Document Type
Article
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.
Repository Citation
Winkenweder, Brian. "The Homometrics of eInterviews." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss1/9