Mirror (Robert Morris, 1969) (Patreon)

Among the original group of minimalists, Robert Morris was probably the closest to a bridge figure between the emerging "primary structures" movement and the slightly earlier, related but distinct school of conceptual art. If you look across his career, there are certainly intellectual commonalities and consistent concerns. But his work was constantly changing shape. From the early show of laquered plywood solids, to his mirrored boxes and planes, through his photographic "I-Box," to his eventual felt wall hangings, Morris was always fundamentally preoccupied with using materials as themselves, to instigate a particular kind of perceptual experience, in a specific locale.

His work in cinema was no exception. Mirror, obviously, was an extension of his sculptural work with mirrors and doubled perception. But it is first and foremost a landscape film. Throughout the running time of the work, Morris is shown holding a mirror of approximately 3x4 feet, and the cameraperson generally tries to keep the frame as tight around that mirror as possible, so that its contents and the film frame's contents (aside from Morris's gloved hands) become identical.

The result is a wintery landscape filled with barren trees, one which shows us what is behind the camera instead of what is in front of it. This is a kind of cinematic analogue to Morris's theoretical interest in the gestalt of geometical forms, wherein we see one  or two faces of a geometrical solid and intuitively "see" the sides that are facing away from us. The mirror makes the landscape buckle and wobble, and Morris walks around, creating a tracking shot by optical transmission.

Mirror is of course related to contemporary work that Robert Smithson was doing at the time, not only with mirrors but with using the landscape and its materials as a basis for "primary structures." Morris is not assembling piles of snow or anything, but he is implying that the snowy field has its own aesthetic integrity, and that the mirror and the camera are two terms in a three-way, equal triangulation. Whereas Smithson would go outside and stay there, for the most part Morris's sojourn into the wild was a momentary aberation.