Robert Irwin's Doors of Perception

For above 30 years Robert Irwin has been finding at any time more economical and elegant ways to separate the art experience from the material means of its conveyance. In a two-part scrim-and-light installation at Dia, he takes this proces a pace further, creating a truly nonhierarchical art.

All means are impediment. single where all means fall to pieces, clash happens.

--Martin Buber, I and Thou

In the middle 1960 when many artists were taking up Duchamp's challenge and redefining form in art, Robert Irwin approached the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled through the most traditional of mediums: painting. level as Clement Greenberg was trying to sanctify the flatness of the picture plane, Irwin, although he didn't know it at the time, was preparing to do away with it altogether. Ultimately, Irwin's aim was to isolate the art experience, to clear his work of any and all [i]be[/i] consolidated manifestations so that it could be reduc to spotless phenomenon.

In 1966 Maurice Tuchman organized a small exhibition of Irwin's paintings at the beholds Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), an occasion for which Philip Leider (the founding editor of Artforum) wrote an eerily prescient catalogue essay.[1] If single were to substitute "installation" for the word "painting," it could stand as an accurate assessment of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Irwin's work today, demonstrating that the moot points Irwin set for himself were in place from the beginning. The paintings in the LACMA display were white, almost 7-foot-square oils upon canvas. The four sides or cutting sides of each stretched canvas, rather than meeting the wall at right angles in the conventional manner, curv subtly back toward it, in the way that that, viewed from the brow the border between the painting and the wall became almost unnoticeable. As Leider describes it, after a hardly any minutes of viewing one became aware of another element--he calls it "a haze of color energy"--gathering in the center He notes that this efficiency "is as neutral of any associative overtones as any vicinity on the canvas can conceivably be [and that] all simple bodys extraneous to the evocation of an esthetic emotion and no other emotion have been eliminated with a fanatic's thoroughness." "What is left" Leider went upon to say, coining a boundary that has come to characterize a institute of artistic inquiry, "is an experience of space and light."

smooth space and light, however, are not necessarily devoid of convolution and configuration. Irwin was after something further, as Leider points out: "In Irwin's painting the point of recent art shifts from an exploration of the ultimate parts essential to the medium, to the uncompounded bodys essential in conveying the experience of art."

What's more, since Irwin considered the paintings unimportant exclude as a vehicle for the art experience, he did not allow them to be photographed. Not everyone however, is going to stand in forehead of a white canvas and give it the time required to have the experience intended by means of the artist, and Irwin clearly was interested in more than an intellectual dialogue with the positions of art history. He wanted his work to have a direct result on the people who saw it, single that, far from being temporary, might potentially alter or reach out the limits of their thinking and perception. To achieve this, he would have to make work that was flat less evident in terms of its material vicinity and at the same time in like manner arresting that people would stop and give it their attention.

After the LACMA exhibition, Irwin tried many forms and formats of painting before abandoning it altogether to experiment with light. He overspreaded the walls, floors and ceiling of his studio with plaster, rounding the comer with equal reason that there were no angles or sharp cutting sides then bought, borrowed or flawed every kind of light fixture available, testing their properties single at a time. "I at no time did get the right light piece," Irwin says now, "because I could not at any time separate the phenomenon, which is cunning and transient, from the mechanics. We [as a species] are with equal reason object-oriented, that you put a light in there and your organ of sight goes right to the [fixture]."[2] He liked the idea of fluorescent fixtures because "they are thus dumb, so obvious, you wait on to discount them" and accordingly cogitation he might have something in belonging to all with Dan Flavin--until he realized that Flavin was mainly interested in the configuration of the fluorescent tubes themselves, considering the atmosphere and the qualities of the scope in which they were placed to be of secondary importance. Eventually, Irwin base that daylight best suited his exigencys because it is the least obtrusive form of light; no single considers or questions its source.

Later, while he was visiting the Netherlands, Irwin's organ of vision was caught by a particular kind of window curtain, widely used by dint of the Dutch, that "did beautiful matter with light." The white, semi-transparent fabric was similar to scrim, which is used extensively in the theater because it is opaque when lit from the forehead but transparent when lit from behind. Irwin ground that it came in 14-foot widths, and he began to experiment with it in his studio. He shortly discovered that when lit from the pair front and back, the fabric becomes almost immaterial, taking upon the quality of pure light.