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My name is Scott Rothkopf and I'm
a curator at the Whitney Museum
of American Art.
And this is Robert Morris'
"Untitled L Beams" from 1965.
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When Robert Morris first made this
piece, it was seen as a very aggressive,
avant-garde kind of statement.
Morris was as much interested
in sculptural forms as he was
in the way that they were perceived.
So for him, the way that our bodies
moved around a piece of art is
something that he was really trying
to explore and have the viewer actively
think about as they regarded his works.
One of the ways Morris got at this was to
create these three L beams which are all
exactly the same and position them
in different orientations, so that the
viewer looking at this piece might kind of
have to mentally unpuzzle in his or her
mind what the relationship of the objects
are one to another, and also whether,
in fact, these forms are the same.
Morris originally thought that he would
make a greater number of L beams
because he was going to array them
in a much bigger configuration
and ultimately he realized that
with just three he could show
all the three possible orientations
of this unit.
You see one standing up,
one on its sort of points,
and one lying down,
and if you try to imagine another
orientation for one of these pieces,
you really can't.
.
I think that the best,
most interesting art of the 20th century
asks us different questions about
how we see and relate to the world,
and I think that Morris' "L Beams"
kcertainly do that.
They force you to think about
what it actually means to see,
to look at an object,
how that object might change
as we look at it from different positions,
how Morris himself has kind of
played that notion out by showing you
the same object from different positions.
So although this may not look like
someone's classical conception of
what a sculpture of a person, let's say,
or an object in space might be,
I do think he's asking questions
that relate, certainly,
to the whole history of sculpture
and the history of art more generally,
which often is about how we relate
to the world physically,
how we experience an object in space,
and how those experiences
make us feel.
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