Chapter 7

Robert Irwin - Art as Inquiry

Transgressing the Frame

Robert Irwin was born in Long Beach, California in 1928, and resides in San Diego.[218] He began his artistic career as an abstract expressionist painter, and exhibited his paintings since 1952. Like many artists at the time, Irwin became dissatisfied with the canvas, and questioned the parameters of the art object. During this early part of his career Irwin moved among a group of artists associated with the Ferus Gallery.[219] Because of his subsequent investigations into the figure-ground relationships which resulted in the discs, critics grouped him with a number of artists whose concerns appeared similar, and who became known as ‘light and space’ artists. Among them were Michael Asher, Maria Nordman, Eric Orr, Michael Brewster and also James Turrell. One of their principal aims was then to eliminate the art object from the gallery, using only either natural or articificial light sources, or, as in Brewster’s case, sound, to affect the perceptual qualities of the space. Initially Irwin also followed this path.

At the beginning of this direction stood the artist’s involvement with perceptual and experimental psychologists during the Art and Technology Program, mentioned above. These experiments widened his interests into an investigation of the human responses to environmental conditions in general. As a consequence, he gave up his studio in Venice in 1970 and spent most of the next two years traveling and lecturing to develop his thoughts on art and circumscribe his ideas in words and writing. Finally, he stopped making objects altogether. Irwin now reduced his material to a (nylon) scrim and/or (natural) light with which he created visual experiences that involved a process of visual illusions depending on the position of the viewer or the situations that changed continuously in respect of the light that entered the space from the outside. These Scrim Pieces were exhibited for the first time in 1975. Critic Roberta Smith described her experience viewing one of them, Scrim V, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago: “It is essentially a closed-off, wedge shaped corridor, whose sides start at two pillars near the museum’s entrance and meet at a far wall, some 80 feet away. It presents numerous views; you could look both into and through it to the large empty area of the gallery space that it blocked off. After the first, symmetrical encounter at the wide end, nothing was constant when you walked along the side. The two panels of scrim were always at a different distance from each other and from the wall that they generally paralleled. As you moved, whole chunks of architecture and space were constantly dropping in and out of view. At times you looked right through the volume but still couldn’t really locate the far wall; at other times the scrim itself seemed opaque and solid.”[220] The central theme of the work was the perceptual experience of the visitor, whose experience would continuously change during the day and the time spent with the piece. For as the eyes adjusted to the space, the viewer would perceive more and differently. Studies in perception have shown empirically that human eyes take at least ten minutes to adjust to new light conditions. The ‘reality’ of seeing thus became a complex set of space and time relationships.[221]

A Site-determined Approach

His categorization has of course been criticized, if only because his distinctions often overlap. Yet the definitions are often used and quoted now, because they do indeed help to qualify different levels of relationships between the work of art and the surrounding space. For Irwin there is a large distinction between the work growing as it were out of the site, and the work that is conceived in the studio, even if considerations of place and placement, of relationships of material, size and scale to the surrounding space come into play. He describes this category as a procedure which breaks with “the conventions of abstract referencing of content, historical lineage, oeuvre of the artist, style, etc., implicit in the other three categories,” and crosses “the conventional boundaries of art vis-à-vis architecture, landscape, city planning, utility, and so forth, reducing such quantitative recognitions (measures and categories) to secondary importance.” By placing the individual observer in context, at the crux of the determining process, it follows “the principles of phenomenal, conditional, and responsive art.”[224] What makes Irwin’s book particularly important in other respects, is that the artist has described the whole process in which a sculptor becomes involved when he decides to create this type of work. He enumerates his experiences and problems encountered and makes suggestions to avoid risks, and mistakes that happen out of ignorance with common affairs surrounding the construction of public works.

Inquiry Into the Hidden Structures of Art

It is exactly at this intersection where his road deviates from the directions taken by ‘light and space’ sculptors. When James Turrell very precisely creates the conditions for perceptual and physical experiences of lunar or stellar phenomena occurring at specific intervals of the solar system, for example, he still creates an artificial situation - even if it heightens the awareness of the visitor, and even if he exerts the utmost care not to disturb the ecology of the environment. Turrell already had conceived his idea of an observatory beforehand, although he developed the total concept during the working process. Irwin always approaches the site without preconceived notions, and he does not impose his art on the site. Both Turrell and Christo sell their preparatory drawings and plans to finance their projects. For Christo, the art work starts with the conception of the idea. The whole process of preparations, of selling the concept, the fundraising and publicity efforts, the production phases and finally its removal, are all part of the work. Irwin, on the contrary, perceives these aspects as being external to the work.

Richard Serra’s monuments (such as Tilted Arc, now removed) may be designed for their setting, but they are in fact large objects trying to dominate and compete with the surroundings. For Irwin, they still belong the classical tradition of sculptural objects. Serra’s Tilted Arc(1981) has been compared to Irwin's Tilted Planes (1978, unrealized), presenting two examples of a different approach in public art. Tilted Arc made for Javits Plaza, downtown Manhattan, dominated the site with its large statuary of slightly bent corten steel plate units. One could not avoid its presence, had to walk around it, as the sculpture split the plaza in two, almost. The office workers felt that the art had invaded their space and protested, with the result known. In contrast, Tilted Planes, a project for the Oval Mall at Ohio State University, Columbus, would have been almost invisible. Using the existing pathways and traverses across the mall, Irwin proposed to slightly tilt a number of the planes, so that the Oval became, as it were, three-dimensional, accentuating the paths and intersections. Irwin: “To me, it was already a piece of sculpture. It had all the dimensions and all the properties of a piece of sculpture: physical divisions, both organic and geometric, participation of people, the kinetics of movement. It was already operative in that way.”[226] Starting from Irwin’s premises, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico (1974-1977) would be designated somewhere between a site-adjusted and a site-specific work. The artist placed four hundred stainless steel poles, 18 feet high, in a rectangular grid, measuring 1 mile by 1 kilometer, in an area with frequent lightning and storms at certain periods of the year, so that the poles act as lightning rods. At other times the rods are barely visible. Although enhancing specific, temporary phenomena in the natural environment, nature seems only partially integral to the work, though. Richard Fleischner, an artist who works in the field of public sculpture, might be more in line with Irwin’s fourth category. Fleischner himself has described the development of his proposal for the Jerome Wiesner Building, familiarly called Media Laboratory, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, as a sculpture that evolved completely out of the complexities of the site, by spending hours walking around, sitting and watching. He was invited to design an inner courtyard section for the newly built Media Laboratory, to be designed by the architecture firm of I.M. Pei & Partners. In the catalogue interview, he mentions that his project soon expanded to comprise just about every inch of the surrounding space, and all the development aspects necessary for its execution. He decided which areas were to be paved and which planted with grasses and plants. He even ended up designing the lighting and seating, normally the realm of the landscape architect. He was in close contact with the architect’s office working with all the parties involved, from Wiesner, the architect and the contractors, to the tradespeople and laborers. Fleischner perceives his task as a problem-solving situation, whereby he goes about it as an inquiry, looking for different solutions possible, ordering and structuring until the desired result has been achieved, and his approach resembles Irwin’s in that respect.[227]

Robert Irwin’s starting point requires him to leave all the old notions behind, in order to ‘surrender’ to the selected environment at large. Clearly, Irwin’s research can only result in an ‘object’ contextualized in the site. It should not surprise us that his works do not have much stylistic or formal congruences. Their only common quality is their starting point - the connection to the site - which often results in a virtual disappearance into the site. The Filigreed Line made for Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1979), consists of a stainless steel line, running along a ridge of grass near a lake, in which a pattern of leaflike forms is cut. The height of the line varies between 2 feet and 2 inches from the surface of the ground. The ‘line’ keeps changing visually with the light of the day, and the seasons of the year. Because the line oscillates before the viewer’s eye, who needs to focus and refocus, he or she is made aware of the nature of perception itself. The Two Running Violet V Forms at the University of San Diego, California, has a similar quality. The two crossing blue-violet, plastic coated wire fences fixed with high poles and sited in between the eucalyptus groves hover between appearance and disappearance, continually changing with the light, the seasons and the position of the spectator. The emphasis is on the integration of the material in the landscape and the perceptual process as experience of the whole, to direct the viewer’s attention to the whole environment away from the art ‘object.’

Although never realized, Irwin’s proposal for the expansion of Miami International Airport is undoubtedly his most ambitious project to date. The development of the plan is extensively described in the exhibition catalogue published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1993. It is also the first full-scale survey of Robert Irwin’s career. I shall therefore give a concise narration of its history, with quotations from Lawrence Weschler’s interview with Irwin, as they are telling about the artist’s approach toward his subject. But mainly because it seems to stand at a crossroads in a continuing development away from the art object and its well-defined boundaries, away from the ‘figure’ as focal point towards an inclusion of the background, and subsequently the surrounding space, whose expansion (temporarily?) ends with the engagement of the whole environment, or one could even say the world at large.

Being invited by the Miami city arts commission, headed by Patricia Fuller at the time, Irwin flew to Miami to look into the situation. “The airport was chaotic, incredibly chaotic. One thing it sure as hell didn’t need was more clutter - another object: art. What it was crying out for, though, was an overall approach. And in fact it seemed a perfect occasion for looking at the situation of public art generally, which is in similar disarray. An airport was a perfect late-twentieth-century case study ... teeming with transience and cross-purposes and disarray.”[228] Robert Irwin took with him Ed Wortz, a long time friend with whom he had worked before, and Coy Howard. They spent a week in the airport hotel to explore the place. His conclusion was that the airport buildings, largely built in the fifties, were of a totally nondescript character, without any sense of location, thus acutally in need of a complete overhaul. Irwin, Howard, and Wortz spent hours, days, looking into the characteristics and possible opportunities of the site and came up with a flow chart, dividing the airport in different zones the passengers passed through. They observed that the zones consisted of six phases which repeated themselves consistently: arriving, passage, seeking, finding, waiting, and leaving. Also, he felt that these zones, i.e. parking-lots, check-in counters and waiting areas, corridors and passage-ways, baggage claim area etc. should be blended more. Thus Irwin started to work and eventually presented the arts commission and the airport’s board with a three-part proposal after several months of work, which was to become his Arts Enrichment Master Plan and was to involve years of work (1986-1990).

The basic element of this master plan was the presentation of a completely new concept of traffic flow from the arrival of passengers and visitors, via check-in to take-off and vice versa. Its main theme was the enhancement of the quality of the specific sites, creating as he calls it a sense of location, so that people would know where they are, move quietly from one zone to the next and leave the usual disquieting haste and nervousness behind. In Irwin’s vision this meant “developing an aesthetics or quality” of site. In practice it boiled down to proposing a thorough rehabilitation of all the passageways and locations of the air-port. He never intended to re-design the whole airport himself, but thought of inviting the appropriate artists for the different sites. Only the entrance section he reserved for himself. The essence of the proposal could not be reflected better than in Weschler’s description: “He was proposing to tear out the fairly dilapidated two-story parking garage at the center of the entire facility, surrounded by entries to all the various terminals, and to replace it with a lush cypress grove. The grove would be layered, with fabulously varied native fern and birds rising from the marshy lake below - meanwhile, arching through the canopy, pedestrian skyways would link the terminals to each other and to the relocated parking structure beyond. There would be benches and cafés, zones for quiet contemplation during those long layovers.” Furthermore, “his project assumes that the airport, the first and last part of the city a traveller experiences, should in some way emblematize the city, rather than serve some impersonal outskirt function, architecturally everywhere and nowhere.”[229] Irwin’s vision was to have the passenger on his way to and from the airport pass a kind of Central Park landscape reflecting the abundance of Florida’s flora and fauna, thereby ‘planting’ the first impression in the mind of the incoming visitor, and ‘leaving’ a lasting experience and memory for the departing passenger.

Initially meeting - of course - with the usual suspicion, Irwin had to put forth all his techniques and powers of persuasion to convince the city and airport administration. He had to surmount numerous bureaucratic hurdles and opposition from, for example, the liability department. However, Dick Judy, airport director at the time, became more and more interested, and by 1990 he seemed almost convinced and about to give his go-ahead for the whole project. At that crucial point in time, Judy got fired, or rather had to ‘resign.’ With the most important person whose trust and respect he had finally gained after three years gone, the project soon died.

Although the artist generally does not purposively set out to restore an older flora typical of a certain climate, or a once existing bioregional diversity, he is quite sensitive to the ecological characteristics of the location. For the proposed Miami airport entrance corridor, in Florida’s Dade county, cypresses, palmettos, and reeds, taking into account the local waterscape situation, would have been planted. For Sentinel Plaza (Sentinel Plaza, Pasadena, California, 1990) Irwin chose small desert plants and cacti, echevaria, to transfer the message that water is precious in this climate. So does the double-trunked sycamore, which appears to have been there for ages. The Indians used the trunk of this tree to build their kavaks. At the center of the piece stands a granite column ornamented with the petals of lotus (?) flowers and a blue (police?) lamp on top, reminiscent of the federal eagle. At its base extends a thin trough-like basin ending in a small circular ‘fountain.’ Behind the plaza is indeed a police station. Sentinel Plaza is an example of how Irwin connects the separate existing elements and their respective symbolic connotations into a layered ‘system’ of meaning: the surrounding buildings, architectural style and function included, the earth and climatic conditions determining the choice of plants and trees, and finally, on a more abstract level, the inclusion of time or age.

Robert Irwin has called his approach one of response to the conditions of the selected or commissioned site. He always starts from the premise that a work can only come into being by asking questions - about the past and future of the site, its social, environmental, political, cultural ramifications. It is a constant inquiry, but no longer about the work’s function as art but as life, as a living environment. His plans are designed with the intent to enhance the spatial potential, including the aesthetic quality of the location, thereby - hopefully - creating a “sense of awareness.” Irwin: “The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject - all that is out there - and the pure potential of the individual perceiver - all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive - the desire to know.”[230]

The recognition of the hand of the artist has become unimportant to Irwin. His major concern is still to make us “see again,” thereby continuing his research into perceptual experience which he had started in the sixties, but now expanded to include the context of a cultural, social and political environment. Irwin: “Basically it’s just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is. It’s not saying that I know what the world should look like. It’s not that I’m rebuilding the world. Basically what artists do is to teach you how to exercise your own potential - they always have, that’s the one thread that goes all the way through.”[231]