Robert Morris Exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 - Tate
Robert Morris Exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 - Tate
Robert Morris Exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 - Tate
Fig.1
1 When Robert Morris’s 1971 exhibition at the Tate Gallery (fig.1) closed on 7 May, just four days into what
was intended to be a five-week-long run, nobody could have guessed it would reopen thirty-eight years
later. The 2009 exhibition, titled Bodyspacemotionthings, featured nearly all the same sculptural
components – now conceived as a single work – and was staged in Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall. On
this occasion, the show, which was scheduled to last only four days, remained open for three weeks. The
temporal divide that separated the first truncated exhibition from its extended doppelganger affords an
opportunity to compare the two versions of the artwork and to see just how much museums, audiences
and ideas about art have changed in the intervening period in response to the provocations
of performance.
Fig.2
triangles, spheres and cylinders, all made of Tate Archive Photographic Collection
3 While the objects recalled Morris’s most iconic minimalist works, the exhibition’s emphasis on physical
interaction made literal his ideas about the viewer’s involvement in the work of art. In 1966 Morris
famously wrote of his approach to sculpture, ‘The object has not become less important. It has become
less self-important.’ 1 The object was less self-important because it was now understood to unfold ‘in
time’, subject to the perceiver’s experience of the context of reception – including space, light, and one’s
own body – what Morris called ‘the entire situation’. 2 The object, then, functioned as a locus of attention
that heightened awareness of these other facets of aesthetic experience, a kind of phenomenological
mirror in which one could see oneself seeing.
Fig.3
Fig.4
Draft press release concerning the closure of Robert Morris, Draft press release concerning the closure of Robert Morris,
dated 7 May 1971
dated 7 May 1971 (detail)
4 The 1971 Tate exhibition magnified this reflective capability by turning the sculptural forms into objects of
use. The double ramp (fig.2) was strewn with weights tethered to ropes, which one was invited to drag
across the surface, experiencing both their heft and the slope of the terrain. A fibreglass sphere of
roughly human-size diameter was positioned under a rope fixed to the ceiling so visitors could attempt to
balance on top of it while rolling it with their feet through a circular course laid out in sandbags. There
were also large wooden planks centrally placed atop horizontal cylinders that resembled standing see-
saws and a wooden construction that looked like a series of chimneys that people were supposed to inch
their way up, among many other challenges. Speaking to BBC presenter Melvyn Bragg, Morris asserted
that the exhibition was ‘an opportunity for people to involve themselves with the work, to become aware
of their own bodies, gravity, effort, fatigue, their bodies under different conditions’. 3 The objects were
catalysts to feel oneself feeling.
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5 In the event, what the visitors felt did not always correspond with what was intended. The exhibition was
popular, with over 2,500 visitors in those first four days. Audiences seemed to delight in testing
themselves and the objects but they were also getting hurt navigating what one critic referred to as the
‘Action Sculpture’. 4 One sprained finger, another torn leg muscle and fourteen reported cases of painful
splinters, along with an incredulous and sometimes hostile reception in the press – one editorial
suggested the exhibition was ‘no more than a child’s playground’ – brought the show instant infamy. 5
Tate set up a casualty station and ordered 100 pairs of trainers to be kept on-hand for visitors’ use, but it
soon became clear that what Keeper of Exhibitions Michael Compton called ‘over-zealous’ and
‘exuberant’ participation was causing the objects themselves to deteriorate and break apart, which
increased their potential to cause harm as time went on (figs.3, 4). 6
Fig.5
Fig.6
Robert Morris
‘At the Tate – the play was the thing’ cartoon, Spectator, 8
Robert Morris 1971
May 1971
6 It was more than a little disingenuous, however, to blame visitors for their own injuries. It was true that
people largely ignored the instructional photographs that accompanied each object, using the works in
any way they wanted. Before the show’s opening, Tate staff had posed for photographs depicting the
intended method of meeting each challenge; these images were affixed to the appropriate pieces (fig.5).
These black-and-white how-to pictures featuring slick young staff members contrast starkly with
caricatures that circulated in the press (fig.6). Yet what the injuries, and the institutional reaction alike,
demonstrated was just how unprecedented the show was.
7 The exhibition was the first of its kind in a major museum. Visitors might not have understood how each
work was meant to deliver a specific mode of experience, but it is clear that they were ready to engage
with art in this new way. Tate and Morris, on the other hand, were unprepared to deliver what they set out
to create. The show was understaffed and the materials used in producing the objects – in keeping with
Morris’s wishes – were rough and unfinished. This is not to say that ‘health and safety’ concerns should
have dictated the shape or scope of the exhibition, but insufficient thought had been given to how the
museum could support the functioning of the works, which is a principal role and duty of a gallery, no
matter what is on display. Morris’s sculptural installation challenged people’s bodies, albeit in unexpected
ways; moreover it worked in equally unpredictable fashion to describe its ‘entire situation’. It
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29/11/2021 11:08 Robert Morris exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971; Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 | Tate
demonstrated its own radical newness in stretching conventions of museum display to their
breaking point.
Fig.7
forebears but also more user-friendly. There were Detail of Robert Morris’s hand-drawn, aerial-view plan 1971
Fig.9
9 The effect of these material fixes is not to be underestimated, but a curator’s note from the planning
stages of Bodyspacemotionthings gets to the core of the matter: ‘Audience [sic] have greater experience
of participatory work and Tate is now much more experienced in staging this type of project’. 7 In the
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29/11/2021 11:08 Robert Morris exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971; Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 | Tate
interval between the two exhibitions, the museum and art audiences had become accustomed to the
notion that an artwork would make immediate demands on a viewer’s body and that it would require
action as prerequisite to reception – or, quite simply, that these are not antithetical operations.
Notes
1. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture II’, Artforum, October 1966, pp.20–3.
2. Ibid.
3. ‘The Arts this Week’, BBC Radio 3, 29 April 1971.
4. Nigel Gosling, ‘The “Have-a-Go” Show’, Observer Review, 2 May 1971.
5. Anon., ‘Art?’, Daily Express, 28 April 1971.
6. Michael Compton quoted in Dennis Barker, ‘Tate – Where the Action Was’, Guardian, 4 May 1971.
7. Curator’s note, Tate Archive EXM 5.1.1 62b/05/5A.
Further reading
Robert Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture II’, Artforum, October 1966, pp.20–3.
Related article
The Dimensions
of Performance
Related documents
Robert Morris,
Robert Morris
1971
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29/11/2021 11:08 Robert Morris exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971; Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 | Tate
Bodyspacemotionthings
at Tate
Modern, 22 May – 14 June 2009
Related photographs
Robert Morris,
Robert Morris Robert Morris,
1971
Bodyspacemotionthings
2009
How to cite
Jonah Westerman, 'Robert Morris exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971; Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern,
2009', in Performance At Tate: Into the Space of Art, Tate Research Publication, 2016,
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/robert-morris, accessed 29
November 2021.
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/robert-morris 6/6