29/11/2021 11:08 Robert Morris exhibition, Tate Gallery, 1971; Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern, 2009 | Tate

Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art ISBN 978-1-84976-416-2

Robert Morris born 1931

Robert Morris, Tate Gallery 1971;

Bodyspacemotionthings, Tate Modern 2009
Jonah Westerman

Fig.1

Exhibition poster for Robert Morris, Tate Gallery, 1971

Tate Archive TG 106.152

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.

2 The 1971 show was first envisaged as a

retrospective but Morris had other ideas. Rather
than displaying previous works, the artist filled the
length of the Tate Gallery’s (now Tate Britain’s)
sculpture hall with a series of new ‘interactive’
sculptures that would experiment with conceptions
about sculptural space and human physicality by
having museum-goers put their own bodies to the
test. The objects themselves were largely
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Fig.2

composed of rectilinear planes and blocks,

Photograph of visitor pulling a rope in Robert Morris, Tate Gallery, 1971

triangles, spheres and cylinders, all made of Tate Archive Photographic Collection

industrial materials that, Morris insisted, could and

should be reused when the exhibition was over and the objects dismantled. One piece consisted of a
double ramp, made out of two steel plates forming a shallow ‘V’, propped under their outer edges on
wooden beams (fig.2).

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)

Tate Archive TG 92.236.1 Tate Archive TG 92.236.1

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

Exhibited at the Tate Gallery, 28 April – 7 May 1971

Tate Archive
Tate Archive Photographic Collection

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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demonstrated its own radical newness in stretching conventions of museum display to their
breaking point.

Fig.7

Robert Morris’s hand-drawn, aerial-view plan 1971

Tate Archive TGA7814

8 While the restaging of Robert Morris as

Bodyspacemotionthings in 2009 was a comparative
success – it ran for three weeks rather than its
planned four days – it too highlighted the physical
and institutional environment in which the exhibition
took place. Curators worked with Morris to re-
imagine the show for the Turbine Hall in Tate
Modern. Some elements had to be left out because
the Turbine Hall is not as long as the Duveen
Galleries in what was the Tate Gallery and is now
Tate Britain. The restaging also required
collaboration with industrial fabricators to ensure
the objects were constructed to be faithful to their
Fig.8

forebears but also more user-friendly. There were Detail of Robert Morris’s hand-drawn, aerial-view plan 1971

Tate Archive TGA7814

more staff on-hand to guide and help visitors. The
physical challenges posed were identical, but the
pieces were now made with the idea of heavy use in mind: they were reinforced and the materials
themselves were of higher quality. There was no more unfinished plywood, no more splinters. The
difference between the ad hoc estimates of Morris’s hand-drawn aerial view from 1971 and the 3-D digital
rendering made by the constructors employed in 2009, conveys a sea change in the institution’s
approach to such participatory projects (figs.7, 8, 9).

Fig.9

Digitally rendered plan for Robert Morris, Bodyspacemotionthings 2009

Tate Archive EXM 5.7 62b/05/5A A34397

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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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.

10 It is impossible to make proclamations as to whether visitors to Bodyspacemotionthings were moved to

appreciate anything new about themselves, or just had a good time, although the two are not mutually
exclusive. What we can learn from this brief exploration, however, is that audiences now expect to be
involved in the work they encounter, to be offered an experience to negotiate. This expectation has
developed, to no small degree, in response to the incursions different forms of performance have made
into the space of art, slowly expanding it and reconfiguring its borders. It has become the responsibility of
artists and institutions to shape this involvement and to make it visible, not for its own sake, but because
it is necessary if we are to reflect on the changing nature of our ‘entire situation’.

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.

Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, Cambridge, MA 1994.

Julia Bryan Wilson (ed.), Robert Morris, Cambridge, MA 2013.

Related article
The Dimensions
of Performance

Related documents
Robert Morris,
Robert Morris
1971

Press release announcing the

Robert Morris exhibition at the
Tate Gallery, scheduled 28 April –
6 June 1971

Related films and videos

TateShots: Robert Morris

Curator Kathy Noble discusses

the Robert Morris exhibition

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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

Tate Gallery, 1971 UBS Openings: The Long

Weekend – Energy and Process,
Tate Modern, 22–25 May 2009,
extended to 14 June 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.

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