In the piece, first performed at the Surplus Dance Theater with the visual artist Carolee Schneemann, Morris, wearing a mask of his own face, systematically carried away four-by-eight foot sheets of plywood to reveal a nude Schneemann emulating Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863). In the 1960s, the artist choreographed and performed a number of works for the New York-based collective known as the Judson Dance Theater, including Site. Bagley Wrightĭance has occupied an important aspect of Morris's oeuvre, involving the artist's creation of rudimentary, box-like props that anticipated his Minimalist objects and concern with viewer interaction.

Walnut and recorded audio tapes (original) and compact disc (reformatted by artist) - Seattle Art Museum, gift of Mr. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me.

Cage was reportedly transfixed by Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, as Morris later recalled: 'When Cage came, I turned it on. Fittingly, the first person in New York Morris invited to see the piece was John Cage-whose silent 1952 composition 4'33' is famously composed of the sounds heard in the background while it is being performed. In so doing, the piece also combines the resulting artwork with the process of artmaking, transferring the focus from one to the other. Lasting for three-and-a-half hours, the audio component of the piece denies the air of romantic mystery surrounding the creation of the art object, presenting it as a time-consuming and perhaps even tedious endeavor. This replaced what Morris posited as the fixed, static nature of Minimalist, or 'object-type,' art.ġ961 Box with the Sound of Its Own MakingĪs its title indicates, Morris's Box with the Sound of Its Own Making consists of an unadorned wooden cube, accompanied by a recording of the sounds produced during its construction. By cutting, dropping, or stacking everyday materials such as felt or rags, Morris emphasized the ephemeral nature of the artwork, which would ultimately change every time it was installed in a new space.

In the late 1960s, Morris began introducing indeterminacy and temporality into the artistic process, referred to as Process art or Anti-Form.

and also described Minimalist sculptures as dependent on the context and conditions in which they were perceived, essentially upending the notion of the artwork as independent in and of itself. It called for the use of simple forms, such as polyhedrons, which could be grasped intuitively by the viewer.

Morris's 1966 essay 'Notes on Sculpture' was among the first to articulate the experiential basis of Minimalist artwork.

These works forced the viewer to consider the arrangement and scale of the forms themselves, and how perception shifted as one moved around them, which was a central preoccupation of Minimalism.

In the mid-1960s, Morris created some of the key exemplars of Minimalist sculpture: enormous, repeated geometric forms, such as cubes and rectangular beams devoid of figuration, surface texture, or expressive content.

Robert bruce williams portrait painter