Robert Morris, “Box with the Sound of Its Own Making”

I just kept thinking that there was some famous box that had slipped my mind, like searching your aphasic brain for the name of the person you are addressing—even one near and dear to you and you just can’t think of the name. “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” is the colorful expression we associate with this lack, and I wonder if scientists have made actual physiological connections between the tip of the tongue as the site for this forgetting, and the general slip into cliche of what might have formerly been a prescription? Anyhow tonight we went to see the US poet Linh Dinh made a rare appearance at UC Berkeley and at dinner I was seated across from Lytle Shaw, whose book on Frank O’Hara (The Poetics of Coterie, from Iowa) is reviewed in this month;s Artforum. I knew he has recemtly finished a second book, on Smithson, the site-specific, all that 60s art and writing so I asked him about the box in “his period.” His pale face came alight. “Well, what about Robert Morris? The ‘Box with the Sound of its Own Making?’” As he spoke the words, the table between us seemed to reel, for that was exactly the thing I’d been thinking of/not thinking of for the past few weeks. We were at the restaurant “Downtown,” on Shattuck in Berkeley, and all of a sudden sensation returned to the tip of my tongue.
Needless to say I have never listened to the entire sound of the Morris box, but I have heard some good parts, the squeals that are the labor pangs of sawdust, the hollowed out sounds of hammers—like some sequel to Wagner’s Ring—and bits of the silences when Morris must have gotten up and left the area to take a leak. A professor of mine back in college had some of this easily transferred onto a tape which gave you the whole RobertMorriswerke in about twelve minutes. Think of this room as a box and think of yourselves as tools making the room and this is your sound, he would intone. Oh, I loved that! It was such a glamorous way to think of sitting in a classroom. At Downtown I picked away at my mushroom bread pudding with green garlic au jus, so grateful to Lytle for taking away that nagging sensation. That Robert Morris was like the gold standard of box work, but I knew there was more.
Well, looking at it and hearing the voice come out of it, made you feel like the Pandora of legend eager to crack open her box. You could only feel that inside was either all the happiness in the world, or all its evils plus the one little fairy of hope.