FOUR PIECES BY MORRIS, 1993, 16mm Color, 94 min.
Choreography by Robert Morris – Film By Babette Mangolte
With: Site: Andrew Ludke, Sarah Tomlinson (Original Cast 1964 Robert Morris, Carolee Schneeman) – Arizona: Andrew Ludke (Original Cast 1963 Robert Morris) –
21:3: Speaker Michael Stella Voice Robert Morris (Original Cast 1963 Robert Morris) – Waterman Switch: Pamela Weese, Susan Blankensop, Michele Pogliani (Original Cast 1965 Lucinda Child, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris)
The film is a reconstitution of the seminal performance work done in the early Sixties by the sculptor Robert Morris. The filmmaker’s problematic was to create a film which, in the Nineties, can give a sense of the aesthetics of another generation without debasing it by transforming it. In particular the modernism concerns of the Sixties performance artists and dancers were centered on casual gestures and duration. Several of those preoccupation’s have been integrated in today’s dance vocabulary (like casual movement and untrained bodies), but some remain elusive, like the concept of theatrical time, which at the time was totally renewed in the performance work of the period due to John Cage’s enormous influence. Film is the medium of duration, but what we call duration is historically determined. Film spectatorship expectations greatly change in different generations. My biggest question was how to represent the sense of time of another generation. I gambled that if I could create a sense of heightened presence of the performer on screen by restructuring the sound space of the image, I could use the distended time-duration of the Sixties to my advantage and emphasize the importance of the performer’s body. The film premises rest on maintaining the concept of art as displacement / art as a frame which I thought was at the center of the impact of the performances at the time when their making revolutionizes the new dance in the New York art scene of the early Sixties. – BM 1994
Permanent Collection:
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Major Festival and shows:
Anthology Film Archives, New York City, New York, 1994
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994
The National Gallery, Washington, DC, 1994
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1995
One image per chapter:
Exposition at Guggenheim Museum slide show of the photographs of the film screens at the Guggenheim Museum as the film chapters were reenactment of performances made by Morris during the 1960s were dispersed among his other art work like sculptures, conceptual art, drawings, and installations: