Draft:Robert Morrison (artist): Difference between revisions

Draft article not currently submitted for review. This is a draft Articles for creation (AfC) submission. It is not currently pending review. While there are no deadlines, abandoned drafts may be deleted after six months. To edit the draft click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. To be accepted, a draft should: Show the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article by using multiple sources that meet four criteria. The sources should be (1) reliable (2) secondary (3) independent of the subject (4) talk about the subject in some depth. For some topics, there are alternative criteria. Be written from a neutral point of view Respect copyright and do not plagiarize. Do not copy-paste. It is strongly discouraged to write about yourself, your business or employer. If you do so, you must declare it. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Last edited by HardyBoy3 (talk | contribs) 2 months ago. (Update) Submit the draft for review!

Robert Morrison (October 20, 1941 – December 16, 2018) was an American artist and teacher. His practice spanned a broad range of media including steel, bronze, wood sculpture, watercolor, ink, paper, graphite drawings, acrylic paintings, glass and ceramics. He became widely known for his elaborate installations fashioned from sheet metal and other materials, many of which included sound as an integral element of the work.^[1] His installations were considered “among the strongest works of contemporary sculpture to be made in Nevada.”^[2]

He earned his BA Degree in Art at Fresno State University in 1962 and his master’s degree in Design at Stanford University. He taught art at The University of California, Davis, and then went to work at the University of Nevada, Reno as an Art Professor in 1967,^[3] where he made a lasting impression on students.^[4] His major public art commissions include a statue of Abraham Curry in front of the Nevada State Capitol Building in Carson City^[5] as well as the Fleischmann Planetarium Sundial at the University of Nevada, Reno.^[6] His most extensive exhibition, Robert Morrison: A Retrospective, included three decades of work from 1968-1998 and opened at Nevada Museum of Art in 2004.

Robert Morrison started his career as a painter in the 1960s. Frustrated that paintings could not achieve genuine flatness, he turned to sculpture, sandblasting images on opposing surfaces of glass cubes to evoke the ‘negative space of sculpture.”^[7] Influenced by musicians John Cage and Steve Reich, concrete texts by Emmett Williams and Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the aleatory works of poet Jackson MacLow, his focus shifted in the 1970s into creating video and performance art.^[8] He worked with televisions and reel to reel recorders to investigate the hypnotic qualities of repeated sound in the forms of spoken words and phrases on video and audio tape loops.^[9]

In 1982, Morrison participated at an experimental poetry performance series called Pigeons at Pipers^[10] at the Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City. Placing four tape recorders on the floor, he threaded blank recording tape in a loop through the machines, turned on both the microphones and the speakers, and hit the start buttons. The tape, picking up dust and debris from the floorboards, made “appaling sounds upon reaching the heads of the machines—sounds recorded and added to and played back by each machine in a building crescendo of unbearable ambient magnitude.”^[11] This work, according to art critic William L. Fox, “gave the space a voice without any specific authorship by the artist” and “exhibited many of the tensions that would inhabit Morrison’s work for the next two decades.” ^[12]

Throughout the 1980s, Morrison turned to creating “sound pieces—large, labor-intensive installations that explore the concept of how sound can affect our sense of space.”^[13] Working mostly with steel, fiberglass, and radio wire, his sculptures symbolized how figures are “bound in media, trying to speak.”^[14] The central and “exasperating paradox” of his work emerged when the sculptural material acts as “a resistance to speech.”^[15] According to American writer Rebecca Solnit, Morrison’s work “often explores ‘how uncomfortably we occupy’ our bodies and our world.”^[16]

Throughout his career, Morrison’s work was in conversation with contemporary artists such as Bruce Nauman, Bill Fontana, and Paul Kos. Although his “heritage was modernist abstraction,” his works uniquely played with conceptualist and Dada techniques such as “temporality, chance and wit.”^[17] As Jeff Kelley writes, Morrison’s “struggle to navigate between the extremes of self and society, figuration and abstraction, speech and muteness, and even life and death” pushed art towards a “threshold” where it “either hardens into forms of modernist denial or softens into an atmosphere of fleeting information, some of which we need to hear, some of which is scary, most of which we miss.” ^[18] In this way, Morrison is “both a sculptor and a performance artist” who lived and worked “at the margins of the mainstream art world.” ^[19]

In 1983, Morrison showed Mumbles at the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno. According to art critic Jeff Kelley, the piece ‘invokes space as it exists beyond human perceptual limits.’^[20]