ABSTRACT
As Robert Morris saw them, Jackson Pollock's drip paintings were almost perfectly inert. They did not swirl with air or light or muscular energy, or if they did, the effect was residual. Morris approved. Nearly overcoming the "duality of thing and allusion," the drip paintings hover at the verge of being no more nor less than the objects they literally are. With his slabs and columns and boxes, Morris led art across the literalist verge. To a world built from ambiguities and outright deceptions, a gray Morris box offers the utterly reliable truth of its boxiness. By the very candor of its presence, it illuminates the room—the larger box—containing it.
