Obituaries
Minimalist sculptor whose ‘interactive’ 1971 show at the Tate had to be closed after a spate of injuries
ROBERT MORRIS, who has died aged 87, was an American radical minimalist sculptor who caused a sensation in Britain in 1971 when his first London show, a vast “interactive” installation entitled “Participatory Objects’’, fashioned out of sheets of rough plywood and steel and put on at what is now Tate Britain, had to be closed four days into its five-week run.
In a structure described by the Daily Telegraph critic as resembling “an Army assault course”, visitors were invited to walk along tight wires, negotiate plywood roof-high “climbing chimneys” and “climbing terraces”, roll around in a giant hoop, hit steel structures with tethered lumps of concrete and climb on giant see-saws.
As the gallery’s keeper of exhibitions, Michael Compton, explained later, Morris had been sure that the famously inhibited British public “would barely touch the thing” and would “behave in a contemplative manner”. Instead, as one Tate commissionaire told the Telegraph, “they went bloody mad”.
Things rapidly began to fall apart. Compton recalled how young women would climb up Morris’s rough plywood ramps then, instead of letting themselves down on ropes, “tended to slide down in their mini-skirts. We would be picking splinters out of their backsides. We had to set up a casualty station.”
When a woman collapsed with a 2in wound to her shin, Compton decided that enough was enough and closed the exhibition. In the four days it had been open, 16 people had been injured and nearly all the exhibits damaged or destroyed.
The museum’s director Norman Reid had hailed the show as “a new concept of art without permanent objects”, and the gallery would insist that it had shaken “the cultural climate of Britain”. More cynical souls, however, were inclined to say that it had merely demonstrated the traditional British delight in having fun.
At the time the Tate staged the exhibition, Morris was considered by many to be one of the world’s most influential living artists. The previous year he had mounted an even larger show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (which prudently installed signs warning visitors not to touch the exhibits), and made headlines when he insisted it be closed several weeks early, declaring himself “on strike” in protest at the American bombing of Cambodia and against art museums as “agents of power”. His action precipitated a “New York Art Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression and War”, leading to a widespread one-day closure of galleries and museums.
But the energy of the protest soon dissipated; the museums resumed business as usual; Kissinger and Nixon remained unmoved; the bombing of Cambodia continued.
Robert Eugene Morris was born on February 19 1931 in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, also Robert, was a livestock dealer. From the Kansas City Art Institute he studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. After service with the US Army corps of engineers during the Korean War, he read Philosophy at Reed College, Oregon.
Returning to San Francisco, in 1956 he married the first of three wives, Simone Forti, a dancer and choreographer, and three years later the couple moved to New York, settling in Lower Manhattan.
There he developed a line in wooden or plywood boxes, one of the best known, Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), consisting of an unadorned wooden cube accompanied by a recording of the sounds produced during its construction emanating from a tape recorder inside. The first person Morris invited to see the piece was the composer John Cage, whose “silent” 1952 composition 4’33” is famously composed of the sounds heard in the background while it is being performed. Cage, Morris recalled, “sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there.”
In 1962 Morris had his first solo exhibition, at New York’s Green Gallery, where pieces included I-box, a wooden box which opened to reveal a full-length nude photograph of its grinning maker.
With Simone, Morris participated in a loose-knit group known as the Judson Dance Theater, for which he built props and choreographed a number of works, in some of which he appeared himself. Site (1964), for example, featured Morris, wearing heavy-duty gloves and a mask of his own face, dismantling a large plywood box to the accompaniment of jackhammers and drills, to reveal the artist Carolee Schneemann reclining in the nude as Manet’s Olympia.
The point of such works was to link art to the process of its construction in order to forge a new relationship between art, labour and politics. Some have argued that it was the breakdown of this relationship that led Morris to insist on the closure of the Whitney Museum show in 1970.
Instead of a traditional opening to the show, the public had been invited to watch as its huge “spills” of concrete, timber, and steel, were assembled by “art workers”, with Morris himself performing the role of forklift driver.
On May 8 1970, however, in what became known as the “Hard Hat Riots”, a crowd of construction workers, fired up by their unions, attacked some 1,000 New York college and high school students and others who were protesting at the shootings, four days earlier, of unarmed students at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard. More than 70 people were injured.
As a result, observed Julia Bryan wilson in 2007, “the driving ideas behind the Whitney exhibition, with its ambitious, even wishful assertions of collaborative production, workers and artist working side by side, had soured.” Feeling no longer able to use construction as a metaphor for the cross-class solidarity he sought, Morris began to explore other ideas.
In 1974 he caused outrage with a poster for an exhibition in New York depicting him, naked from the waist up, sporting a pair of aviator sunglasses, Nazi helmet, spiked metal collar and manacles, all held together by thick chains.
After divorcing Simone and marrying his second wife, Priscilla Johnson, he turned to land art, his most famous creation being Observatorium (1977), a vast outdoor work in the Netherlands inspired by English prehistoric sites such as Stonehenge. Other work included scatter art, “steam works”, and paintings and sculptures symbolising nuclear holocaust. He also became a critic and theorist, writing mostly unreadable essays for art periodicals.
Morris returned to Britain in 1997 with a solo exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, consisting of charcoal drawings done blindfold and wall hangings fashioned from inchthick felt, cut to fall with a fluid symmetry which contrasted with the weight of the material. Reviewing the exhibition in the Daily Telegraph, John Mcewen found that his spirit remained “unsatisfied”.
In 2009 Tate Modern staged a recreation of the 1971 Tate show in its cavernous Turbine Hall, entitled “Body motion space things”, using higher-grade plywood, and with the addition of netting and other safety features. Though it proved as popular with the public (especially children) as the previous show, neither Morris, who judged it a “disaster”, nor the critics were impressed by its qualities as art. Morris’s art, one review lamented, “was once an inspiration to young artists, but now it seems addressed to a public that wants to amuse itself and nothing more.”
Morris’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Lucile Michels, a painter, and by a daughter.