it Was one of the greats. An artist, intelligent and a theoretical gloss. One of the few who survived this turn of the century and which managed to change the previous. Robert Morris (Kansas City, 1931) died on November 28 at the age of 87 in Kingston, New York, by a pneumonia. The artist starred in one of the chapters is fundamental to understanding the development and evolution of art during the second half of the TWENTIETH century.
In the New York of 1965, Warhol was with your reading, pop in the key of sham; while Claes Oldenburg played to deny the raw materials of art with her soft sculptures, Yayoi Kusama is composed of your Infinity Mirror Room, and Lawrence Alloway established the abstraction pospictórica of Ellsworth Kelly and company beating the famous dripping of Pollock.
In the middle of all that, started to emerge, an art which sailed between the formalism and what that would be called the antiformalismo, the minimal art, also known, by a multitude of sub-paragraphs grammar: minimal art, ABC art, cool art, serial art, primary structures, art in process and systematic painting. That was responsible for Morris along with Donald Judd, who signed in the Artforum magazine that less was more, that had objects with capacity of not to say anything, to be insignificant and does not possess a organization of signs and forms. All this had exhibition format, entitled Shape and Structure.
The stance was extreme in those times, but confirmed to minimalism as the sculptural tendency of hegemony in the american context. The works of Morris were geometrical volumes simple that both could be placed on the ground as mounted to the ceiling or a wall, and that in its repetition purifying the sculpture, bringing it closer to its essence. Much there was in that idea of the philosophy classes which were attended in the fifties, after studying painting in his Kansas hometown.
the Art process
There were a few criticisms. The historian Michael Fried were crossed out even heretical for having impoverished and corrupted the modern art. Excessive drama, they said. Betpark That made the minimalism was not a steady movement or easily encuadrable. Morris was not long in breaking away, opening the object to the art process. It led him to approach the environment and the action, in the land art, the actions of social demands and to move virtually all the movements and trends of art from the late sixties until today.
With his first wife, Simone Forti, is inserted in circles of dance and music, to be involved in theater improvisation and the Judson Dance Theater where they were also Rauschenberg, and Yvonne Rainer. Among his experimental short is a Neo Classic (1971) and perhaps the work that most scandal caused outside the I-Box (1962), one of his early explorations with his naked body, in the inside of a spice cabinet next to a hatch. It was rare to see an artist of his generation with a job so diverse and so vibrant, so unmarked of the tradition, and surely there resides his greatness, in creative freedom under which there was a critical bold both to modernism and its conception of art as a apart of life, as modernity in the oppressive system, disciplinary and dehumanizing.
A career that was rewarded by the great collections and the great museums. His retrospective came to the Tate in 1971 and the Guggenheim in New York in 1994, and the follow-up of his career he owes to Leo Castelli, who was always given carte blanche in his iconic gallery. In the poster of his famous exhibition S&M Fantasy still remember a Robert Morris, chained in a position classic sadomasochistic, in reference to the authority that is assigned socially to the artist.
Although its link to minimalism is what you have been guaranteed a place in the canon of contemporary art, the production of Morris covers a large number of topics, including the experience of the body, the movement, the time, the social demands of the artist as a worker, politics, nuclear war, memory, and even death. Yours came yesterday. The journey back to the history.
Milestones of a long career
Robert Morris (Kansas City, Missouri, 1931-Kingston, New York, 2018) was next to Donald Judd one of the great theorists of minimalism. the gallery Leo Castelli showed her works in this famous space, new york in 1968.
His exhibition at the Whitney Museum , in 1970, was his first big shows. It epató to the public, instead of to the inauguration, we invited the placement of their huge pieces of concrete and steel. is The Guggenheim New York dedicated a major retrospective in 1994. The Tate Gallery in London had done in 1971.
