Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Box with the Sound of Its Own Making
Robert Morris American
Not on view
From inside an otherwise ordinary wooden box emerge the occasional sounds of hammering, sawing, and sanding. These sounds form part of a three-and-a-half-hour recording that Morris created while making the very box in front of us. The audio soundtrack reframes our experience of the work, suggesting an ongoing act of labor, which is interrupted only by the necessity to rest or retrieve more supplies. The work is a manifesto of sorts: insofar as it makes evident the means and methods of its own production, it heralded a paradigm shift in art, one in which process, duration, provisionality, and incompletion take pride of place.
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