The Brooklyn Rail

Robert Morris (1931–2018)—Minimalist, Process artist, performance artist—leaves a multifaceted legacy. He’s hard to pin down, and that protean identity, that tendency toward metamorphosis, may be his greatest gift to posterity. Appropriately, this show consists of two very different halves: an installation and a suite of eight drawings, everything made in the 1970s.

The installation explores the possibilities entailed in mirrors. Many artists, Joan Jonas notably, deploy mirrors in their work, but Morris’s 1975 piece Untitled (Walk Around) invites, well, speculation. Imagine yourself at the center of a rectangular space: the floor is dark; the walls and ceiling are white. At the center of each wall hangs a 60 by 60-inch mirror. Hung from the ceiling in groups of two, and set off at a 45-degree angle from those mirrors, are eight steel frames, themselves holding mirrors. Still standing at the center of the rectangle, you may now imagine yourself at the center of a church nave. Each of the mirrors, along with its dual accompaniment, constitutes a chapel. What you find in those chapels is what you bring to them: there are no saints to worship here, just your own reflection.

You may first find infinity, yourself replicated in the mirrors facing one another. (Infinity here is disturbing, because we realize that if we step aside it ceases to exist.) So, Morris replicates the old decorating trick—superbly practiced at the Amalienburg hunting lodge—a circular room with mirror walls, of making a small space huge through illusion. You may find exactly what Alice finds when she enters the looking-glass world: left is right, forward is backward, with the English printed word becoming a grotesque parody of Hebrew running right to left. You may find yourself in a multiplied selfie. The Narcissus who lurks within all of us may be entranced by his reflection in the mirrors, with a special benefit Narcissus lacked: you can see your face and the back of your head at the same time.

Morris invites us to consider the mirror’s possibilities. In reflection, we use our consciousness to observe an image we know to be fleeting. We are staring at a ghost, an apparition that will disappear like the computer-generated world in The Matrix. The reflection is simultaneously real and unreal, as we see ourselves and our alter-egos, one of which may be the real self we allow no one else to see. Small wonder Narcissus staring into the pool is an image of the artist looking within himself for inspiration. Morris conjugates all these ideas in this inexhaustible installation.

The eight drawings are the antithesis to Walk Around. Morris executed these pieces with his eyes resolutely shut. He followed a rigorous protocol, including a limited allotment of time for each drawing. The results of “Blind Time”—a series of eight drawings, four titled Blind Time (all 1973) and four titled Blind Time II (all 1976)—are astonishing. He executed one 1973 work as if he had envisioned his mirror installation standing at the drawing board: a white sheet inscribed with roughly drawn squares within squares, alternating white space and black graphite. Yet another illusion of infinite space, a world-within-world derived from inner vision, an invitation to vertigo.

Four of the drawings evince what we might assume to be an aspect of Morris’s bipartite imagination, Narcissus and Echo, since they depend on a sharp division of the image into discrete halves. Again, the idea of reflection predominates, as we see in another Blind Time drawing, composed of two pointillist groups of dashes, the left side black, the right side muti-colored. Like stages in the metamorphosis of a cell, a kind of mitosis, the two groups face each other, ready either to blend into a new totality or go their separate ways. This side-by-side structure is inverted in a third 1973 drawing: above, on a white sheet, short black lines, almost a fence or wall, itself divided into two halves, and below, a worm-like phallus. The rudiments of a landscape manifest themselves because two shapes juxtaposed on a horizontal axis inevitably suggest depth. That may not be what Morris expected to produce with his eyes wide shut, but the viewer will inevitably make automatic assumptions.

Totally unlike the bifocal drawings is Blind Time II. Here we have a psychologically complex arrangement of parts: to the left, a black plane that recedes away from the viewer. To the right, a vaguely anthropomorphic shape, possibly a head, whose open mouth is on the verge of devouring the black plane. Is this Saturn about to devour his unformed offspring or is it the darkness about to return Morris’s mirror images to their primordial night? The possibilities are endless.