Robert Morris

The "infamous" 1974 self-constructed body art poster of Robert Morris.

Robert Morris (born 9 February 1931, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation art.

Morris studied at the University of Kansas, Kansas City Art Institute, and Reed College [1]. Initially a painter, Morris’ work of the 1950s was influenced by Abstract Expressionism and particularly Jackson Pollock. While living in California, Morris also came into contact with the work of La Monte Young and John Cage. The idea that art making was a record of a performance by the artist (drawn from Hans Namuth’s photos of Pollock at work) in the studio led to an interest in dance and choreography. Morris moved to New York in 1960 where he staged a performance based on the exploration of bodies in space in which an upright square column after a few minutes on stage falls over. Morris developed the same idea into his first Minimal Sculptures Two Columns shown in 1961, and L Beams (1965).

Bronze Gate (2005) is a cor-ten steel work by Robert Morris. It is set in the garden of the dialysis pavilion in the hospital of Pistoia, Italy.

In New York, Morris began to explore the work of Marcel Duchamp making pieces that directly responded to Duchamp’s (Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), Fountain (1963)). In 1963 he had an exhibition of Minimal sculptures at the Green Gallery in New York that was written about by Donald Judd. In 1964 Morris devised and performed two celebrated performance artworks 21.3 in which he lip syncs to a reading of an essay by Erwin Panofsky and Site with Carolee Schneemann. Morris enrolled at Hunter College in New York (his masters thesis was on the work of Brancusi) and in 1966 published a series of influential essays "Notes on Sculpture" in Artforum. He exhibited two L Beams in the seminal 1966 exhibit, "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in New York.

In 1967 Morris created Steam ,an early piece of Land Art. By the late 1960s Morris was being featured in museum shows in America but his work and writings drew criticism from Clement Greenberg. His work became larger scale taking up the majority of the gallery space with series of modular units or piles of earth and felt. In 1971 Morris designed an exhibition for the Tate Gallery that took up the whole central sculpture gallery with ramps and cubes. He published a photo of himself dressed in S&M gear in an advertisement in Artforum, similar to one by Lynda Benglis, with whom Morris had collaborated on several videos.^[1]

Untitled of 1967/1986, steel and steel mesh, in the National Gallery of Art

He created the Robert Morris Observatory in the Netherlands, a "modern Stonehenge", which identifies the solstices and the equinoxes. It is at coordinates 52°32'58"N 5°33'57"E (This from http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observatorium_Robert_Morris)

During the later 1970s Morris switched to figurative work, a move that surprised many of his supporters. Themes of the work were often fear of nuclear war. During the 1990s returned to his early work supervising reconstructions and installations of lost pieces. Morris currently lives and works in New York.

In 1974, Robert Morris advertised his display at the Castelli Gallery with a poster showing him bare-chested in sadomasochistic garb. Critic Amelia Jones argued that the body poster was a statement about hyper-masculinity and the stereotypical idea that masculinity equated to homophobia.^[2] Through the poster, Morris equated the power of art with that of a physical force, specifically violence.^[3]

"Robert Morris's work is fundamentally theatrical. (...) his theater is one of negation: negation of the avant-gardist concept of originality, negation of logic and reason, negation of the desire to assign uniform cultural meanings to diverse phenomena; negation of a worldview that distrusts the unfamiliar and the unconventional." (Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s, p. 3.)

References

• Berger, Maurice. Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s, New York: Harper & Row, 1989

• Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1

Further reading

• Nancy Marmer, "Death in Black and White: Robert Morris," Art in America, March 1983, pp. 129-133.

Notes

External links

• Guggenheim Robert Morris bio
• Taking the train with Robert Morris
• Robert Morris, Publicportfolio at columbia.edu
• Robert Morris in the Video Data Bank
• Land Reclamation und Erdmonumente article in German by Thomas Dreher
• Observatory near Lelystad/Oost Flevoland in Netherlands, illustrations
• Allan Kaprow versus Robert Morris. Ansätze zu einer Kunstgeschichte als Mediengeschichte article in German by Thomas Dreher on the competing theories on art by Allan Kaprow and Robert Morris