Untitled (Pink Felt)
Untitled (Pink Felt) (1970) is composed of dozens of sliced pink industrial felt pieces that have been dropped unceremoniously on the floor. Morris’s scattered felt strips obliquely allude to the human body through their response to gravity and epidermal quality. The ragged irregular contours of the jumbled heap refuse to conform to the strict unitary profile that is characteristic of Minimalist sculpture. This, along with its growing referentiality, led Morris’s work of the late-1960s and early 1970s to be referred to by such terms as Anti-Form, Process art, or Post-Minimalism. (Jennifer Blessing)
Randomness and temporality played important roles in Morris's body of work known as Process art or Anti-Form, a movement he theorized in a famous 1968 essay "Anti=Form." To create the work seen here, Morris cut and dropped pieces of felt on the floor; the result of these actions is a tangled mass of shapes with jagged contours and irregular sizes, spilling across the floor in a tangled object without any consistent structure. This form was not permanent, as whenever Untitled (Pink Felt) was reinstalled in a new location the felt pieces were dropped anew, resulting in a different composition for every iteration. In addition to introducing ephemerality into the artistic process, works such as Untitled (Pink Felt) represented a striking departure from pieces like Untitled (L-Beams), with their serially repeated geometric shapes of works. Embodying a gentler aesthetic than their austere Minimalist predecessors, such works also seemed to reintroduce figuration, as the arrangement of felt pieces calls to mind organic forms.
