Part of the meaning of much of Minimal sculpture issues from the way in which it becomes a metaphorical statement of the self understood only in experience. Morris’ three L-Beams from 1965, for example, serve as a certain kind of cognate for this naked dependence of intention and meaning upon the body as it surfaces into the world in every external particular of its movements and gestures. For no matter how clearly we understand that the three Ls are identical, it is impossible to really perceive them—the one upended, the second lying on its sides, and the third poised on its two ends—as the same. The experienced shape of the individual sections depends, obviously, upon the orientation of the Ls to the space they share with our bodies—thus, the size of the Ls shifts according to the object’s specific relation to the ground, both in terms of the overall scale and in terms of an internal comparison between the two arms of a given L.

The L-Beams have been described as suggesting

a child’s manipulation of forms, as though they were huge building blocks. The urge to alter, to see many possibilities inherent in a single shape, is typical of a child’s syncretistic vision, whereby learning of one specific form can be transferred to any variations of that form. (8)

But that account seems exactly to violate one’s actual experience of the work, to superimpose a mental construct of “sameness” on a world of unlikes. In a sense it is to fall for what Morris refers to as the “known constant”—that ideal Cartesian unity—which the piece holds out as a kind of nostalgic remnant of past forms of explanation. It is to ignore the way this “constant” recedes into the ground of the sculpture as a fiction, crowded by the emergence of absolute difference within the particularity of the actual space. Situating themselves within the space of experience, the space to which one’s own body appears, if it is to appear at all, the L-Beams suspend the axiomatic coordinates of an ideal space. We explain space in terms of these coordinates when we think of it as absolute grid which seems however to converge in depth because we are badly placed to see it. We imagine clarity to come from thinking ourselves suspended above it in order to defray the distortions of our perspective, in order to recapture the absoluteness of its total parallelism. But the meaning of depth is nowhere to be found in the diagrammatic assumptions of this suspension. (9)

The project of Morris’ sculpture has consistently been to defeat the diagrammatic. In the sectional fiberglass pieces of 1967-68, for example, the specific configuration of the work is not allowed to become a figure seen against the ‘ground’ of the object’s ‘real’ structure. The notion of a fixed, internal armature that could mirror the viewer’s own self, fully formed prior to experience, founders on the capacity of those separable parts to shift or to have shifted, to formulate a notion of the self which exists only at the moment of externality within that experience. (10)

Morris has persistently written about the conceptual context of his own work and that of fellow-artists. In one of these earliest essay, “Notes on Sculpture,” Morris speaks of his preoccupation with strong three-dimensional gestalts. “Characteristic of a gestalt,” he wrote, “is that once it is established all the information about it, qua gestalt, is exhausted. (One does not, for example, seek the gestalt of a gestalt).” The body of criticism that has grown up around Minimal Art over the past five or six years has, strangely enough, understood the meaning of that statement, and indeed the meaning of gestalt itself, to be about a latent kind of Cartesianism. The gestalt seems to be interpreted as an immutable, ideal unit that persists beyond the particularities of experience, becoming through its very persistence the ground for all experience. Yet this is to ignore the most rudimentary notions of gestalt theory, in which the properties of the “good gestalt” are demonstrated to be entirely context-dependent. The meaning of a trapezoid, for example, and therefore its gestalt formations, changes depending upon whether it must be seen as a two-dimensional figure or as a square oriented in depth—a meaning that can in no way precede experience. Morris himself pointed to this when he said, “it is those aspects of apprehension that are not coexistent with the visual field but rather the result of the experience of the visual field.”

With different forms and varying strategies, Judd’s and Andre’s and Flavin’s works are seemingly involved in discrediting the persistence of Cartesianism and in positing meaning itself as a function of external space.

That sense of coalescing in experience and of a realization of the self as it achieves externality is evident in the Prop Pieces that Serra began to make in 1969. By means of a metaphor of striking abstractness, these works suggested a continual coming into a coherence of the body, I the guise of a form that was consistently seen in the act of cohering. The special precariousness of their parts was not about imminent collapse or dissolution. Rather it was directed at evoking the tension between a conceptual unity of certain simple shapes and the actual conditions of their physical union. The One Ton Prop (House of Cards), for example, is a cube (therefore an ‘ideal’ shape) perceived as perpetually dependent upon these conditions. As well, House of Cards deals specifically with internal space as something constantly available to external vision, and as something entirely defined by the perpetual act of balance by which its exterior is constituted. Thus, interiority (the “I for myself”) is clearly made a function of exteriority (the “I for others”).