While visiting New York City in January 1985,I strolled by a few galleries in Soho to see if they were showing anything of interest. I was not prepared for the exhibition Robert Morris: work from 1967-1984, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, since I knew little about this artist at the time .I had only seen Morris’s art in books and never in reality. That first impression was indeed powerfully; It engaged me deeply and I was intrigues to learn more.

I saw more of his work in America and Europe. I found myself standing for hours watching Morris’s choreographies in videos at his 1994 Guggenheim retrospective. However, it was only after entering his labyrinth in Fattoria di Celle in santomato di Pistoia in June 1996 that I felt ready for the present study.

For over four decades now, Robert Morris has produced art ranging from choreographed dance, performances, audio and video recordings (depicting the processes of his art making itself), to sculptures, installations, earthworks, paintings and prints, he seems to have run nearly the entire gamut of media type and art forms. For this reason, many see a lack of consistency in Morris’s art; it has been said that there is no way to identify “a Morris.”I, however , do not share this view.

On the contrary, powerful arguments can be developed to demonstrate that despite its visual diversity, a strong identity underlies his vast oeuvre. Throughout Morris’s twists and turns, his work have a common core, displaying a thematic and artistic consistency. He keeps transforming his lifelong subject, which is physical and mental conflict, with a remarkable physical immediacy.

Thus, regardless of Morris’s method of presentation, there is a fine thread running through his art, it together and leading one through a gradually developing continuum of meaning and substance. Morris, after all, ranks as one of the few artist/ philosophers of our time, certainly one of the deeper thinkers addressing the question of just what ought to constitute a work of art, from process to audience involvement. It is surprising then, that his pieces have been so often considered only in isolation from his writings, for instance, or even his works with each other or with work in a different discipline or medium.

This study will investigate Morris’s angst,” as it springs out of the idea of “dualism.” The term and polarities, alterations and dualities, antithetical dyads and coincidentia  oppositorum,” The present book will investigate this concept of dread within the context of a representative number of Morris’s works, as a gradual development of his thoughts and ideas, that culminate in a consistent, unified and complete body of art.

When I asked Morris what “angst and Robert Morris” mean to him, he answered:

My dictionary defines the term “angst” as “a feeling of anxiety: dread.” So what this means to me is that it has always been the case, a condition – like some people have green eyes or other are left-handed. It has to do with the coloration of my subjectivity. From a Lacanian perspective, this would no doubt be a far-from-achieved subjectivity. But if yeats was right that “bodily decrepitude is wisdom,” then perhaps soon a fuller subjectivity will be achieved more or less by default and I will find myself ignoring the angst…But I’m not counting on it.