Robert Morris 1931-2018
By Sophie Turner
Robert Morris, Untitled, 1965, reconstructed 1971, Each cube: 914 × 914 × 914 mm, Tate.
A founding thinker in the Minimalist movement, the sculptor, conceptual artist and writer, Robert Morris, is recognised for his geometric sculptures produced in the 1960s. While he is best known for these geometric forms, that escape metaphorical reading, Morris was also involved in painting, land art, performance art and dance.
Born in Kansas on the 9th of February 1931, Morris studied engineering at the University of Kansas and art at the Kansas City Art Institute and later the California School of Fine Arts and Reed College. Early in his career he was inspired by the Abstract Expressionists, thus developing an interest in painting. Looking to generate greater interaction between the artistic process and the viewer, Morris and his first wife, the dancer Simone Forti, worked in improvisational dance and theatre.
In search of a greater challenge, Morris moved to New York in 1961. The 1960s for Morris saw the advent of his minimalist practice and his work with sculpture. Works such as Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) exemplify this shift. The mirrored surface of the four large cubes, lacking narrative content or surface design, invite the viewer to consider the sculpture’s relationship to the surrounding space. Unlike many other Minimalists, Morris looked to make the viewer conscious of their place amongst the sculptures. The focus upon art’s interaction with the viewer fed into his other artistic practices. An active contributor to the development of the Judson Dance Theatre, Morris was disinterested in the narrative abilities of dance and instead focused upon the manipulation of the body as an art form.
From the late 1960s, Morris’s approach can be considered Post-Minimalist. Informed by organic material processes and chance, Morris worked with ephemeral materials such as industrial felt, steam and soil. In works such as Untitled (Steam Work for Bellingham) commissioned by the Western Washington University, Morris created a fountain underground that rose above ground as steam. Dependent upon the weather and university’s heat output, Morris still focused upon the work’s interaction with its location and the relationship with the viewer.
Alongside his artistic practice, Morris documented and theorised his developments in Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art through a series of articles “Notes on Sculpture” in Artforum. Morris has enjoyed the success of many solo exhibitions, including the Institute of Arts, Detroit and the Whitney Museum of Art in 1970, the Guggenheim Museum in 1994 and recently a retrospective of his plywood minimalist sculptures within the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern in 2018.
Morris imagined his own mausoleum ‘a sealed aluminium tube three miles long, inside which he wishes to be put, housed in an iron coffin suspended from pulleys. Every three months the position of the coffin is to be changed by an attendant who will move along the outside of the tube holding a magnet’. Sadly, after his death in 2018, his idea was not realised but it reflects his ever-increasing interest in the symbiotic relationship between the material, spectator, and the artwork.
Bibliography
Virginia Spivey, ‘Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance’, Dance Research Journal, 35/36, 2003-04, pp. 113-130
Michael Compton and David Sylvester, Robert Morris [catalogue of an exhibition held at the] Tate Gallery, 28 April - 6 June 1971 (London: Tate Gallery, 1971)