Robert Irwin biography by Lawrence Weschler
“I walked in the daytime for a long, long time, but then I got into the habit in the evening of buying myself a couple bottles of beer, sticking them in my pocket, and then just walking, for example, in Pairs, all night long in Paris until it became dawn, and then returning to my hotel room, sleeping till evening, having dinner, and starting out again. Just walking by myself. At certain times of night I’d be the only one out in the whole city. I mean, whole areas were just dead silent. And it was an incredibly romantic, very beautiful city, especially late at night like that.”
It was a strange way to see Europe. “After I’d been over about six or eight times during that decade,” Bob reaclls, “having spent maybe two or more years there altogether, I remember once having a conversation with some people who’d just come back from a two-week tour and being unable to convince them that I’d ben there at all. They’d talk Etoile and Elysees and Opera and all those names, I couldn’t remember any of that stuff. I’d probably seen more of Paris than all of those people combined, but I couldn’t tell them anywhre I’d been in terms of the name of the street or the cafe or whateve. I just wasn’t interested in that. In fact, I maybe saw all of the churches in Paris, but I never went to see any of the churces in Paris. In my wanderings there would this building and I’d walk int> > o it just like I walked into every building, but I didn’t care whether it was built in the Whatever or who did it. I mean, even to this day, I couldn’t care less. On the other hand, I retained a very real sense of the differing textures of each of those places…”
… Irwin installed himself on day in a small rented cabin and then did not converse with a soul for the next eight months.
Today, when he talks about it, he can’t explain why it happened. It jsut did, gradually, this distancing of hiself from the world: the night walks in Paris, the North African desert, and then, by an ineluctable process, this season on Ibiza.
He does recall how it felt. “It was a tremendously painful thing to do, especially in the beginning. It’s like in the everyday world, you’re just plugged into all the possibilities. Every time you get bored, you plug yourself in somewhere: you call somebody up, you pick up a magazine, a book, you go to a movie, anything. And all of that becomes your identity, the way in which you’re alive. You identify yourself in terms of all that. Well, what was happening to me as I was on my way to Ibiza was that I was pulling all those plugs out, one at a time: books, language, social contacts. And what happens at a certain point as you get down to the last plugs, it’s like the Zen thing of having no ego: it becomes scary, it’s like maybe you’re going to lose yourself. And boredom then becomes extremely painful. You really are bored and alone and vulnerable in the sense of having no outside supports in terms of your own being. But when you get them all pulled out, a little period goes by, and then it’s absolutely srene, it’s terrific. It just becomes really pleasa nt, because you’re out, you’re all the way out.”
“At first I just placed the two lines intuitively. But then I said to myself, ‘Who really put those two lines on like that?’ Was it really spontaneous intuition or was it rather cultural indoctrination? I mean, when you think of the degree to which we are inculcated to the whole idea about order and pattern and relationship: the way the street out there is laid out, the way this room is laid out, the fact that I went to school and took a class in design or learned to read from left to right. We have all these incredibly complicated assumptions and ideas about order which are operating all around us. So when I go up and put two lines on the canvas, did I put them on? Or was I simply reflecting this whole baggage that I’m carrying around? That was not really a negative; I just came to doubt that I myself had done it.”
Irwin’s entire progression had been dictated by upsurges of boredom; bored with the figurative, he’d moved on to the abstract, and so forth. Now he mobilized boredom itself as one of his means. “I put myself in that disciplined position, and one of the tools I used was boredom. Boredom is a very good tool. Because whenever you play creative games, what you normally do is you bring to the situation all your aspirations, all your assumptions, all your ambitions — all your stuff. And then you pile it up on your painting, reading into the painting all the things you want it to be. I’m sure it’s the same with writing; you load it up with all your illusions about what it is. Boredom’s a great way to break that. You do the same thing over and over and over again, until you’re bored stiff with it. Then all your illusions, aspirations, everything just drains off. And now what you see is what you get. Nothing more. A is A and B is B. A is not plus plus plus all these other things. It’s just A. And suddenly you’ve got something showing you all its threadbare reality, its lack of structure, its lack of meaning. And then you have a chance to… Boredom’s great. It’s a silly tool, but finally it’s a very good one. There are possible more sophisticated ways to get at something like that, but when you come from where I came from, you take your tools where you can find them.”
[The late line canvases] only “work” immediately; they command and incredibly presence — “a rich floating sense of energy,” as Irwin describes it — but only to one who is in fact present. Back at home, you may remember what it felt like to stand before the painting, the texture of the meditative state it put you in, but the canvas itself, its image in your mind, will be evanescent. That is why for many years Irwin declined to allow his work to be photographed, because the image of the canvas was precisely what the painting was not about.
Indeed the problem is even more complicated than that. For in a very real sense, the achievement of these paintings was in their making, and the finished canvas at one level is only an incidental relic, a fossil of that original process of discovery: not only do you have to be present before these paintings in order to experience them, it may be that you have to have made them as well. Irwin admitted as much one afternoon: “With those late line paintings, the process was intimate to the solution. I sometimes wonder whether anyone in the world has seen those paintings but me.”
Irwin often has had problems in being typecast as an artist of this or that sort: an abstract expressionist, a color-field painter, an op artist, a minimalist, a conceptualist, and so forth. While it is true that his trajectory has often taken him through the domains of these movements, usually he is just passing through, hot on the trail of his own concerns. Critics who for a few years are celebrating the fact that he’s come round to their view are often quickly disappointed as he “reverts” to some other. In his own terms, however, his trajectory has been arrow-straight.
[Originally, he] was fiercely competitive: he wanted to be the best goddamn abstract expressionist on the block. Something happened, though, over the next several years. He got hooked on what he was doing: curiosity came to supersede ambition as his principal motivation. It has stayed that way ever since.
“Those lines,” Irwin is likely to grin nowadays, “that was where, at age thirty-five, I finally grew up and became an artist.”
“You know,” Irwin advised me on morning as we began talking about his movement toward the dot paintings, the works that would command his attention between 1964 and 1966, “you have to be careful in taking these things I’m saying and working them into too clear an evolving narrative. There’s a danger in spelling these recollections out so lucidly that your reader gains the impression that at the time I knew what I was doing and where all this was leading in some sort of intellectual way. You have to make it very clear to anyone who might read your essay, especially any young artist who might happen to pick it up, that my whole process was really an intuitive activity in which all the time I was only putting one foot in front of the other, and that each step was not that resolved. Most of the time I didn’t have any idea where I was going; I had no real intellectual clarity as to what it was I thought I was doing. Usually it was just a straightforward commitment in terms of pursuing the particular problems or questions which had been raised in doing the work”
“Maybe I was just gradually developing a trust in the act itself, that somehow, if it were pursued legitimately, the questions it would raise would be legitimate and the answers would have to exist somewhere, would be worth pursuing, and would be of consequence.”
“Actually, during those years in the midsixties,” he doubled back on his formulation, “the answers seemed to matter less and less: I was becoming much more of a question person than an answer person.”
What Robert Irwin is insisting upon, these paintings seem irresistibly to declare, is that the medium is not the message. They explore a division, as absolute as can possibly be demonstrated, between the art-object and the art, between painting and the experience of art. What stays in the musuem is only the art-object, not valueless, but not the value of art. The art is what has happened to the viewer.
from Leider’s 1966 catalogue essay on Robert Irwin’s work
… the real questions Irwin was trying to engender in his students were located less in the past than in themselves. “All the time my ideal of teaching has been to argue with people on behalf o the idea that they are responsible for their own activities, that they are really, in a sense, the question, that ultimately they are what it is they have to contribute. The most critical part of that is for them to begin developing the ability to assign their own tasks and make their own criticism in direct relation to their own needs and not in light of some abstract criteria. Because once you learn how to make your own assignments instead of relying on someone else, then you have learned the only thing you really need to get out of school, that is, you’ve learned how to learn. You’ve become your own teacher.”
…
Once he had brought his students to that threshold, Irwin goes on to explain, he was faced with another challenge, “which was that I might not like what it was they were doing. But my own feelings at that point were beside the point; or rather, since my relationships to those students had shifted from that of leader to coparticipant, my personal likes, dislikes, and biases were no longer critical to their development except as just one more issue up for discussion.”
That was how the process was supposed to work, but there were many pitfalls, the most treacherous of which was perhaps that of imitation. “It’s very difficult to avoid, the student being lost in the beginning and the school set up to emphasize short-term performance. So they tend to imitate what you do as a way of associating with what you say. But what you’re trying to do is develop their sensitivities and not your own. I have strong philosophic reservations about what it is we are actually talking about when we use the word morality, but as that word is most commonly used, I would think that the most immoral thing one can do is have ambitions for someone else’s mind. That’s the crux of the challenge and the responsibility of having the opportunity to deal with young people at such a crucial time in their formation. One of the hardest things to do is not to give them clues — ‘Here, do it this way, it’s a lot easier’ — and instead to keep them on the edge of the question.”
[Robert Irwin] is quite adamant on the question of whether society owes the artist a living: he feels it odes not. He urges young artists to structure their finances in such a way that they do not have to rely on the sale of their art: he urges them to reduce their material requirements and to cultivate alternative sources of income. The important thing, whenever possible, is to safeguard the art from impinging financial pressures. Irwin does no subscribe to the sackcloth-and-ashes school of artistic romanticism; he sees no special virtue in starving in garrets.
“Look,” he said to me one day, “it’s really quite simple. Pursuing the questions which art provokes is a long-term activity that necessarily needs to be free of short-term measures and rewards. In order to maintain a natural balance and continuously develop the ability to make reasoned observations and decisions, it is necessary that you take very good care of yourself, since you are the crux of it all. I’m always very kind to myself. I indulge myself in lots of ways. I give myself lots of free time. I allow myself lots of room for mistakes and contradictions. And I spend a lot of time entertaining my personal fantasies and playing the games I enjoy. I don’t let money questions get to me. It’s just a matter of good health.”
His motto could be, modest needs lavishly met.
As his principal contribution to the United States Pavilion at the 1976 Venice Biennale, Irwin merely outlined, with a string stretched into a taught rectangle, the dappled of tree-filtered light on a path of ground. At that point he still felt he needed the string, not so much because he needed to leave a trace of himself as because he needed to mark that particular corner of ground as in some sense a heightened field. But many people mistook the string itself for the the work of art (“When I point my finger at the moon, don’t mistake my finger for the moon” is a Zen aphorism that Irwin is fond of citing).
Irwin has become increasingly convinced that perception precedes conception, that every thought or idea arises within the context of an infinite field of perceptual presence which it thereupon rushes to delimit. In this conviction, Irwin conspicuously dissents from a central tenet of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes argued that the fundamental, originary moment, when everything else had been stripped away, occurred in the cogito: Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Thinking preceded and defined being: mind preceded and defined experience. For Descartes, it is the thinking mind that perceives. Irwin, by contrast, feels that prior to the Cartesian cogito there is, as it were, a “precogito,” which is the originary pre-mediated perceptual field, and that all thinking has designs, lays designs, as it were, across this field.
Irwin’s most sustained theoretical exposition to date of the foundations for this contention comes, in his Whitney essay, in the middle portion, “The Process of a Compounded Abstraction.” Over five densely articulated pages, Irwin traces a six-fold progression from perception through conception, form, formful, formal, and on to formalized. The text requires a more careful consideration than this context allows, but the six stages can be summarized: Irwin defines perception as the individual’s originary, direct interface with the phenomenally given. We are speaking here of the overbrimming synesthesia of undifferentiated sensations — they are not even defined yet as sounds versus colors, and so forth — they exist as the plenum of experience. With the next stage, conception, the individual (who now, for the first time, arises as a being differentiated from his surroundings, a cogito, an “I”) through the operations of his mind isolates zones of focus: this splash, that tree, that horizon, this car, and so forth; and yet, at this stage, though isolated, these zones remain unnamed. Naming comes at the next stage, form, where that isolated zone of focus, that tree, now becomes “that tree.” With naming, and myriad parallel operations, it now becomes possible for the first time for indivudals to communicate with each other; community comes into being. At the next stage, formful, these named things begin to be deployed through relational patterns: day and night, hot and cool, loud and soft, and so forth. At the next stage, formal, these patterns in turn begin to be reified, to become standardized into the more efficient deployments of social usage: clock time, calendars, color wheels, temperature readings, and so forth. At the final stage, formalized, it is these standardized measures that begin to dictate our behavior, a behavior that has now become utterly estranged from direct perceptual experience. Thus, for example, we shuttle ourselves through a world of nine-to-five jobs, daylight saving time, thermostatic controls, and so forth.
…
In this sense, perception is originary, the foundation of everything. And yet, like the bottommost stratum at an archaeological dig, perception is the hardest to reach.
[It] implied not only the dematerialization of the art object, but the virtual evaporation of the artist’s role qua artist. And Irwin was willing to say as much. Sitting there is the Whitney’s coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. “That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it’s beautiful,” he commented, “that, as far as I’m concerned, now fits all my criteria for art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.”
In everything Irwin has done since the abstract expressionist canvases in the late fifties, he has been trying to approach — and slowly getting closer and closer to his goal — that presence that would not be metaphorical. For Irwin sees presence and metaphor as polar opposites. Presence demands presence, whereas metaphor allows, indeed requires, absence — evasion. When the one who experiences the object experiences it as like something else, or as like something that could be accounted for in such and such a way, then he no longer experiences it but rather experiences his abstractions — and presently his compounded abstractions — of it. Across the lines, the dots, and the discs, in calibrating presence, Irwin was still creating objects that were metaphors of presence. Even the room at the Whitney and its two accompanying on-site installations were more about what it might be like to be present than about presence. They were, however, getting closer to the quarry, and in his most recent work, Irwin has gotten closer still.
“Bob had this way of looking at plants unlike anyone I’ve ever encountered,” Naranjo told me. “For instance, he’d talk about how trees looked completely different lit from in front than from behind — not only a whole different color but a whole different density — which was going to be important because here they’d have to work both ways, which wasn’t always the case. Things I’d never really though about before. Invariably, we’d visit some new nursery and he’d spot some strange, scraggly tree and get all excited , pointing — ‘Richard, I want that tree’ — to which I’d have to say, ‘Bob, that tree is dying.’ ‘Shows you how much I know about gardening,’ he’d reply cheerfully, very easygoing. But he was a great listener and a fast learner.”
“[It] all comes down to how you answer a single question: Is the moment of perception — that first moment, before all the abstracting, conceptualizing processes that follow — is that moment closest to or furthest from the real? Everything depends on how you answer that question.”
The red, for example, wasn’t simply red — or rather it was: the surface was covered over in a completely even gloss of lipstick red paint — but (had it been doing that before?) the panel was reflecting ambient conditions like crazy, so much so that in fact almost none of the surface, strictly speaking, was red. Pool-like, it was reflecting the yellow ceiling panel beyond, whose own color was in turn being affected by the blue floor piece beyond that. There were purple effects and green, a sort of even bruise brown hovering over the entire array when one viewed the gallery from the side. And now, as I ambled over to the far end and peered into the blue — and wait, that definitely hadn’t been there a moment ago — it was as if these reflections and reflected reflections were boring a hole through the floor: if there was someone else on the other side, gazing into the red, it was as if, yes, there they were, straight ahead, but there they also were — flip and counterflip — standing three stories down, and then (gazing up) stories up as well. (The piece was as vertically deep as the Dia piece had been horizontally wide: perpendicular but every bit as heavenly.) The visitor might then amble over to the yellow rectangle, so as to peer into that pool, only bizarrely, the yellow plane afforded no such illusion: in fact one might initially assume that it had been painted with a matte yellow as opposed to the reflective gloss of the red and blue, except that on closer examination (you had to crouch down to confirm this), the yellow paint was just as glossy as the others; it just didn’t reflect the same way.
…
And what of that? Why does the piece seem so flat at first? Why does it take one so long to start noticing the incredibly complex infolding of colors?
“Well,” Irwin surmised, “maybe it has something to do with the title of that book of yours: because seeing really is forgetting the name of the thing you see. In this instance, you walk in and your brain tell you, oh, that’s a red, a yellow, and a blue plane — so that’s what you see. You see ‘red,’ and ‘yellow’ and ‘blue,’ and it takes a while for your perceptual apparatus to burn through all that initial cognitive/linguistic labeling.”
As a result, curiously, this piece couldn’t be photographed in its experiential fullness for exactly the opposite reason Irwin’s pieces usually presented photographers with such problems. With most of his other works, as he often said, the camera might approximate the piece’s image but could never convey its presence (its lived presence, which is to say the presence across time), which is to say the main thing the piece was about. In this instance, however, the camera (lacking any cognitive/linguistic filter) instantaneously captured, and couldn’t help capturing, all the complicated infolding, overlapping chaos of cross-reflecting color which it could take a person standing there a good ten minutes of patient attention finally to worry out. What a camera couldn’t capture, in fact, was the room with simple flat red, yellow, and blue rectangular planes.
“Yeah,” said Irwin, “isn’t human perception amazing?”