I wanted to post a few thoughts about Robert Irwin's work. Brian and I flew to San Diego to finish our books in peace by the sea (it's extraordinary to be out of the snow, but the books aren't finished...!) and, especially, to see Robert Irwin's retrospective at MCASD, which includes five new pieces. For those who know and love Irwin's work, it is a real treat. In the first building you find some of his very early (1955-60) expressionist paintings, the line paintings that followed, one of his dot paintings and one of the disks. I had seen a disk previously, but this one was different. Whereas the other disk I saw in LA (and in images) was metallic (spray-painted an egg-shell colour), this one is made of plastic and is transparent. There is a faint line of darker paint across the disk which gives the impression of a line. The extraordinary aspect of the disk is its transparency - as you step away from it it fades into the visual field, moving into the wall even as it moves out of it - a kind of pulsing in and of perception. It's extraordinary. In the same room, Irwin had a triangular section covered by a scrim, to create something like another wall. I say "something like" because the feeling of these srim walls is very uncanny - at first all you perceive is a strangeness in the environment. Something's not quite right, but you can't pinpoint what it is. As you approach it, you realize you have no sense of depth - it's as though the room were swimming in a kind of white texture. The wall feels soft to vision, there but not there. One amazing thing about it is how it gets people interactive - talking to one another about the strangeness of the not-wallness of the wall. I noticed that in LA as well, where there was a similar scrim room. Downstairs, there's another series of scrims, equally interesting, but the most magical aspect of the exhibition for me happens on the other side of the street. In that gallery, there are three rooms. One room is called Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, taking Barnett Newmann's painting as a point of departure. It's very hard to describe this exquisite work, but I'll try: You walk into a very large space with a high ceiling and in it are three large squares of colour on the floor (maybe 20 by 20 feet) - one red, one blue, one yellow. Directly above these squares, which are shiny and glossy (enamel, I believe), there are three more squares (these ones perhaps 20 feet in the air). So you have these open non-cubes of colour that give a sense of an open enclosure where the middle space - where your perception usually occurs, is open. As you move around these non-rooms of colour, the strangest thing happens: you begin to see reflections of complimentarity in the colours as well as in the windows of the space reflected. You're looking down at the room upside down reflected and the white windows above-below you are suddenly purple, green and orange! Impossible to explain, really, but the feeling of it is the best part: you are inundated with colour, the affective tone one of continual transformation. It's relational without trying to be, engaging, complex and extraordinarily simple at the same time. There's a ludic element too: looking into the colour, you see reflections of the other people both right-side up and upside down (depending on whether you are looking at a reflection of the reflection of the square above you or whether you are looking straight into the reflection of the square at your feet). Spectacular.
When talking to Irwin today, we discussed many aspects of his work, but most resonant for me was his belief that you cannot plan how art maps itself out. Art is site-conditioned for Irwin: it becomes-with an environment that proposes to art its unfolding.
Brian and I will try to write something up about this for publication in our upcoming online journal Inflexions.
More soon!
Erin
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