 × 45.7 cm). Photo: Courtesy of Robert Morris and Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © 2010 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Seventeen of Morris's essays written between 1993 and 2005, with 124 illustrations of art mainly by 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. The essays: - 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 Artists: 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?) An OCTOBER book

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most important artists of his generation, produced sculpture, drawings, photographs, films, and paintings in addition to the writings collected here.

By the early 1960s, theorists like Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Barthes had created a world ruled by signifying structures and pictured through the grids of language, information, and systems. Artists soon followed, turning to language and its related forms to devise a new, conceptual approach to art making. Examining the ways in which artists shared the structuralist devotion to systems of many sorts, Systems We Have Loved shows that even as structuralism encouraged the advent of conceptual art, it also raised intractable problems that artists were forced to confront. Considering such notable art figures as Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Rosalind Krauss, Eve Meltzer argues that during this period the visual arts depicted and tested the far-reaching claims about subjectivity espoused by theorists. She offers a new way of framing two of the twentieth century’s most transformative movements—one artistic, one expansively theoretical—and she reveals their shared dream—or nightmare—of the world as a system of signs. By endorsing this view, Meltzer proposes, these artists drew attention to the fictions and limitations of this dream, even as they risked getting caught in the very systems they had adopted. The first book to describe art’s embrace of the world as an information system, Systems We Have Loved breathes new life into the study of conceptual art.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.