Art: Maximizing the Minimal

Way back in 191 3, an unwary art critic covered himself with retrospective ignominy by mocking Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's cubistic Nude Descending a Staircase as looking more like "an explosion in a shingle factory." There is no such danger today awaiting critics of Minimal Sculptor Robert Morris —even though some of his work does indeed look like an explosion in some sort of factory—because Morris' untitled pieces are not intended to represent anything. "What you see is what there is," says Morris. Since 1962, Morris watchers have seen him exhibit an 8-ft.-square slab of painted plywood, a tangled knot of rope, a pile of dirt, and himself, nude but covered with mineral oil, moving slowly across a stage while clasped in the arms of a lovely female dancer. Not everyone agrees about the value of these displays. But they have won 39-year-old Morris recent retrospectives at Washington's Corcoran Gallery and the Detroit Institute of Arts. And last week New York's Whitney Museum presented six new pieces, including Morris' biggest indoor sculpture to date.

Public Process. Materials for the new sculptures included eleven huge concrete blocks weighing as much as 1,500 lbs. apiece, 15 two-in.-thick steel plates weighing between 2,400 lbs. and 4,000 lbs. each and 80 unwieldy wooden beams of the type that carried traffic on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue during recent subway construction. To make room, the Whitney cleared away all the partitions in its 108-ft.-long third-floor gallery. As workmen moved in with gantries, forklifts and hydraulic jacks to help Morris do his thing, the museum took on the look of a midtown Manhattan construction site.

There were even sidewalk superintendents—interested museumgoers who were invited to watch the artist at work. "We've dispensed with a formal opening so people can see how such large-scale sculpture gets here in the first place," says Marcia Tucker, the Associate Curator who organized the show. "Morris is dealing with ways of perceiving that are native to us all, with the feeling of gravity pulling things down, with the sense of size and weight, with things that fall and collapse. This way the public can take part in the process."