This piece is characteristic of Morris’ exploration of soft sculpture in the late 1960s and 1970s, bringing together his earlier immersion in geometric forms of Minimalism and his burgeoning interests in the Abstract Expressionist’s experiments with chance. Morris here plays with the relationship between structure and formlessness, allowing the simple material of felt to create its own form.

Morris’ long career defies conventional artistic labels – he worked across media, in performance, dance, film and painting as well as sculpture, and his oeuvre has been associated with a range of movements including Conceptual, Minimalist and Abstract art. However, the breadth of his interests and output has resulted in his work fitting uneasily with any singly term of classification.
Having studied engineering at the University of Kansas City, he turned to art, studying at Kansas City Art Institute, the California School of Fine Arts and Reed College, Oregon. In his early career he worked in improvisatory theatre, film and painting, only turning to sculpture in 1961 when he moved to New York, where he still lives and works. His early sculptures were abstract, geometric forms. Like his contemporary, Donald Judd, he created Minimalist ‘objects’: cubes, cylinders and other simple volumes in series, in neutral colour and industrial materials, most commonly plywood and fibreglass. The influence of Minimalist principles is still evident in this work: its form is essentially a rectangle, and Morris has again used neutral colour and a single industrial material. However, the hanging form of the soft material lacks the seeming total neutrality and geometric rigour of Minimalism, with emphasis rather on organic movement of the felt material.

The shift in Morris' sculpture from the strict forms of his Minimalist work to the loose forms exemplified by this piece can be dated to 1968, when he wrote the seminal essay ‘Anti-Form’. This essay expressed his distaste for the ‘well-built’ aesthetic of Minimalism and his admiration for the centrality of process in the work of Jackson Pollock and Claes Oldenburg. Morris here indicated a significant change in attitude toward form and sculpture: “focus on matter and gravity as a means results in forms which were not projected in advance… Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material” (Robert Morris, Anti Form, Artforum, April 1968, www.msu.edu). According to Morris, sculpture required a “recovery of process” and “rethinking of the role of both material and tools in making”, rather than rigid, a priori valuation. Turning to Pollock’s dripping and Morris Louis’s pouring as inspiration, Morris relinquishes control over the form of his sculpture, rather embracing the formlessness of unpredictable materials.

The philosophy outlined in ‘Anti-Form’ is clearly apparent in his work from this period. He produced sculptural pieces created through lateral spreading, scattering and stacking of materials, thereby liberating sculpture from the convention of a single, fixed entity. These works are open-ended and non-aesthetic, due to the artist’s removal from the artwork, breaking the traditionally direct relationship between artist and finished artwork. The overall configuration of the work is left to the medium itself, with gravity and chance, rather than the artist’s hands, playing a central role. Felt became Morris’ material of choice for over a decade as it met both his practical and aesthetic need being highly pliant and absorbent, but also cheap and widely available. This choice of material has resulted in associations being drawn between his work and the Arte Povera of Joseph Beuys, further evidencing his status as in-between conventional classifications. As a result of allowing the material to form itself, many of Morris’ sculptures of this period could never be installed in identical ways, therefore furthering their indeterminate status and providing a sharp contrast to the fixed nature of his earlier Minimalist works.

For Morris, felt also has strong associations with the body: “felt has anatomical associations; it relates to the body – it’s skin-like” (Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994, p. 213). This links his felt pieces to his works in performance – married to the dancer Simone Forti, and working in theatre and dance himself, the body and movement were constant preoccupations for the artist. In this piece therefore, the moving body is evoked in an abstract manner – the skin-like material and the organic, independent movement of the material echo that of a dancer, and the viewer’s body is also implicitly drawn into the work in its perception.

In this work, Morris balances a seemingly geometric shape with soft, unpredictable material. The basic geometric rectangle is here undermined by the soft hanging material employed by Morris; the rigid shape of minimalism has been distorted into a shape which flows and changes. Whilst part of the felt is secured and fixed in shape, swathes of the material are left to hang freely. This piece, therefore, exemplifies this period of his career when he endeavoured “to find a way to generate unpredictable, indeterminate consequences” (Simon Grant interviews Robert Morris, Tate Etc. issue 14: Autumn 2008, September 2008).

This present lot represents the translation of Morris’ philosophy into material art object: his rejection of the increasing austerity of the Minimalist movement in the late 1960s and turn towards the formlessness of soft sculpture is here given material form. Geometric rigour and free-flowing forms are blurred by Morris in this piece as he attempts to subvert the traditional formalism of sculpture in favour of the indeterminate. As written in the aforementioned essay 'Anti-Form', the alternative to convention was to let materials determine their own shape and character. This uncontrolled variable in the artwork involves the relinquishing of authority over the final appearance: each time this work is displayed, its precise arrangement will change. Morris explains: “The early felt works had multiple positions – sometimes thrown on the floor or hung on the wall. But once the works were photographed nobody wanted to hear about alternative positions. And of course works on the wall are easier to deal with than things on the floor so the wall option became the preferred position. I suppose this illustrates Duchamp’s remark about how art quickly loses its aesthetic smell and becomes frozen and arid. Anyway some of the works involving many separate pieces could of course never be installed twice in the same way. These maintained their indeterminate status more than the works made of larger sections.”(Simon Grant interviews Robert Morris). Untitled, although it does not include many separate pieces, does have qualities that render it subject to change. The nature of the material itself, along with the minimal use of copper grommets to fix it in place, confirm its state as unpredictable. This irresolute quality of the work renders it ongoing and characterises Morris’ oeuvre in its innovation.