In an article entitled “The Present Tense of Space” by art theorist and minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, adapted one of George Herbert Mead’s concepts articulated in “Mind, Self and Society.” Morris applied Mead’s concept of “self” to his theory of contemporary sculpture. I subsequently expanded the ideas of both writers to help better articulate the ways in which I and other artists use sound as a sculptural medium. Morris used this framework to describe distinctions between aspects of two types of visual sculpture. The first type of sculpture, principally concerned with the fabrication of objects, was characterized by visual information which was instantaneously apprehensible from a single vantage point. The second type which had proliferated “since the rnid-’60s,” representing one of the “more or less successful options to the independent object,” “focused itself spatially.” The latter type of sculpture was characterized by visual information which was continuously changing in relation to a observer’s temporally and spatially extended ambulation.
Morris suggested that this newer type of sculpture, because of its emphasis on time and duration, provided the observer with a “directness of experience … embedded in the very nature of spatial perception,” which caused “images, the past tense of reality to give way to duration, the present tense of immediate spatial experience.”
In order to facilitate a discussion of the distinctions between the two types of sculpture, Morris described two types of experience that corresponded to each of the two categories of sculpture.
The first step Morris took in articulating these two types of experience was to point to the manner in which the mind processes images. He suggested that the real time experience of one’s environment was characterized by an “in-motion ‘filmic’ changing imagery.” This imagistic “flow of the experienced” existed in diametrical opposition to the “static, characteristic images” which tended to dominate in the “scenery of memory’s mental space.”
His next step in articulating these two experiential modes was to point to another binary opposition which existed between two types of selves known to the self.
Involving a linguistic component, as well as an imagistic one, this concept of a divided self was derived from a theory posited by Mead.
In an effort to explicate the nature of the social being, Mead had theorized that there were two types of selves which he called the “I” and the “me.” The “I” type self referred to “the [real time] response of the [human] organism to the attitudes of the others.The “me” type self was comprised of the “organized set of [remembered] attitudes of others which one himself assumes.
Morris asserted that the “I” type self “at the point of time’s arrow” was the only part of the self with direct access to the changing imagery of immediate experience. The “me,” “that reconstituted ‘image’ of the self formed of whatever parts–language, images, judgments, etc.–which can never be coexistent with immediate experience but accompanies it in bits and pieces,” was part of the self wherein the static images of memory resided. Basing his theory on Mead’s concept of a divided self, and borrowing his terminology, Morris posited the existence of, what he termed, the “I” and “me” types of experience.
The distinction between the two types of experience was determined by the amount of time that transpired between the “I” type self’s initial encounter with a work and its final “assessment and judgment” of that work within the realm of the “me” type self.
The “I” type experience was characterized by an extended temporal “stretch” between the “I” type self’s initial encounter with the work and its reconstitution of that experience within the domain of the “me” type self.
Morris explained that real spatial experience requiring physically and temporally extended exploration had “more further to go, literally and otherwise, toward judgmental summation” than works which began as objects. Morris termed this specific kind of “I” type experience, characterized by continually changing visual information derived from physically and temporally extended ambulation, “presentness.”
The “me” type experience, on the other hand, was characterized by an almost instantaneous transmutation from the domain of the “I” to the “me” type self. Speaking of the nature of this immediate perception of the independent specific object, which facilitated this relatively instantaneous transmutation from the “I” to “me” type selves, Morris stated that this phenomenon resulted from the structural unity provided by the “wholistic generalized gestalt form.” Morris contended that the nature of gestalt unity “was tied to perception which is instantaneous–in the mind if not always in the eye” and that it was this mentally oriented process of structural completion that allowed for the “immediacy and comprehensibility [of the whole work] from one point of view.”
He further stated that this “me” type, object oriented experience could also be derived from certain works which emphasized space in conjunction with physical units. Speaking specifically of certain types of minimalist sculpture, he stated that “the wholistic, generalized gestalt form [provided] a structural unity first for objects and then for spaces, …but [that] this ‘all-at-once’ information generated by the gestalt is not relevant and is probably antithetical to the behavioral, temporal nature of extended spatial experience.”