Exchange

Finch College Project, 1969, by Robert Morris is an installation which consists of a film projected in the same site where it was created. It is a significant precursor to the immersive video installations that gained prominence as a medium for avant-garde art during the 1970s. This project constitutes a continuation of Morris’s earlier interest in installations that produce a total environment, as in his 1961 work, Untitled (Passageway). In 2001, the Whitney Museum of American Art included Finch College Project in the exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977, placing this piece in conversation with similar moving-image installations created by artists such as Vito Acconci, Simone Forti, Dan Graham, and Joan Jonas.

Made for Art by Telephone – an exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Morris simply dictated instructions for the making of the film. Despite this conceptual origin, it is also an essentially cinematic ‘performance’, exploiting slow motion, tight framing and an implicit analogy between the transparent glass door against which the figure pushes, and the screen or image surface. The repetitions and variations, the use of gesture, weight and force, give the performance a dance-like gravity.

For Wisconsin, Morris directed a large group of students to run, wander, collide, and form piles in certain patterns on another snowy field. Though their movements hint at mass hysteria, mass hypnosis, and, when they collapse in sequence, mass murder, the film ultimately celebrates the joy of participation.

Morris, in a winter landscape, holds a mirror to nature, and to the camera.

A Southern Californian gas station is observed over time from fixed and moving perspectives, exploring the distinction between the human experience of space and the ‘objective’ perspective of the camera.