Morris, Robert (1968): Anti Form
Morris, Robert (1968): Anti Form
Artforum – April 1968.
Consultado: 09. Marzo. 2020
This imperative for the well-built thing solved certain problems. It got rid of asymmetrical placing and composition, for one thing. The solution also threw out all non-rigid materials.
(...)
What remains problematic about these schemes is the
fact that any order for multiple units is an imposed one which has no inherent
relation to the physicality of the existing units. Permuted, progressive, symmetrical
organizations with a dualistic character in relation to the matter they
distribute.
(...)
The relationships such schemes establish are not
critical from point to point as in European art. The duality is established by
the fact that an order, any order, is operating beyond the physical things.
(...)
The process of “making itself” has hardly been
examined. It has only received attention in terms of some kind of mythical,
romanticized polarity
(...)
Of the Abstract Expressionists only Pollock was able
to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of the work.
Pollock’s recovery of process involved a profound rethinking of the role of
both material and tools in making. The stick which drips paint is a tool which acknowledges the
nature of the fluidity of paint. Like any other tool it is still one that
controls and transforms matter.
(...)
The visibility of
process in art occurred with the saving of sketches and unfinished work in the
High Renaissance. In the nineteenth century both Rodin and Rosso left traces of
touch in finished work. Like the Abstract Expressionists after them, they
registered the plasticity of material in autobiographical terms. It remained
for Pollock and Louis to go beyond the personalism of the hand to the more
direct revelation of matter itself. How Pollock broke the domination of Cubist
form is tied to his investigation of means: tools, methods of making, nature of
material. Form is not perpetuated by means but by preservation of separable
idealized ends. This is an anti-entropic and conservative enterprise. It
accounts for Greek architecture changing from wood to marble and looking the
same, or for the look of Cubist bronzes with their fragmented, faceted planes.
The perpetuation of form is functioning idealism.
In object-type art
process is not visible. Materials often are. When they are, their
reasonableness is usually apparent. Rigid industrial materials go together at
right angles with great ease. But it is the apriori valuation of the well-built
that dictates the materials. The well-built form of objects preceded any
consideration of means. Materials themselves have been limited to those which
efficiently make the general object form.
Recently, materials
other than rigid industrial ones have begun to show up. Oldenburg was one of
the first to use such materials. A direct investigation of the properties of
these materials is in progress. This involves a reconsideration of the use of
tools in relation to material. In some cases these investigations move from the
making of things to the making of material itself. Sometimes a direct
manipulation of a given material without the use of any tool is made. In these
cases considerations of gravity become as important as those of space. The
focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms which were not projected
in advance. Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and
unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the
material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied since replacing will
result in another configuration. Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms
and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work’s refusal
to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.
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