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Thursday, April 3, 2008

Time for Irwin, Part II

posted by on April 3 at 10:30 AM

Yesterday, I wrote about Robert Irwin’s almost 50 years of art as a social project devoted to rearranging the hierarchy of what we pay attention to in the world (and what we either thoughtlessly or willfully ignore).

His breakthrough moment, his great contribution to the history of art, is this:

disk_install.jpg
Photograph by Philipp Scholz Rittermann

Maybe it doesn’t look like much. But it’s a solid, convex disc attached to the wall by a thick arm and sticking out several feet into the room. And yet even when you’re right there seeing its heft, it can disappear.

This installation is the best I’ve seen of a Robert Irwin disc. Irwin, who lives in San Diego, arranged it so that the museum would open up a skylight in its roof for the piece. The light is natural, and it falls down like a shower. (In the absence of natural light at many venues, Irwin was induced to devise a way of showing the discs that involves spotlights and a field of shadows on the wall behind the disc, which is how you often see the discs presented; the closest one to Seattle on public view, as far as I know, is at the Portland Art Museum.)

This installation isn’t up anymore. It was at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, where I saw it, until the end of February; the other, newer half of the Irwin retrospective is still up at the museum’s second building until April 13. (The show is not traveling; it will soon exist only in a very nice hardback catalog.)

Every time Irwin got bored, he moved on to something else, and he got bored early and often. For that reason, his career is defined by a constantly shifting, almost aggressive chronological narrative (gestural abstraction to line paintings to dot paintings to discs to scrims to installations to public works and gardens).

These days, Irwin doesn’t make freestanding objects. Eleven years ago, he made a piece that was like a eulogy for the whole basic premise of art objects, like a tribute to the empty space they leave behind when they go. Asked to complete a commission for the La Jolla branch of the MCASD, which sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean and may have the best view of any museum in the country (anybody care to differ?), Irwin selected the room with the panoramic view of the water.

Instead of hanging art on the walls of the room, he cut three 24-by-26-inch holes out of its windows. He cut absences out of a material designed already not to be seen. It takes a few minutes to discover that there’s even art in the room at all, and then you smell the sea air.

Robert%20Irwin%201%202%203%204.jpg
Photo by Pablo Mason

(Like the discs, I consider this work to be one of Irwin’s best. But it wasn’t installed during the Irwin retrospective. The La Jolla branch had other, unrelated shows on display, and the “view” room was set up as a reading area. It was confounding.)

Coming up: The blatant but largely unobserved flaw in the show’s centerpiece, why the bad lighting on one of Irwin’s paintings is perfect, why I’m glad the glass column in the show was knocked over and broken during the first weeks of the show, and what’s up with Irwin in Seattle right now.

RSS icon Comments

1

Wow. A flat glory hole.

Posted by Will in Seattle | April 3, 2008 10:53 AM
2

just saw a disc with the spotlights and shadows at MoMA nyc. fantastic. the one at the top of the post looks more arresting however. thanks jen.

Posted by terry miller | April 3, 2008 11:28 AM
3

@#1, my thoughts exactly. =)

Posted by Cato | April 3, 2008 11:39 AM
4

"...it’s a solid sphere attached to the wall by a thick arm and sticking out several feet into the room."

No, it's not. It's a section of a hollow sphere. AKA a convex disk. And it's attached to the wall by a post, made from a hollow tube.

Glad you liked it though.

Posted by Schoolmarm | April 3, 2008 12:58 PM
5

Schoolmarm:

The disc is in no way "hollow," nor is it a "section" of a larger sphere. It is a single, solid, curved plane of acrylic. Irwin did not create his discs by cutting segments from already formed whole spheres (it took much, much, much more labor than that); in addition, "convex" and "hollow" are not synonymous.

I'm not sure whether the tube is hollow, but I have a call in to the curator to see. I'll let you know.

Schoolmarmishly,
Jen

Posted by Jen Graves | April 3, 2008 1:37 PM
6

Yay, modern art that's actually interesting to look at.

Posted by The CHZA | April 3, 2008 2:12 PM
7

This just in: The post is hollow. Big around, and hollow.

Posted by Jen Graves | April 3, 2008 2:25 PM
8

Wow. I just reread what I wrote and realized that all of this Schoolmarmishness extends from my misuse of the word sphere. I apologize, Schoolmarm, for insinuating that you do not know the difference between "convex" and "hollow." I see completely what you were trying to say, and I'm fixing the wording on the original post. Oy. Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

Dunce-Capped,
Jen

Posted by Jen Graves | April 3, 2008 2:45 PM
9

Uh, help us out here. Is it a disc (i.e., a flat round thing), or more like a dish?

Posted by Fnarf | April 3, 2008 3:20 PM
10

I happen to be one of the formost art critics in the country. Take it form me, it is crap>

Posted by famous art critic | April 3, 2008 3:39 PM
11

It's a convex curved disc, quite like a dish with its base turned outward.

Posted by Jen Graves | April 3, 2008 4:11 PM
12

Can you get HBO on that thing? [badda boom].

Posted by Fnarf | April 3, 2008 5:20 PM
13

It's true: We all do make mistakes from time to time. Thank you for the simple correction and display of humility, a rare but always lovely thing to see.

Posted by Schoolmarm | April 4, 2008 6:40 PM

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