16 Jun 2010

Robert Morris exhibition at Muzeum Sztuki Lodz

Robert Morris. Notes on Sculpture. Objects, installations, films.
Exhibition organized in cooperation with Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (Germany)
curator: Susanne Titz / Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (Germany)
curatorial cooperation: Katarzyna SÅ‚oboda
coordinator: Sonia Nieśpiałowska-Owczarek
 
The exhibition at Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz is the first individual presentation of Robert Morris’ works in Poland. The artist, together with Donald Judd, laid the foundations of minimalism, but his equally artistic and theoretical comprehensive oeuvre goes beyond the schematic framework of the movement.

The exhibition will present important works from the 1960s: classical gestalt forms such as Two Columns (1961) and Untitled (Three L-Beams) (1965); works resulting from the concept of anti form:  Untitled (Felt Piece) (1967) or Threadwaste (1968). One of the crucial works in the exhibition will be the installation Hearing (1972), where, in the space of an improvised interrogation room, the quotes, references and paraphrases of texts written by contemporary artists, authors and thinkers (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Marcel Duchamp, Jorge Luis Borges and Claude Lévi-Strauss among others) allowed Morris to create a polyphonic dialogue on the condition of modern culture, politics and ethics. An extensive selection of films will also be shown, including Wisconsin (1969), Neo Classic (1971), Exchange (1973), as well as recordings of performances from the 1960s such as  Site (1964/1993), Arizona (1963/1993), Waterman Switch (1965/1993) – the 1990s re-enactments of which were filmed by Babette Mangolte.

As a part of the exhibition, a new work in the urban space of Å?ódź has been proposed: a labyrinth, a recurring yet at the same time evolving project in Morris’ practice, will this time be created in a material different from those used thus far.

The exhibition does not, however, have the character of an extensive retrospective. It is rather more a spatial essay which can be read in the context of Morris’ theoretical texts translated into Polish for the first time and published as part of a three-volume publication accompanying the exhibition. The first volume will contain important texts by Morris such as all four parts of Notes on Sculpture (1966-1969), Anti Form (1968), Indiana Street (1995) and Size Matters (2000). The second volume will include a translation of the shorthand notes for the installation, Hearing (1972), as well as an extensive essay by Professor Gregor Stemmrich on this particular work. The third volume will constitute an attempt to read Robert Morris’ oeuvre in the context of the avant-garde tradition represented by Muzeum Sztuki, equally in theoretical dimension as in the form of the collection presented on the upper floors of ms². The exhibition is a subsequent project of Muzeum Sztuki prepared in the institution's programme aimed at confronting, and thus re-reading the relationships between the historical avant-garde and the concepts and practices in contemporary art.