CMA Exhibition Feature : Robert Morris (American, born 1931) Finch College Project, 1969 (recreated 2001)

Special Exhibitions

Into The Light


	Into The Light
		Artists in the Exhibition

Robert Morris (American, born 1931)
Finch College Project, 1969 (recreated 2001)

In 1969, Robert Morris made his only film installation, Finch College Project, one of five films he created in the same year, all dealing with space and time. A crew was filmed installing and then removing, on opposite walls of the gallery, a photograph of a movie audience and an identically sized mirror. A camera was positioned in the center of the room on a turntable revolving at one rotation per minute. The re-created film shown here is projected in rotation around the walls of the gallery, now marked by the removal of the mirrors and photographs. This grid traces the memory of the once-present objects.

The grids and the sweeping panoramic movement of the film image around the gallery articulate Morris's focus on process and time as the subject and meaning of his artwork. The viewer's attention is concentrated not on an object hung on the wall, but on the space surrounding it and the time within which the object appears and disappears. Finch College Project marks a moment in art when the viewer became directly engaged with the environment of the artwork in a perceptual awareness of surrounding space. The viewer moves around the gallery in order to see and understand the work. In this way, Morris and others created a new language of art, in which the visitor's perception of the piece becomes central to its meaning.

Participants in the work: Eric Angles, Marc Bernier, François Bucher, Daniel Clark, Michelle Dent, Christopher Eamon, Bradley Eros, Marta Deskur, Dave Geraghty, Filippo Gentile, George Hirose, Chrissie Iles, Tanya Leighton, Graham Miles, Jonas Mekas, Shannon McLachlan, John Mhiripiri, Donal ó'Ceilléachair, Ivo Vinvesa Rogner, Rani Singh, Lise Soskolne, Maggie Suisman, Valerie Tevere, Ksenija Turcic, Mary-Jo Thompson, Stephen Vitiello, Heather Wagner. With thanks to Anthology Film Archives.


About Robert Morris Born 1931, Kansas City, Missouri Lives in Gardner, New York Like many artists in Into the Light, Robert Morris has long explored the connections between performance, time, and sculpture. Critic, choreographer, sculptor, and pioneer, Robert Morris played a key role in defining several art movements during the 1960s and 1970s, including Minimalist sculpture, Process Art, and Earthworks. As early as the 1960s, Morris used aluminum and steel mesh in his sculptures. Morris experimented with felt in a series of works that examined the effects of gravity and strain on ordinary objects. Indoor installations along with monumental outdoor Earthworks are among the works Morris has created using materials like dirt, whose very nature defies shape or structure.

Page 5 of 16 | On the next page: Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941)
Spinning Spheres, 1970