Robert Morris began his career as an Abstract Expressionist painter. In the early 1960s he started making sculptures conceived in connection with avantgarde dance, relating the positioning of his pieces to the positioning of bodies in space. Morris’s first sculptural object, made in 1960, was a hollow rectangular column painted grey. It was placed in the center of a stage for a few minutes, after which it was toppled, remaining prone for an equal amount of time. Initially Morris had planned to be inside the column, which he understood as a surrogate for a performer.