“Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (February 4–April 17, 1994) & the Guggenheim Museum SoHo (February 4–April 4, 1994)
The long-awaited Robert Morris retrospective opened at the Guggenheim this winter, and oh boy! I’ve seen retrospectives demolish individual reputations, but this one takes a whole era with it: the glory days of the Minimalist movement when works of art were the step-children of philosophical reflection, and when the humid currents of further theoretical musings—mostly in the pages of Artforum—bestowed upon them a gleaming aura of high intellectual ambition and achievement.
“Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem” was jointly organized by Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim, and Rosalind Krauss, the Columbia University art historian (Dr. Krauss’s catalogue essay is yet another of her trademark pieces of obscurantist writing). It presents us with work that may once have possessed a commanding authority but which now looks washed-up, a quaint memento of a time long past rather than anything possessed of any contemporary relevance.
The real mind/body problem is that Morris lacks a mind capable of producing a body of work that matters. For one thing, he’s a shameless appropriator of the ideas of others, namely Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, and, especially, Jasper Johns. Indeed, you feel slightly uncomfortable walking down the Guggenheim’s ramp past all those Sculpmetal-covered constructions of body parts and imprints: does Morris think his audience won’t have heard of Johns or seen