0032 Labyrinth – Fragments

Robert Morris and his Installation for ms² Łódź 2010

Abstract

The installation by Robert Morris called Labyrinth, accompanying his monographic exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź, was one of his numerous works based on this theme. Besides the labyrinth itself, which belongs to forms most pregnant with meanings, at least two issues seem intriguing. The first is the dialogue of Minimalism with art of all eras, of which Morris is a brilliant exponent. The other issue is connected to the concept of site-specific art, developed by him in the 1960s and assuming a comprehensive analysis of a place, its history, its social, cultural and political environment, which justifies and anchors the work. The Łódź context forced the artist to change his strategy, but the work based on the (very rare in art history) pattern of a triangular labyrinth may be interpreted as an important element of Morris's Threading through a labyrinth. Tracing the changes in the Minimalist discourse of the recent decades I focus on a few interpretative lines, connected with the functioning of the "labyrinth" as a structure, I find some analogies between pattern repetitions by writers from the Oulipo group and the activities of Robert Morris.