Slow Motion

Robert Morris

Slow Motion

16mm film, 17:23, 1969, Courtesy of the artist and Sonnabend Gallery

A muscular male nude runs into a heavy glass door. His impact opens the door and the figure moves through it. Several sequences of this are filmed with a high-speed camera, which slows the impact of flesh against glass. In addition to this sensuality feature, the film calls attention by being taken while Morris was giving directions via a long-distance call from New York to the male performer in Chicago.

Robert Morris (b. 1931, Kansas City, Missouri) first studied engineering and then turned to art and art criticism. He earned a Master degree in art history from Hunter College 1962, where he has been teaching since 1964. Morris is an artist of seminal influence on contemporary art after the Second World War in the twentieth century. His essays on dance, minimalist sculpture, process art,
and earthwork, especially the latter three, provided a groundbreaking theoretical framework defining the principal art movements in the 1960s and the 1970s, such as minimalism, performance art, land art, process art, and installation art. His aesthetics of formlessness or anti-form constitutes the radical moment of post-modern art rupturing with modernism. Numerous major museums around the world have hosted his retrospectives, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994), Centre Pompidou – Musée National d´Art Moderne, Paris (1995), Cabinet des Estampes du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland (1998), Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon, Lyon (1998, 1999, 2000), Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach among others. The artist lives in New York City and Gardiner, New York.