Morris's Work Research Articles

Public Heroes, Secret Jews: Jewish Identity and Comic Books

Public Heroes, Secret Jews:Jewish Identity and Comic Books Jennifer Caplan (bio) "Who was that masked man?" was the common refrain of those who witnessed the Lone Ranger (John Reid) perform some heroic act or feat of derring-do. The Lone Ranger began in 1933 as a radio program, so it was up to the audience to imagine what the man and his mask looked like. By 1938 there was a syndicated comic strip, and in 1948 The Lone Ranger comic book series began its 145-issue run.1 These visual representations created the now iconic look of a man in a simple black domino mask, which was enough of a disguise that no one could recognize the man under the mask. Superman had already established that something as simple as removing or adding a pair of glasses could obscure a hero's identity, so the Lone Ranger's domino mask was more than sufficient as an act of subterfuge. Putting on or taking off a mask is an almost sacred act within the pages of comic books. The mask is the thing that separates, protects, and creates the liminal space in which an alter ego exists. This essay is going to use what I am calling "masking theory" to think critically about both what it means to have a secret identity and how Jewish comic book characters have had their Jewishness masked and unmasked throughout their history. Masks do not all work the same way. Bruce Wayne wears a mask so that people do not know he is also Batman, but Clark Kent is the mask that Superman wears to hide his otherness. Characters don masks for many reasons, but the most common is to hide something about themselves that they do not think society would understand. Sometimes they are protecting the reputation and family of the "real person" under the mask, but not always. Superman hides in plain sight as Clark Kent just as Wonder Woman hides as Diana Prince; they hide their inhumanity while Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker (Spiderman) hide their humanity. The mask is always a defense mechanism, but what it is defending is not always the same thing. Masking theory, in this case, is focused not only on the characters but also the comic book authors themselves, and what we might infer about them based on what masks they apply to their creations. The masking and unmasking of Jewish characters speaks to what Rachel Kranson calls the "ambivalent embrace" of postwar American Jews and middle-class American identity.2 [End Page 53] For this study I focus primarily on four characters: The Thing (Ben Grimm), Magneto (Max Eisenhardt), Ragman (Rory Regan), and Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde). Drawing on Tom Morris's work on secret identities, as well as other contemporary theories of comics and graphic novels, I argue that for three out of the four characters, it has been their Jewishness that has been their "secret identity" at least as much as their "real" name. I am beginning with The Thing because his mask is the least stereotypical. His identity was never a secret, so if (as Morris argues) a secret identity is an integral part of the superhero genre, The Thing allows us to ask what his secret might be. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created The Thing, and they and the other Jewish writers like them might have been masking themselves as they were masking their characters. While fear of exposure might have driven art to imitate life, secret identities are nevertheless powerful, in part because they open up space for more: more personality, more diversity, and more exceptionality. A character with two separate yet fully formed identities offers greater space for writers and artists to explore social and political issues, and yet there can be downsides to keeping certain parts of a character hidden, or masked. In "The Secret of Secret Identities" Morris writes, "for most of the superheroes, a dual identity is primarily about masking. The costume and the superhero persona (from the Latin for 'mask,' or presentation) keep a secret."3 Masking is substantially different from both hiding and making invisible. Masking is about taking something obvious or apparent and...

Jeff Morris: Hearing Voices

Jeff Morris: Hearing Voices

H.D.’s Tapestry: Embroidery, William Morris and The Sword Went Out to Sea

This article focuses on the role of embroidery in H.D.’s life and work in the 1940s. Bringing the tropes of tapestry, writing, and spiritualism together gave H.D. a means to explore possibilities for both personal and social healing following the trauma of the war years and to express her hopes for a world without war. Moreover, H.D. used tapestry as a metaphor that allowed her to explore her affiliation to nineteenth-century poets, particularly William Morris, while also enabling the development of her modernist style to a more extreme dynamic of rupture and connection. The article situates H.D.’s embroidery in the context of wider discourses on women's amateur textile craft and Morris's work in textiles and literature, before considering H.D.’s use of tapestry as a creative practice and metaphor in her late novel The Sword Went Out to Sea.

Mixing Memory and Desire: Exploring Utopian Currents in Heritage

There is some precedent for utopian thinking around cultural heritage, and a number of writers have commented on the utopian ideal of museums to house and preserve intact cultural memory. However, this article focuses on another, distinct utopian strain relevant to cultural heritage that can be traced through the influence of William Morris on the formation of conservation methods in the nineteenth century. While figures such as Morris have been linked to the critique of "monumental heritage" in recent years, a central message in Morris's writings was that the guiding principle for conservation should not be stasis but change. Equally, for him, knowledge of the past was important for recovering the hopes of former generations, a theme he explored in his utopian fiction. Morris's utopianism presents a challenge to the logic of inheritance, whereby the past is figured as a legacy to be maintained and the future, in turn, is extracted confidently from the present. Instead, Morris's utopianism involves a mixture of memory and desire that signals a way into thinking about alternative experiences and expectations. Here, I discuss how the utopian currents in Morris's work shed light on contemporary heritage debates and the different kinds of futures implicit in heritage-making.

Animals′ Role in Proper Behaviour: Cheŵa Women′s Instructions in South-Central Africa

The most common role of animals in the Cheŵa culture of south-central Africa is twofold: they are regarded as an important source of food, and they also provide raw materials for the creation of traditional medicines. Animals, however, also have a nuanced symbolic role that impacts the way people behave with each other by embodying cultural protocols of proper — and not so proper — behaviour. They appear repeatedly in storytelling and proverbs to reference qualities that people need to avoid or pursue and learn from the moral of the story in which animals interplay with each other, just as humans do. For example, someone who wants to prevent the consequences of greed is often advised to heed hyena stories and proverbs. My contribution elaborates on Brian Morris's instrumental work in south-central Africa, which has permitted us to elucidate the symbolism of certain animals and the perception of landscape for Indigenous populations in this region. I discuss some of the ways in which animals have been employed to teach and learn proper behaviour in a particular sacred ceremony of the Cheŵa people which takes place in celebration of womanhood: Chinamwali.

To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris’s Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams ed. by Michelle Weinroth, Paul Leduc Browne

Michelle Weinroth and Paul Leduc Browne, eds. To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss: William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's up, 2015. 378 pp. $39.95. The aim of this book is show that William Morris's politics, artistic, and literary endeavours, his understanding and practice of craft design, and his essays on the arts and industry are intimately and, if not always obviously, substantively interrelated. The fractured Morris, the Morris of disconnected passions and projects across his life is a common idea that has been held for a long time and some degree still is, although not among knowledgeable Morris scholars. It has taken specialized digging in many areas bring out and give expression the wholeness that is Morris. E.P. Thompson's magisterial biography, perhaps more than any other work, signaled the need see the integrative nature of Morris's life, personality, and work. To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss falls within this broad characterization of contemporary Morris scholarship. And for this reason the collection of essays is be welcomed. The twelve essays (including an introduction and conclusion) are, with one exception, the work of literary scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The editors characterize the collection as being pitched the specialized scholar, but also a wider readership Morris is such a large figure across so many disciplines that almost anyone looking into his work will, sooner or later, and usually sooner, feel themselves, in some respects, be part of a wider readership. I imagine that Morris felt this way himself from time time; after all, his painterly talents were modest and did not develop (amusingly perhaps, he could not draw birds and relied on his architect friend Philip Webb for this sort of detail), by his own admission the classical political economy of Marx literally made his head hurt, and he had work hard, and did so successfully, connect with audiences far removed from his own class experience. Even Morris was not an expert in everything that he did. The book sets out make manifest the impulses of Morris's life-long radicalism in the literary and design arts and show their anticipations and reverberations in his later political activities and interventions. In a clear statement the introduction defines the objective of the collection thus: to delineate and define Morris's unorthodox radicalism and, in doing so, uncover the consistency and precocity of his innovative social thought For the most part the essays are faithful this task. Illustrating this approach, for example, Florence Boos's fine opening essay states her intention examine the apparent paradox of Morris's representations of violence, interpret them as sublimated expressions of personal and political conflicts, and argue that his increasingly explicit abhorrence of . …

Sustainable Socialism: William Morris on Waste

While William Morris has long been recognized for his radical approach to the problem of labor, which built on the ideas of John Ruskin and informed his contributions to the Arts and Crafts philosophy, his ideas about waste have received much less attention. This article suggests that the Kelmscott Press, which Morris founded in 1891, was designed to embody the values of durability and sustainability in sharp contrast to the neophilia, disposability, and planned obsolescence of capitalist production. Many critics have dismissed the political value of Kelmscott Press on the basis of the handcrafted books' expense and rarity, but by considering Morris's work for Kelmscott in light of his fictional and non-fictional writings about waste around the time of the press's conception, we can see how Kelmscott laid the groundwork for a philosophy of sustainable socialism.

The Mis-shapen Pearl: Morris, Handel, Milton, andL'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato

Mark Morris's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato (1988), embodies ideas about how to live a good life. L'Allegro is unusual in that it is a full evening-length work, yet has no through-narrative; it has characters and action, but these change in each of the many individual sections. However, together these embody a dialogue – really a three (or four or even five)-way discussion between poet, composer and choreographer about the best way to live. The relationship between dance, music and text, and the implied conversation across the centuries between Milton, Handel, Jennens and Morris, offer insights into the way such layering of creativity can illuminate our engagement with art.As in so much of Mark Morris's work, the relationship of choreography and music is of paramount importance, and this will form the main focus of the discussion here. Handel's secular oratorio of 1740 is itself a setting of John Milton's companion poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1631), which explicitly explore through debate the relative merits of different approaches to life. Handel's musical setting includes an additional ‘voice’ in the debate: Il Moderato, words by Handel's librettist Charles Jennens, offering a ‘middle way’, or ‘18thcentury balance’, as John Eliot Gardiner has it (1980:16).1For the purposes of this essay I focus chiefly on the dialogue between dance and music as manifest in a few ‘moments’, with reference also at times to the poetry and its rhythms. In this, I am guided by theories of art as embodiment as expounded by Paul Crowther. When we engage with art, we do so in the fullest sense of perceptual, that is, with our whole, embodied selves. Art, as the embodiment of ideas, does not teach us anything specific about the artist or his/her world, but it does reveal something of the world-view of the artist as an embodied being. There is thus the potential for empathy, and imaginative engagement; we are not passive consumers but active reciprocal participants.Through close reading of a few short examples drawn from the work, I employ structural analysis to examine music-dance relationships, referring also from time to time to the poetry, which itself reflects key characteristics of both choreography and music. These examples show how dance, music and poetry manifest characteristics that are suggestive of similar perspectives on life, both individually and in relationship with one another. John Creaser, writing of Milton's poems, observes that they embody a sophisticated and resilient playfulness conveyed through verbal nuance and rhythmic buoyancy, a revelation of temperament and sensibility rather than an exploration of ideals. (Creaser 2001:377)

'Eξιλ <tex-math>$\acute{\alpha}$</tex-math> σασθαι: Appeasing God in the Septuagint Pentateuch

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) I. STATING THE PROBLEM The simplex verb ... and its compound ... indicate in Greek literature action appease, placate, propitiate, and are found in both religious and secular realms. The group (hereafter the word or the verb) expresses process by which a person could restore to kindness an aggrieved deity or fellow mortal, who would typically appear as direct object of verb. Septuagint this sense occurs to a limited extent.1 cultic portions of Pentateuch, however, in its meaning propitiate becomes a contextual difficulty. Such a meaning does not equate to ... (pivel), which there does not mean appease but rather something like of impurities.2 Moreover, Greek verb does not appear in syntax familiar to Greek readers. Instead of a human or deity appearing as direct object in accusative, a prepositional phrase or, far less frequently, an impersonal noun as direct object now follows verb. The nouns in prepositional phrases are often individuals, but could also be items such as tents and altars or abstracts such as life and sin. If verb could convey something like purge, purify, or expiate in these types of constructions, it would make better contextual sense, especially since this is what Hebrew means. The resolution of this contextual difficulty has been guided by considerations extraneous to LXX as a corpus of linguistic information. For instance, readers from earliest times have noticed that ... and cognates in meaning of appease were intrusive into Jewish and Christian thought. Consequently, in much of attention paid to this in secondary literature aim has been to resolve theological contradiction posed by LXX language, in which deity is propitiated by sacrifice, when Hebrew Bible and NT do not on face of it support such a notion. this regard, C. H. Dodd posited a development in meaning such that expiate or purge would be considered part of word's semantic range.3 That is, after all, what translators must have known term to connote if it came to stand in for a Hebrew of that meaning, or so his argument goes. Dodd's work was and remains highly influential.4 It is not surprising, therefore, to encounter meaning purge for in a LXX lexicon or a NT commentary that draws on Septuagintal usage. T. Muraoka and J. Lust et al. list in addition to standard meanings also sense of purge.5Harold W. Attridge in his commentary on Epistle to Hebrews states that in LXX words ... and ... had come to be used for expiation as well as propitiation. In Hebrews, he observes, Christ's sacrifice is always directed at removing sin and its effects, not at propitiating God.6 The central question for this study is whether such a semantic shift is borne out by philological data. II. A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCHOLARSHIP Since appearance of Dodd's work, another kind of solution has been put forward that focuses on meaning of Hebrew context. Leon Morris's argument, articulated first in an article in Expository Times and later in a monograph, rests on assumption that meaning of ... is indeed propitiate or else translators would not have employed Greek equivalent, or that, at least, respective Hebrew contexts contained idea of God's wrath, so that translators employed a that responds well to such contexts.7 Morris's work is commendable, although my impression is that, had he argued for Greek word's meaning from perspective of its standard meaning, he would have arrived at similar conclusions. Instead he opened himself up to criticism by resorting to Hebrew context. I shall return to his arguments below. What one encounters in other studies is an emphasis on evidentiary value of Greek context with no regard for its relationship to Hebrew parent text. …

Modern Beauty: Baudelaire, the Everyday, Cultural Studies

This article rethinks the usual divide between poetry and cultural studies by showing that the latter inherits from the former the art of knowing the everyday. It identifies Baudelaire's crucial intervention in the becoming-essay-like of poetic form by considering three poems in the context of cultural studies theorist Meaghan Morris's work, notably her discussion of the work of Australian poet John Forbes. The historic turn of modern poetry to everyday subject matter might be described as having had as a consequence a certain 'becoming-essayistic' of lyric inspiration and poetic form. The ethical dimension of the everyday is explored through a discussion of the shock of knowing and the 'soubresauts de la conscience' put in motion by Baudelaire's writing of the city. The experience, part astonishment and part stupidity, that the article describes as the shock of knowing, is the experience shared by contemporary cultural critics and a line of poets of the everyday that stems from Baudelaire.

The Palladian Palace at Apethorpe

The seventh earl of Westmorland commissioned an ambitious proposal for rebuilding his family seat, Apethorpe Hall, of which only a small part was realized in about 1742. The full proposal is known from copies of the architect's drawings, which have been tentatively attributed to Roger Morris. This article describes the proposal drawings and the realized buildings, and, by detailed comparison with Morris's known work, shows that the attribution need not be tentative. Two of the realized buildings, now attributed to Morris for the first time, are the estate dovecote and Woodnewton Manor House, an eye-catcher in a nearby village, which had previously been attributed to an earlier generation of architects.

K. R. S. Morris and Tsetse Eradication in the Gold Coast, 1928–51

AbstractThis article investigates the anti-tsetse fly work of colonial entomologist K. R. S. Morris in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast between 1928 and 1951. Morris's main programme was directed at the Lawra District of the north-west, where he claimed to have eliminated the tsetse population and trypanosomiasis by the end of his tenure. This achievement allowed farmers to move into the formerly infested land and reclaim the area for agricultural development. As an added benefit, Morris also claimed, eliminating tsetse flies in the Lawra District reduced the incidence of sleeping sickness in the main market towns of north-west Ashanti. The article charts Morris's work, which is historically significant for a number of reasons. First, it reveals much about the connection between anti-tsetse work and colonial development doctrine in northern Ghana. Second, it highlights the importance of studying colonial practices. Morris's clearing programme appears to have worked, but it was almost certainly based on faulty theories of tsetse ecology. In this sense, the story of anti-tsetse work in the Northern Territories shows that we might learn as much from colonial practices as from colonial ideologies.

K. R. S. Morris and Tsetse Eradication in the Gold Coast, 1928-51

This article investigates the anti-tsetse fly work of colonial entomologist K. R. S. Morris in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast between 1928 and 1951. Morris's main programme was directed at the Lawra District of the north-west, where he claimed to have eliminated the tsetse population and trypanosomiasis by the end of his tenure. This achievement allowed farmers to move into the formerly infested land and reclaim the area for agricultural development. As an added benefit, Morris also claimed, eliminating tsetse flies in the Lawra District reduced the incidence of sleeping sickness in the main market towns of north-west Ashanti. The article charts Morris's work, which is historically significant for a number of reasons. First, it reveals much about the connection between anti-tsetse work and colonial development doctrine in northern Ghana. Second, it highlights the importance of studying colonial practices. Morris's clearing programme appears to have worked, but it was almost certainly based on faulty theories of tsetse ecology. In this sense, the story of anti-tsetse work in the Northern Territories shows that we might learn as much from colonial practices as from colonial ideologies.

The Laws of Hospitality: Liberty, Generosity, and the Limits of Dissent in William Morris's 'The Tables Turned' and 'News from Nowhere'

This article scrutinizes recent critical claims that William Morris's The Tables Turned (1887) and News from Nowhere (1890) constitute exceptionally tolerant and accommodating visions of the ideal society. The first section provides evidence in support of Morris's liberalistic concern for the rights of minorities. The second and third sections complicate this analysis, stressing Morris's parallel commitment to informal regulatory methods. Particular attention is directed towards the role of hospitality in these utopias, a form of generosity whose combination of freedom and control is comparable to the operation of gift-exchanges as understood by Marcel Mauss. ********** In the postscript to his revised edition of William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1) E. P. Thompson considers M.M.-H. Abensour's now influential reading of News from Nowhere (1890). (2) Referring primarily to Abensour's guiding conception of an 'education of desire', he identifies the French critic's approach as a useful and productive way of reappraising Morris's utopianism. Thompson's enthusiasm for Abensour has not been uncontroversial. Perry Anderson, for one, notoriously characterized it as a brief insinuation of that 'Parisian irrationalism' which favours 'metaphysical vacancy' over 'clear and observable meaning'. (3) Among the more receptive responses to Thompson's postscript has been that of Ruth Levitas, who takes into account the views of both Thompson and Anderson, and synthesizes them: Morris's utopianism, Levitas argues, is no vague expression of frustrated desire, but rather a disciplined, politically effective, form of dream. (4) Most critics have adopted a less guarded approach in accounting for the imaginative processes that inform this vision of the ideal society. In recent discussions of News from Nowhere one hears less of discipline than of Morris's exceptional openness, receptivity, and pluralism. (5) William Morris @ News from Nowhere (1990), a collection of essays issued to mark the centenary year of the work's publication, is typical in this respect. Morris is presented here as a kind of anarcho-communist forebear of recent trends. The views of the volume's editor, Stephen Coleman, are especially germane. He suggests, first, that 'in Nowhere cohesion is not the product of compulsion', and second, that our recurrent failure to endorse Morris's insistence on the achievability of political liberty is merely 'a reflection of the intensity of the modern fear of freedom' (p. 89). (6) What limits Morris may have placed on the scope of these freedoms, or more specifically on the conduct of his utopians, have received far less attention. Of course the troubled history of utopian experimentation in the twentieth century makes this emphasis unsurprising. It is now a precondition of any favourable appraisal of Morris's work that it echo A. L. Morton's assertion that 'Morris' is the first Utopia which is not utopian'. (7) All the same, it is my purpose in this article to insist on the limited nature of Nowhere's openness. This does not mean that I dispute the common assertion that News from Nowhere constitutes a libertarian utopia. As the first part of this discussion should serve to demonstrate, much evidence exists to support such a reading. It has simply become necessary to register the fact that, in certain respects, Nowhere remains typically utopian, that it constitutes a vision of happiness achieved by means of an act of exclusion. Morris, this is to say, exercises his sovereignty as a utopist: he leaves out what displeases him. 'News from Nowhere': A Tolerant Utopia? In the first half of the twentieth century Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek began to express the view that the crimes of Fascism and Communism were directly attributable to the historicism latent in utopian thought. (8) The misgivings prompting such critiques were only strengthened by the publication of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920-21), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), all three of them dystopias. …

The relevance of Morris's utopia

This paper considers the reputation of William Morris's News From Nowhere and its evaluation as a utopia. It argues that there is a discrepancy between scholarly estimations of the book's importance and its treatment as a utopia relevant to socialism. Whilst scholars have for many years almost unanimously praised News From Nowhere as Morris's crowning achievement, most have also attempted to argue that Morris did not intend his work to be used as a serious model for socialism. After reviewing some of the secondary literature and distinguishing between a variety of different interpretations of Morris's work, I suggest that the relevance of News From Nowhere might be assessed by the standards which Morris applied to Thomas More's Utopia. Considering Morris's work in this framework of utopianism, I argue that the relevance of Morris's utopia lies in what Norman Geras has called its “maximum” vision.

Cardiovascular disease--linking pathology and epidemiology.

Coronary heart disease (CHD) in the form of myocardial infarction first came to attention early in the 20th century. Mortality from CHD increased dramatically after the First World War and had assumed epidemic proportions, particularly in the USA, by 1945. The ensuing research stemmed almost exclusively from the lipid infiltration hypothesis for atheroma. Using epidemiological methods, pathological evidence for the thrombotic component of CHD was demonstrated by Morris as early as 1951. Morris's main work was based, first, on routine autopsy records at the London (now Royal London) Hospital and, second, on the National Necropsy Survey relating physical activity at work to pathological findings. The indications from Morris's work that thrombosis contributes as much to clinical CHD as atheroma were in due course strengthened by the findings of clinical trials of aspirin, prospective studies incorporating measures of haemostatic function and further studies of pathology. Recognition of the thrombotic contribution to CHD does not materially alter approaches to prevention through lifestyle modifications but does have major implications for pharmacological measures. Thus, aspirin and thrombolytic therapy are mandatory in the acute stage of suspected myocardial infarction while aspirin is also part of accepted practice in the longer term in secondary prevention. The value of warfarin is being rediscovered, often at a lower and therefore safer intensity of anticoagulation than previously considered necessary. The effect that warfarin may have on the vessel wall as well as on occlusion of the lumen is helping to reconcile the two major hypotheses for the pathology of CHD. Much of our current knowledge about the origins, management and prevention of CHD stems from Morris's early studies linking pathology and epidemiology.

William Morris Victoria and Albert Museum, 9 May–1 September 1996

Three items, each of which reveals a significant dimension of Morris's work as a designer and manufacturer of textiles, remain in my mind from the Victoria and Albert Museum's splendid exhibition. The first is the 'If I Can' hanging of r856-57; the second a group of letters, dating from r875 and r876, from Morris to Thomas Wardle of Leek; and the third is Burne-Jones's caricature of Morris giving a demonstration of weaving at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in November r888. Of the three, the 'If I Can' hanging is the most poignant, seeming to offer direct contact with Morris at a crucial phase in his career. Behind him lay an idyllic childhood in Walthamstow, the shock of his father's death when Morris was sixteen, the formative but often disappointing years at Marlborough and Oxford, the revelatory force of his exploration of French Gothic architecture in r854 and r855, the abandonment of his plan to enter the Church and his brief and abortive apprenticeship in G. E. Street's Oxford architectural practice. Now, influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and in company with his closest friend, Edward Burne-Jones, he had moved to London to begin his career as a painter. Since childhood he had been under the spell of the Middle Ages and when he found no contemporary furnishings to his taste, he set about designing his own in the medieval style. His visits to Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge in Epping Forest had demonstrated the potential of wall hangings, and the 'If I Can' hanging represents the only surviving example of his earliest work in this medium. The design of repeating fruit tree with birds in flight was taken from a fifteenth-century manuscript, while the motto is a form of Jan van Eyck's 'Als ich kanne', seen on Morris's trip to the Low Countries in r856. The materials are simple: a plain linen ground with natural dyed wools. The work itself is tactfully described in the catalogue as 'unorthodox flat and patterned stitches', with which Morris may have had some help from Mary Nicholson, the servant at his rooms in Red Lion Square. It is simply done, but it has the charm and force of the naive. It shows Morris, characteristically, encountering a particular decorative need and discovering for himself the resources and techniques to fulfil that need. It was out of Morris's response to similar requirements for the decoration of Philip Webb's Red House, completed in r860, that Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. ('The Firm') was founded. The letters to Thomas Wardle, dating from nearly twenty years later than the hanging, find Morris at a very different stage in his career. By now well-known as both poet and designer, he was at the very beginning of his political activity. He also faced considerable challenges in his business life. In r875 'The Firm' was reconstituted as Morris arid Co., with Morris himself as sole proprietor. His investment income was falling, and it was essential for him to place the company on a sound footing; he therefore needed to ensure a

The Reception of the Sixties

ous art magazines but of mass-press journalism-was something that shocked us. I'm sure this was experienced by each of us differently, since we all encountered 1960s art and the discourse it generated, and the profound change it effected in artistic practice, at different moments. But we could start by speculating on why we think there is a particular resistance to 1960s art at this moment. What is there in the political or aesthetic situation of the 1990s that makes the issues at stake in Morris's work invisible?

Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp

Benjamin Buchloh: Having seen the Robert Morris exhibition one more time, yesterday, and having seen the Cardfile piece, I was confirmed in an earlier assumption which I couldn't really verify before, since I didn't then have access to the detailed contents of the piece: namely that Morris's work is constitutive for the beginning of Conceptual art in the American context. On every level, it anticipates-in the same way incidentally, as the I-Box does-the three questions that are crucial for the program of Conceptual as I see it: one, the specific question of how traditional forms of markmaking can be displaced by an exclusively photographic or textual operation of recording and documentation; second, and more complicated perhaps, the question of how the legacy of Duchamp was transformed from its first level of reception in the work ofJasperJohns to the second level in Morriswhat one might call the semiological, or the structural/linguistic axis; and third, and more commonly, the radical dismantling of all traditional definitions of objects and categories-the dematerialization of the work of art, as Lucy Lippard called it-and its transfer onto the linguistic, the photographic, and the site-specific operations within which Conceptual art was defined.

A Critique of Benny Morris

(1991). A Critique of Benny Morris. Journal of Palestine Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 90-97.