Luxembourg’s contemporary art museum Mudam hosts a remarkable exhibition of one of the most influential and controversial American artists of the postwar period, Robert Morris, curated by a close collaborator of the artist who died in 2018.
The Perceiving Body demonstrates the radical new ideas that underlie Morris’s early works from the 1960s and 1970s. The sculptor, conceptual artist and writer, born in 1931, was crucial in the development of minimalism, land-art and process art in the 1960s.
During this period, conceptual artists had already begun emphasizing the core idea of an artwork over aesthetic or technical concerns. The forefather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, who first introduced ordinary, functional, manufactured, readymade objects as art, was a big inspiration for Morris.
The exhibition at Mudam has no chronological narrative or fixed exhibition route. It has no beginning and no end. Instead curator Jeffrey Weiss devised a web of possibilities where the viewer encounters the key principles from this art period with every move. In harmony with the era, Weiss’s curation can be defined as “minimalist”, designing each room like a basic exercise to immerse the viewer in an essential idea and then allowing a chain of associations throughout the show.
Morris called his art “a series of investigations”; Weiss conceived a new investigation on how Morris’s language from the 1960s expand and transform the current dialogue fifty to sixty years later.
In minimalist sculpture, the relationship of the artwork to the space around it gained importance. The personal reaction of the audience played a critical role and unlike traditional sculpture, artists used industrial and prefabricated materials, encouraging viewers to experience the work in terms of its scale, material, weight and appearance of light.
The 1969 film Mirrors offers the only view of the artist himself Photo: Mudam Luxembourg
“Perspective is its own construct. As a system it has shaped how we see so many things that we tend to take it for granted,” said Weiss about the work. “You see yourself occupying the intersection of the two systems, you are either in the mirror or not. Sometimes you expect a reflection, but you don’t see one. What’s destabilizing is the space of work with respect to the mirrors is a nowhere space.”
The artist’s role in the exhibition can be perceived in this area of intersection where he is simultaneously present and absent. His presence is felt in one room and elusive in the next one.
In only one room do visitors encounter an image of the artist towards the end of a 8.5-minute film. The 1969-dated movie Mirror not only brings back the device of the mirror (a key element in this period) but also introduces the artist while he is performing to the camera.
During his career, Morris contributed to the development of process art, which focused on the process of making art, through irregular arrangements, piling and hanging. Improvisation, transience and non-traditional materials were common.
The installation Scatter Piece demonstrates Morris’s performative side and his application of “chance operations” which he borrowed from John Cage, the 20th century avant-garde composer who later turned to visual art.
Chance operations removed the choice of the artist and incorporated random chance to art production. Simple procedures like rolling dice or choosing numbers from a telephone book assigned the material and position of each piece in Morris’s installation.
As a theorist and an artist, Morris challenged the existing norms of making and viewing art. Minimalist and conceptual artists criticized the elitist art world, expressed dissatisfaction with social structures and government policies.
Scatter Pieces shows Morris’s more peformative side Photo: Mudam Luxembourg
Although he is often associated with minimalism, experimenting with ideas within the context of performance, dance and theater was a crucial part of Morris’s practice. He took part in the Judson Dance Theater (Judson Memorial Church, New York City, 1962-1964) which rejected modern dance theory. Morris, who possibly shifted the course of American art history, never confined himself within one discipline.
The curator of the exhibition at Mudam, Jeffrey Weiss, worked with the artist closely until the artist’s death in 2018. Weiss authored the meticulous book Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (2014). While Weiss was the Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York between 2010 and 2018, he conducted several interviews with Morris for a study known as the Panza Collection Initiative.
In collaboration with the conservator Francesca Esmay, Weiss addressed questions relating to ephemeral and fabrication-based art produced in the 1960s and 1970s. The transient quality of some of Morris’s installations only rendered his ideological heritage more resilient.
Weiss stressed that the experimental idea of aesthetics in the form of “what if” propositions, as they are evoked by the selected Morris works on display, can provide great insight even today. The Perceiving Body is on view at Mudam until 26 April 2020.