Wall-Floor Slab 1964

Curator: Let’s turn our attention to Robert Morris' "Wall-Floor Slab," created in 1964. The piece is metal. Editor: My initial thought? An oppressive gray geometry attempting an escape. There’s something melancholic about its sheer simplicity. Like a failed modernist utopian dream leaning against the wall. Curator: Exactly! Its non-objective form invites scrutiny of its inherent properties: scale, surface, and spatial relationship. Consider how the planar surface disrupts the gallery space, demanding the viewer re-evaluate the surrounding architecture. It also brings up several exciting conversations about phenomenology. Editor: Phenomenology... right. But really, I’m thinking of Buster Keaton leaning against a similar slab in a silent film, only it all collapses. I get a similar anticipation here – a silent joke about stability and artifice. Curator: An interesting analogy. However, viewed through a formalist lens, the "Wall-Floor Slab" demonstrates Morris’ engagement with minimalism. Reducing the artwork to its bare essentials directs attention to the materiality and the viewers embodied perception. Editor: Perhaps, but this slab—let's be honest, it does look kind of drab—points beyond formal concerns. The very gesture of leaning undermines its apparent stability, as if this austere slab struggles to remain standing. Maybe the piece can also be approached through psychoanalysis to discover how we perceive or interact with the large unknown. Curator: Psychoanalysis moves away from the structural components that render this work art. To dilute its form into free-form, Freudian concepts disallows a reading that recognizes how composition and negative space invite introspection through line, mass and volume. Editor: But maybe that friction, between minimalist intent and my own impulse to anthropomorphize it, makes it a more potent work, because what seems simple is full of complexity. Curator: Your perspective is certainly unique, though I find more reward contemplating the intentionality of Morris’ deployment of geometric forms to disrupt conventional notions of sculpture. Editor: And I am seeing more nuance in such stark lines. In the end, maybe we both were won over a bit.