Robert Irwin: Way Out West

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

L&M Arts, Los Angeles

17 September – 22 October

By Ed Schad

Robert Irwin can now make objects, but that wasn’t always the case. Much of his story as an artist is about discovering that what he sought as an artist, the negotiation of fundamental features of perception and vision for a real embodied impact on a viewer, could be found neither in conventional painting and sculpture nor in objects of any kind. This put Irwin in crisis, led to a stint in the desert and left him with lots of time without a studio or traditional artmaking practice, just the goal of knowing the world, of doing something in the world to reveal the world.

A classic example of this occurred in 1980, at 78 Market Street in Venice, when he knocked out the front wall of a gallery, painted the contents of the space white and then stretched a fine scrim across the front to form a permeable exterior barrier to the street. Only visitors who sought an experience had one – the scrim would dissolve in the light, and the space inside the gallery would open into depth and atmosphere. Philosophy could evolve from such a moment, but it was not the source of the moment itself. Instead, Irwin loosened his grip on the world in order to see it unfold. Viewers who saw the scrim slowly fade could note how vision is bound up with their attentions and according to their expectations at any given moment in their lives.

A little less than a mile from that spot and 31 years later, Irwin has returned to Los Angeles (actually, his last LA commercial show was 40 years ago). At L&M he has installed groupings of fluorescent light tubes. Multiple gels line Irwin’s tubes, and the colours change according to what lights are on, what colours are adjacent to other colours and where the viewer stands in the gallery. Durango (2011), for instance, is a midday haze of warm desert earth tones from the front, a stroke of neon flash from the side. Some lights thought to be on are off, others thought off get their lightly negotiated hues from electricity. Each piece is capable of multiple settings in terms of how many or which lights are on at any given moment.

Though now Irwin employs objects for his purposes, the tenor and aim of his entire career is present both in logic and effect. As with the scrim those many years ago, the emphasis of the tubes is on slow, timed-release perceptual tweaks and subtleties that work to get viewers involved with what and how they see what they see.

The works can be either boutique art objects or perceptual teachers, depending on who the viewers are and how much time and effortthey want to spend. It’s the colour theory of someone like Josef Albers mixed with the slow absorption that Ad Reinhardt expected from his paintings. Strangely the most direct association, Dan Flavin, goes far in appearance but not in theory. Irwin has no problems with the tricks, illusions and refinements that Flavin resisted – all are instead part of activating an ever-changing gallery of colour and light.