Im Beginning To See The Light

I'M BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT JACK MURPHY 28 JUNE 2015

NOTES ON A CONDITIONAL ESSAY Robert Irwin is an American artist from Los Angeles. A childhood in Long Beach preceded military service and enrollment at various art colleges prior to his artistic career.

Irwin's output consistently explores the idea of “phenomenal presence.”1 That is: the work focuses on the perception of a specific arrangement of objects or of a specific spatial situation. It is about having a physical experience.

Until the arrival of modern art, artistic production was realized through the creation of an image, and the success of the artwork was weighed in how the meaning of the image was communicated. The cultural signification produced by the image was considered in this weighing, as was the technique used to make the image. Cubism began to dissolve this subjectivity, and subsequent waves of twentieth-century art, increasingly more abstract, further fractured this pathway. Artists increasingly preferred to focus on the bodily what it is instead of the cerebral what it means. Figuring it out for himself, Irwin wrote: The big challenge for me […] was simply always try to maximize the energy, the physicality of the painting, and to minimize the imagery. It could all be looked at essentially as turning the entire question upside down: moving away from the literate, conceptual rationale and really reestablishing the inquiry on the perceptual, tactile level.2 This inquiry formed the basis of Irwin's process: to interrogate, completely, the terms of how a work is produced and the space in which the work exists in an effort to maximize the energy of the gesture. The mark disappears, but the feeling remains.

Irwin's ocular journey and philosophies are fascinating topics in themselves, but they are not the subject of this text. Those revelations are covered in well-written and fine detail in Lawrence Weschler's book of conversations with Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (a critical source for this text, also).

To summarize the work of a vast creative life even further: the intensity of this gaze communicates the overall intensity of Irwin as a person. He was, and remains, a sharply intelligent figure, prepared to hold court on any topic, from his search for the perfect mix of fountain Coke, to early big band music (a young Irwin made a living for a while as a competitive swing dancer), to intricacies of Western philosophical treatises. Indeed, Irwin's positions on the value of the phenomenal seem to bubble out of his absorption of Enlightenment philosophers like Kant, to whom the term was essential. This aside highlights the correlation between art and life, and the general tenet that perceptual operation triggered by the artwork could and should be triggered by just about anything else. Again, Weschler's book captures this idea in its innumerable worthwhile vignettes.

Moving forward, the text will address Irwin's work as it relates to the topic of colour, with a focus on Irwin's fluorescent tube pieces. An obvious caveat here is the categorical difference between the experience of a work and its visual reproduction. It is a fiddly, cerebral distinction but one invited by the extreme care shown by Irwin in realizing his works. Concerned with the difference between a painting's “identity and physical existence,”3 Irwin, for a long time, forbade photographic reproductions 1 Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982/2008), 66.

2 Weschler, 65.

3 Robert Irwin, “Statement on Reproductions, in Notes Toward a Conditional Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011), 21. Originally published as: Robert Irwin, “Statement on Reproductions,” Artforum 3, no. 9 (June 1965), 23.

of his work, though he has since recanted. Writing about the work adds another variable to the equation. It is not a substitute for the work itself, just as a photograph cannot suffice. But, it is a format to review, dissect, and contextualize the qualities of the experiences made possible by the works themselves.

IRWIN ON COLOUR The history of Irwin's work has been described elsewhere as an hourglass, moving from initial paintings into the compression chamber of perceptual renovations, and widening out again to his immense catalogue of installations and public art since the 1970s. The same diagrammatic shape could be applied to the presence of colour in Irwin's efforts.

Early oil paintings feature the swirls of bodied colour that are to be expected from Abstract Expressionist pieces of the 1950s. Young and carefree, Irwin's initial efforts embody a breezy West Coast cool, to the degree that one found its way onto the cover of a Chet Baker record.4 The first solo show of the work was an amateur success but Irwin, recoiling from prevailing styles, fell in with the artists of the now-renowned Ferus Gallery who produced an alternative vision for what California art meant in the early 1960s. Soon after, he sequestered himself in his Venice, California studio, eager to “start over again—from scratch.”5 Further works were produced but the painter was distracted by the inevitable trappings of a studio space: the unevenness of the stretched canvas, the colour of the baseboard, the cornered dust, difficult to sweep up. Locked inside, Irwin spent intense days simply looking, staring at a white wall to catalogue its eccentricities or to just appreciate its minute changes in colour as the sun wobbled across the sky. Monkish solitude led him to eventually discard all of the assumed requirements of a painting.

The products of this reduction moved quickly from his “later line paintings” (figure 1) to dot paintings.

The dot paintings were a scatter of tiny green and red specks on white canvas, an effort created with painstaking care. The result was easily dismissed as an even, warm gray canvas if seen in passing, with the microscopic grid of colour only emerging when examined up close or after a long stare.

A break-through arrived in 1967, taking the form of a slightly bulging acrylic disc that hovered off the wall. It was lit from four sources, which worked to totally obscure the edge of the object against the larger field of wall and shadows (figure 2). This and further installations would later place Irwin solidly at the center of California's Light and Sound Movement, which focused on ideas of material experimentation and perceptual alteration. Another famous member is James Turrell, who, alongside Irwin and physicist Ed Wortz, participated in an Art and Technology experiment that paired artists with scientists. The trio experimented with an anechoic chamber and, in one famous experiment, studied how different frequencies of sound affect the enjoyment of a glass of beer. Turrell abruptly left the experiment, and no finished works resulted from the collaboration. Later, Irwin and Wortz produced a “National Symposium on Habitation” to discuss the findings and invited a range of professionals to attend and give talks. Frank Gehry participated, and helped Irwin to produce the cardboard furniture used at the conference, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible.

4 John Hallmark Neff, “Hands-on: Irwin and Abstract Expressionism,” in Robert Irwin (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1993), 79.

5 Neff, 79.

Figure 1. Crazy Otto, 1962, oil on canvas, 66” x 65”.

Figure 2. Untitled, ca. 1966-67, sprayed acrylic lacquer on shaped aluminum, 60� diameter.

In the 1970s, any obvious colour disappeared from the Irwin's work, though this was a deliberate reduction. Remembering his process during an interview in 2007, Irwin remarked: [A]ctually, I always wanted colour in my work. I went through a reductive process, which was misidentified as being minimalism. […] I found that there were just too many things in my paintings, things that did not contribute enough to justify their being there. […] So, I started editing my work, taking out what was really not crucial or critical to it.6 He goes on to distance his processes from the category of minimalism: In that reductive process, I really would have liked to have used colour. But in the beginning, my use of colour was very seductive and involved in self-identification; it had no real reason for being there. I guess we're talking about the idea of taking colour out as a reduction, and the idea of minimalism as such, but I was never, never interested in minimalism. This reduction was essentially a break from the past.7 With this goal in mind, Irwin made many specific, intensely distilled installations in the 1970s, largely consisting of finely finishing a space, adding lighting to augment any natural light presence, or using the ephemeral material of scrim, a perforated cloth that alternately disappears when lit from behind, or becomes opaque when seen at a shallow angle. In 1970, Irwin snuck into the Museum of Modern Art and refinished an awkward empty room, repainting it, cleaning the skylight, and relamping the fixtures with very blue (high Kelvin) lights, resulting in a “rainbow” effect of warmer daylight and cool fluorescents.8 Most visitors didn't notice, but those that remained to see the subtlety were rewarded with the pleasant sensation of a well-tuned space. Similar site-responsive installations followed, including a powerful scrim piece in Breuer's Whitney in 1977.9 Materially these works were cheap—scrim, paint, tape, light fixtures, sunlight—but the phenomenological payoff was immense.

More permanent public art commissions followed as Irwin's career developed, from small Cor-Tentrimmed planes of mown grass, to proposals for airport landscape master plans. One would think that such a fascination with the varietals of white would make Irwin an ideal partner to work with Richard Meier, but their collaboration in the 1990s on the Getty Museum garden turned into a war zone. Irwin, with no official training as a landscape architect, designed largely by texture, and travelled throughout California to source plants, rocks, and materials for the project (figure 3). His swirling, circular design annihilated Meier's precious 30” grid, and a great deal of yelling followed. The finished garden is stunning.

Recent installations began to include bold colours again. For a 2006 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Irwin filled a room with six large rectangles of primary colours, assembled with airplane-grade materials and paint, a work humorously titled Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, in reference to a quartet of large paintings by Barnett Newman (figure 4). Hugh M. Davies, the MCASD's Director, explains the piece in the exhibition catalog:

6 Hugh M. Davies, “Excerpts from a Conversation with Robert Irwin,” in Primaries and Secondaries (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2008), 49.

7 Davies, 49-50.

8 Robert Irwin and Jennifer Winkworth, “A Public Conversation Between Robert Irwin and Jennifer Winkworth,” in Robert Irwin Cacophonous (New York: Pace Gallery, 2015), 7-9.

9 The myriad installations from this era are not reproduced in this text, but are impressive, and worth googling, at least.

The Whitney piece Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light was reinstalled in 2013, and good photographs of the show, along with the original 1977 retrospective catalog, can be found here: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/RobertIrwin.

Figure 3. Robert Irwin, photographs used to study the texture, colours, and scales of various plant material at the Central Garden, Getty Center, Los Angeles.

Figure 4. Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue, 2006-2007, urethane paint over lacquer on aircraft honeycomb aluminum.

By vertically pairing painted primary coloured panels—22-by-20-feet ceiling panels suspended and aligned directly over identical floor panels—Irwin defines a trio of three-dimensional idealized spaces. Placed in line, these colour-filled volumes read like diagrams for imaginary Miesian structures stripped of any structural supporting columns or even glass walls. As one walks around the piece and looks down at the highly reflective glossy surfaces, they seem to have depth, appearing almost like pools of liquid colour. Staring down at the yellow floor, the reflection of the adjacent red ceiling reflects as an orange square nestled below the surface, like a giant Albers composition of concentric coloured squares, but here the colours are infinitely more complex, illusive, and even mysterious, rather than purely rational.10 This mix of stripped-down visual experience, precise fabrication, and dry, referential humor exemplifies what makes Irwin's work pleasurable.

THE TUBES THEMSELVES As early as 1965, Irwin was aware of using light as a medium for exploration. Notes in preparation for his Habitation conference, in a section titled COLOR [sic] state the obvious: “light, of course, with its flexibility to be considered as a colour source.”11 His installations consistently deal with modulating or colouring natural light and the placement of artificial light sources. Irwin then began experimenting with directly altering the fixtures themselves.

The mere use of a fluorescent tube and housing immediately recalls the work of Dan Flavin, but the approaches of Irwin and Flavin differ fundamentally. Flavin uses commercially-produced coloured bulbs—hence the limited colour palette—arranged on the wall or in space. Irwin, meanwhile, always hangs his pieces on the wall, and, starting with white light, wraps the bulb in theatre gels to arrive at a more nuanced tincture.

This May, I visited the Pace Gallery in New York City, where a show of recent pieces titled Cacophonous was installed. “They start having discourse and changes of pace—they're arguing with one another […] They become cacophonous, like modern music,” remarked Irwin, quoted in a review of the installation.12 The main room had a number of large recent arrangements of 6' tubes, and a smaller back room contained smaller, vertical sets of seven 8' tubes.

Starting from the ready-made cool white tube, Irwin layers coloured gels—sometimes up to a dozen overlays—to manipulate, reflect, darken, or fully obscure the bulb's output. The pieces are always symmetric (palindromic, also), rippling outwards in an undulation of light/dark, warm/cool binaries.

Some of the housings are painted black, or are assembled with a fin that gives a dark vertical accent behind the line of the bulbs. Sometimes a flat panel caps an unused housing. Or, there is a space in the grid., punctuating the arrangement with void. Some tubes are pinstriped with black or white tape, throwing the light sideways instead of towards the viewer. At times, the colour of the light shining through is different that the surface colour of the bulb, making for some eerie iridescence.

In the largest piece, Cacophony (figures 5-7), the sixty-nine tubes were mostly dark with brighter white and lime accents, like an olive barcode. A whole spectrum of hues opens between frosted green and 10 Hugh M. Davies, “Robert Irwin: One Perspective” in Primaries and Secondaries, 16.

11 Robert Irwin, “Notes on Habitability,” in Notes Toward a Conditional Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011), 43.

Originally: “Notes on Habitability:,” 1970, Robert Irwin Papers, 1970-2004, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Research Library accession no. 940081.

12 Andy Battaglia, “Artist Robert Irwin: At 86, still playing with light and space,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/artist-robert-irwin-at-86-still-playing-with-light-and-space-1428708031.

Figure 5. Cacophonous, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 39'-4 1/4” x 6' x 4 3/4”. Partial view.

Figure 6. Cacophonous. Detail view.

Figure 7. Cacophonous. Detail view.

gray, with silvery throws of indirect light and cucumber reflections. One can easily get lost up close studying the effects of each combination of techniques.13 For reference, a piece's name can help decode Irwin's allusions and thoughts on the individual palettes. South South West (figure 8) is more varied, with golden highlights surrounding a central blood red tube. Another, Agave, is brighter still, with warm yellows enveloping a darker core (figure 8).

The light sources themselves and the atmosphere they create sum to create the full piece, and Irwin recognizes this: he lists the materials for the piece as "light + shadow + reflection + color [sic].”

Standing and looking at the tubes, one scans the procession of taped bulbs and moves laterally back and forth across the array. The change in viewing angle causes the colours to collapse together, further abstracting the materials into a progression of pure, saturated intensity. Figures 7-8 show this effect in progress when viewing Cacophony. Writing in a recent book on the installations of Robert Irwin and James Turrell in Italy's Villa Panza, Michael Govan shares similar findings: In these fluorescent light works, positive and negative space is lost in a symphony of light and shadow of varying hue and reflectivity. What at first appears a two-dimensional experience— vertical lines on a wall—becomes exceptionally three-dimensional and fluid as one walks along the evenly spaced fluorescent fixtures.14 Lingering makes one aware of the chromatic effects of the sunlight coming into the space, as it changes with the passage of clouds that shade the room. The industrial surfaces are reflective, and one therefore sees the presence of the viewer given back to him or herself, as well as the reflections of cars in motion on 25th Street. An ambulance passed by when I was there, and a flash of red sped across the darkened interior. A looming lacquered black metal panel on the north wall added to the reflectivity and dispersal of light. The show's title references the chaotic ensemble nature of the pieces, but I found them quietly brooding and mesmerizing, like the sheen off the coat of a powerful, spooked thoroughbred.15 In the smaller, partitioned back room with less natural light, taller pieces of seven 8' tubes showcase more complicated banding patterns and are a bit more ominous. The central tube of Harlem Nocturne (figures 10-11) bands layers of gray with three horizontal stripes of red, now both horizontally and vertically symmetric. There are only five bulbs in Blue Lou, but they give off an icy light around a deep blue core (figure 12). Legacy, working inward, is an unlit tube, a dark metallic that gives off no light, a bright white, and a much-obscured red center with a tight coral snake band of red, black and white (figures 13-14) Up close, one can discern the thickness of the gel layers and sense the material's translucency at work. Even closer, the distinctions between discrete tapings blur, and the strata of shadow and light converge into a spectrum of vertical texture.

These pieces are remarkable because they begin with light and derive their arrangements of colour through filtering and masking. They are primarily and existentially concerned with colour, but the resultant colour is metallic, reflected, obscured. Rather than existing as fully composed—fixed, literally —on canvas, the magic happens when the light leaks out from behind the gels and bounces around. The 13 Observing from a sitting position in the middle of the floor, I found myself writing phrases like “metallic deep green sheen,” “smoked clear plastic,” “metallic gold,” “smoky pink salt,” in my notebook—phrases that, in the absence of the visual, disintegrate into nonsense, evidence that words break down when trying to catalog the actual colours at hand.

14 Michael Govan, “Fluorescent Lights and Gardens,” in Robert Irwin James Turrell Villa Panza, ed. Michael Govan and Anna Bernardini (Varese: FAI – Villa e Collezione Panza, Los Angeles: Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Munich: DelMonico Books • Prestel, 2014), 110.

15 The automotive and equine references arrived to me while in the presence of the works, but they also ring true for Irwin's life. A true Angeleno, he grew up coveting the curvy beauty of cars. In Seeing is Forgetting..., Irwin recalls his '39 Ford, reminiscing about the “twenty coats of ruby-red maroon” he laquered onto the dash. Later, Irwin also made a living by betting on horse races, which took over after his earlier practice of swing dancing for money. These are all other stories, however.

Figure 8. South South West, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 172 1/4” x 6' x 4 5/8”.

Figure 9. Agave, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 93 7/8” x 6' x 4 5/8”.

Figure 10. Harlem Nocturne, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 45 1/2” x 8' x 4 1/2”.

Figure 11. Harlem Nocturne, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 45 1/2� x 8' x 4 1/2�. Detail view.

Figure 12. Blue Lou, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 45 1/2” x 8' x 4 1/2”.

Figure 13. Legacy, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 45 1/2” x 8' x 4 1/2”.

Figure 14. Legacy, 2014-15, light + shadow + reflection + color, 45 1/2” x 8' x 4 1/2”. Detail view.

impact of the piece is only assembled in the viewer's eyes. They are a breed of West Coast cool readymades, to borrow Duchamp's term: without such articulate detailing, composition, and tidy installation, the fixtures revert to a junky assembly of banal housings. But Irwin is unconcerned with the cultural identities implicit in the objects. Instead, it is their physical existence alone that motivate Irwin's efforts to trigger a sensual encounter. “Non-objective art, as I see it,” wrote Irwin in a 1965 statement that still holds true now, “remove[s] the referentiality (idea-identity) from painting— demanding personal sensual involvement as the only accurate human communication.”16 Fifty years later, this communication remains successfully embodied in his coloured light creations.

NOW & FUTURE Robert Irwin will turn 87 in September, but his artistic output hasn't slowed.

Recently a re-installation of Irwin's Excursus: Homage to the Square opened at Dia:Beacon, a museum north of New York City on the Hudson River, located in a former Nabisco factory.17 Excursus, paying homage with its name to Josef Albers, was first installed in Dia's Chelsea space in 1998. The piece consists of rooms of white scrim, punctured with doorways. Small taped fluorescent works hang on the translucent walls, and are banded similarly to the vertical pieces described above. The outlines of viewers can be seen in adjacent rooms but dissolve through thicker layers of scrim. Writing about the original installation, one critic remembered it as “ethereal and, in a good way, somehow purgatorial, as if you might find your way to a clear divine light with time and patience.”18 Out in West Texas, construction has begun on a new permanent installation in Marfa at the Chinati Foundation, a museum founded by Donald Judd. Irwin's piece, the first addition to the collection since 1990, takes its shape from an old hospital, a perimeter-loaded square that echoes the historic presidio of Spanish settlement (figure 15). The work will be realized in a new construction building that echoes the old one, a budgetary move met with resistance as it defies Judd's principles of preservation and renovation. Windows are treated with a tinted gradient, and a center wall of scrim with openings allows circulation on both sides of the wall. The finish floor is lower than its original datum, placing the window sills at eye-level, making for a “Dutch landscape-like view of the surrounding West Texas fields and sky.”19 When complete, it will be the only standalone building designed by Irwin in which to view his mastery of scrim.20 In our visual world obsessed with the hyperconsumption of media, images flicker and pass at an everincreasing speed. The gaze is subverted by the glance, the scroll, and the swipe. Looking is regularly decoupled from seeing, and both are a far cry from perceiving. Irwin's work—and that of other perceptual artists, to be sure—offers respite and an invitation to slow down in order to have a physical experience. Irwin's pieces are often intensely simple, but boldly sensorial. They puncture the expectation of what composes an aesthetic encounter by introducing unexpected elements or spaces— in this case, a new format for making colour. You'll never look at a fluorescent tube the same way again.

16 Irwin, “Statement on Reproductions,” 22.

17 Dia:Beacon is itself, in part, an Irwin work, as he was highly involved in the renovation of the building, directing “every aspect of the plantings, paving and fencing, and windows and doors.” The arrangement of clear and frosted glass panels in the steel factory windows is his doing, for example. This work of total design harkens back to Irwin's myriad installations of meticulous thought and execution.

18 Ken Johnson, “Review: Robert Irwin Shows a Calming Installation at Dia:Beacon,” The New York Times, June 4, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/arts/design/review-robert-irwin-shows-a-calming-installation-at-diabeacon.html? _r=0.

19 “Robert Irwin Project,” Chinati, 2015. https://chinati.org/robertirwin/project.php.

20 Chinati Foundation, “Support the Robert Irwin Project – We are breaking ground,” email, June 1, 2015.

Figure 15. Plan and exterior elevations for the Robert Irwin project.

FIGURE SOURCES Figure 1. Reproduced from Robert Irwin: A Selection of Works 1958 to 1970 (New York City: PaceWildenstein, 1998.). Photograph © Bill Jacobson Studio.

Figure 2. Reproduced from Robert Irwin (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1993), 115. Collection of the artist.

Figure 3. Reproduced from Robert Irwin James Turrell Villa Panza, ed. Michael Govan and Anna Bernardini (Varese: FAI – Villa e Collezione Panza, Los Angeles: Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Munich: DelMonico Books • Prestel, 2014), 108.

Figure 4. Reproduced from Primaries and Secondaries (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2008), 15. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Museum Purchase, International and Contemporary Collectors Funds.

Figures 5-14. Reproduced from Robert Irwin Cacophonous (New York: Pace Gallery, 2015). All photography by Philipp Scholz Rittermann, © 2013-15 Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

Figure 15. Reproduced from “Robert Irwin Project,” Chinati, 2015. https://chinati.org/robertirwin/project.php.