Frankly, I’m not so interested that Robert Morris made a work about Litany of The Chariot in 1961, too. Thanks to George Heard Hamilton’s translations of Robert Lebel’s 1959 monograph and first-pass catalogue raisonné AND The Green Box, the entire English-speaking New York art world could suddenly read what their Duchamp fandom was actually about. I’m sure everyone was into it.
I AM interested, though, in where Morris’ first Duchamp-related work has been.
Litanies (Litany of the Chariot) (1961), or as it’s signed and titled at the bottom, The Litanies of the Chariot by Marcel Duchamp. A Two and One Half Hour Recitation by R. Morris, is a drawing dated 2-18-61.
Morris made it, we’re to understand, by writing out the “Litanies of the Chariot” text from The Green Book in miniscule cursive script until it filled a 22-inch sheet of paper, and that this took two and a half hours.
As Christophe Cherix put it when he was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of MoMA’s Prints and Illustrated Books department:
There is a performative aspect to Litanies, as it takes Duchamp’s statement literally by accomplishing quite exactly what it states. If Duchamp associates chariot and litany, this is because the latter expresses by repetition a circular aspect of the thought process, two elements, repetition and circularity, which Morris expresses as literally as possible, and, I would suggest, materializes in the very space of his drawing.
But when was that, exactly? Is a question I still can’t figure, and it matters.
Cherix was talking about Litany, a performance/drawing, in a text about Morris’s Prints because, “even as it provides a key to Morris’ oeuvre, [it] also stands as a reminder of a painful moment in the history of the institution I work for, the Museum of Modern Art in New York… It was part of our collection until it mysteriously disappeared during the long tour of the exhibition The Drawings of Robert Morris, organized by Thomas Krens in 1982 for the Williams College Museum of Art.”
That text was published in 2015, by which point Cherix actually led a consolidated Department of Drawings & Prints, and had since 2013. Before that, he’d been Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints & Illustrated Books since 2010, and joined the department in 2007. [His current staff bio says he’s the David Rockefeller Director, and had been the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings & Prints, but the P&IB chief curatorship is not a named position. Is that what happens to your named curatorship in a reorg, it just gets erased from the record, only lingering in outdated bios from undated symposia? Is it any more permanent than putting your name on a gallery that gets remodeled out of existence or rehung out of significance? Is that when you decide it’s truly enough of a legacy to just have the sculpture garden named after you? Or your mother?]
Anyway, symposia. Cherix’s text originated at a three-day symposium, Investigations: The Expanded Field of Writing in the Works of Robert Morris, held at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon in November 2008. Amazingly, Cherix’s Friday afternoon session had a “Retransmission au Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts,” the scene of the crime.
Was that the impetus for the disclosure? Because I can find no other mention of the “mysterious disappearance” in the 42 years since it happened. Litany was discussed but not illustrated in the monograph for Rosalind Krauss’s 1994 Morris retrospective at [Krens’s] Guggenheim, where it obviously did not appear.
From the bio for a French literary festival in Culver City in May 2012, when symposium Noura Wedell moved to USC, we learn that “the collected papers of [the symposium] are currently in press.” So that would explain Cherix’s updated bio. And you know what else happened in May 2012? Let’s go to this new footnote: “Litanies has since been recovered and was restituted to the Museum of Modern Art in May 2012.”
Well that’s convenient timing! Where was it, and what happened?
From its 1982 origin in Williamstown The Drawings of Robert Morris traveled to seven locations: Boston, Seattle, Austin, Grand Rapids, Otterlo, and Milan, ending in Malmö in 1984. Where did it go missing? The records of each venue should reveal where it went, and then where it didn’t show up.
The easier thing, of course, is for someone to say what happened. So many people at the pinnacle of the art and museum world know what happened to this Robert Morris drawing, and where it was, and maybe even who had it. But in 42 years no one has said anything besides one footnote in an open-source symposium proceedings.
[update/footnote] OK lfg:
The Drawings of Robert Morris, organized by Thomas Krens was at:
The Clark, Williamstown, May 1–June 27, 1982;
ICA Boston, July 6–Aug 29, 1982;
Seattle Art Museum, Nov 27–Jan 15, 1983;
Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin (TX), Apr 1–May 8, 1983;
Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI), May 29–Jul 10, 1983;
Rijksmuseum Kroller-Müller, Otterlo (NL), [as Robert Morris: Tekeningen 1956–1983], Sept 10–Oct 23, 1983;
Malmö Konsthall (SE), Jan 28–Apr 3, 1984; [NO?] and
Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (IT), [as I disegni di Robert Morris]Apr 18–May 28, 1984.
Will update as the info comes in.
[Sept. 4 update] One confirmation that the work made it as far as Austin, which is nice because the Seattle Art Museum restricts access to their archives at the UofW library, and canceled my research appointment.
The only institution to respond directly, Malmö Konsthall, only had installation shots available that appear not to include the work. I get that August is August, but no other institution has responded at all so far. 🤷♂️