Weschler's Robert Irwin

It says a lot about artist Robert Irwin that my favorite work of his has never actually been created. Irwin is a conceptual artist, horse race afficionado and dreamer whose artistic career is sketched in Lawrence Weschler's superb book "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees." This book gives Irwin's conceptual art a humanity that experiencing it in person does not.

Weschler's book traces how Irwin went from being a precocious teenager winning national figurative drawing contests to joining the second generation of abstract painters in Los Angeles, to becoming a mature artist stretching a rope in the desert for no one to see.

Until the 1980s, he refused to allow his work to be photographed or reproduced because he believed the context for art as important as the piece. In the late '70s, Irwin pushed the Marcel Duchamp art-as-context idea into boredom, like when he transformed an empty room at MoMA by replacing the lights and running a string along the room. The point was to get people to notice the environment in which art is situated. Most artists working today know where this line of thinking ends, and lucky for us Irwin did it so we don't have to.

At one point, Irwin created these clear glass columns that were designed to be almost invisible. The idea was that a viewer would look across the room and, not seeing an "artwork" per se, notice a slight refraction, a visual hiccup through the glass, and question their visual experience of a particular place. Or at least notice how the eye is working with physical expectations layed out by the brain. When you consider this piece you see the basic Irwin contradiction: he was creating art that's not meant to be looked at.

Irwin came to make art like this after his experience of creating beautiful abstract-expressionist canvases that were about the surface of the painting, creating space by with and color. It talks about his long days in the studio, making one mark on the canvas and then retreating to ponder its relationship to all the other marks, figuring out whether the picture plane had been compressed or expanded, how this figure related to the ground. Weschler would think and think on the surface and how a viewer would enter the painting.

Once you see the artwork as a surface, you notice all the other surfaces around it. For instance, for Irwin the sides of the canvas became as important as the front. The viewer's experience wasn't just frontal, after all. And then he worried about the back, and the light that hit the painting, and the wall it was on, and then the building. He became not just a perfectionist (although he was accused of being that) but someone who saw the canvas as unending.

He was questioning the foundations of art. At one point in the book, Irwin is invited to join an exchange program where artists were invited to work with scientists. Most artists continued to do what they were already working on, only at a bigger and more complicated scale. (Think Warhol meeting up with Polaroid folks in order to produce larger, more fabulous Polaroids.) Irwin joined with a Buddhist NASA engineer and fundamentally changed the artwork he was doing. Talking to Weschler, Irwin says that there are people in every discipline who just continue working at the traditional elements of the trade, and there are those who work on a more philosophical level. These people, according to Irwin, have more in common with conceptual thinkers in other fields than with traditional practioners in their own field. Irwin has more in common with a physicist who thinks about quantum theory, in other words, than with Norman Rockwell.

Weschler's book, which was originally published in the early '80s, keeps artspeak and technical philosophy at a blissful minimum. Instead, we hear the voice of Irwin, funny, anecdotal, searching. He recalls his days betting at the racetrack in order to make a living, and his youthful days cruising southern California as a teenager. If, like me, you can feel scammed to pay $20 admission to an empty warehouse just to read wall text to a fluorescent light in the corner, this book is indispensible.

Watch an interview with Robert Irwin here.