Kathy Noble: We’re in the turbine hall of Tate Modern, and we’re standing in a recreation of Robert Morris’s Bodyspacemotionthings, which was an exhibition that took place at what was Tate Britain: Tate Gallery, in 1971. Catherine Wood: Robert Morris has always been very open to, or very unprecious about, the way that his work is made and preserved. He would always rather remake a sculpture than transport it. I think part of our interest, really, was in the experiment of staging it again now in a space in which people are so used to participating. It’s a space where people feel uninhibited, and feel kind of conceptually open to maybe engaging something like this. Kathy Noble: This one here is probably the hardest one, to be honest. You really have to be quite strong, and the idea is that it’s a semi-climbing wall, and you squeeze yourself between the separate blocks and then push yourself up. The idea of the piece behind me is that the roof and the slope, they almost sandwich you between them, so you are supposed to push yourself up, and it gradually sandwiches you as you get to the top of the roof. Catherine Wood: Robert Morris in his work has always been very interested in how you might experience things via your body, not just via sight, and this piece was the kind of furthest that he pushed that idea. I think many artists, very many artists, are influenced by this work. There are certain artists like Goshka Macuga or a group called Continuous Project Altered Daily in New York, who make work that is a kind of direct hommage to Robert Morris. But many, many, more who are working across performance have a debt to his practice. It was such an important event in Tate’s own history that that’s part of the reason we wanted to bring it back to light, because the extent to which the institution has evolved in the past 38 years is enormous. But I think this was the kind of, one of the radical ground-breaking things that precipitated the change.
