“Nobody in this town knows I’m here, so don’t blow my cover,” says Robert Irwin as a photographer’s shutter clicks.
The throwaway line is pure Irwin. Contradiction wrapped in a wink, playful but with an edge, alluding to his identity as a Los Angeles artist despite living in San Diego for almost 30 years, even the evanescent quality of his art — all distilled into one short sentence.
It’s a Bob Irwin moment.
A major monographic exhibition, “Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change,” opened April 7 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. It presents paintings, discs and acrylic columns created between 1958 and 1970, the pivotal time just before he closed his studio and embarked on the creative journey that would transform his practice and influence generations of artists. Capping the exhibition is a new piece using 124 feet of translucent scrim, the gauzy fabric that is Irwin’s signature material. It stretches from floor to ceiling, slicing the Hirshhorn’s iconic circle with a pane of light.
At New York’s Dia:Beacon, Irwin’s “Excursus: Homage to the Square3” opened in June 2015 and will be on view through May 2017. Originally conceived in 1998 for the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, “Excursus” is sited in the former factory that Irwin redesigned, inside and out. It’s a milky fog of white scrim rooms spiked with fluorescent lights wrapped in bands of intense color. Irwin protests that it’s not really about Josef Albers, despite the title referencing the renowned color theorist’s most famous series. “He was just involved with two-dimensional,” says Irwin. “He was doing the square. I’m taking the square and cubing it.”
Where: Hirshhorn Museum, 700 Independence Ave. S.W., Washington, D.C.
This July, Irwin will unveil his largest project, an installation for the Chinati Foundation, turning the remains of an old Army hospital in Marfa, Texas, into a 13,000-square-foot structure of rhythmic windows and walls that focus attention on the surrounding desert. He says he’s been working on it for 15 years, generating at least 20 different plans. Now, with just a few months to go, he’s still deliberating.
“Looking at it, unfinished, it’s doing some pretty interesting things,” he says, slowly. “I’m questioning everything. I thought about all the stuff I can do to make this thing worth the trip. But now I’m feeling, the less I do, the better.”
The Marfa installation combines massive amounts of concrete and basalt with scrim and tinted film. It’s a building that makes the viewer see the sky, a monumental form from a man whose work hinges on what his biographer, Lawrence Weschler, calls “the tiniest thing … that just happens to be the only thing that matters.”
“He’s someone who can’t be identified in any one way,” says Evelyn Hankins, curator of “All the Rules Will Change.” She finds herself explaining Irwin’s trajectory to people struggling to reconcile the Getty Garden in Los Angeles with his work in Light and Space. They’re all born of the shift that occurred after 1970, when he began creating art in response to the specific conditions of a site, intended to reawaken perception.
“There is no designated medium or look,” Hankins says. “The great thing about all three of these projects is that they give people a chance to see all of the different ways that he operates.”
She first approached the artist in late 2013, wanting to show how his early objects laid the foundation for the site-conditional work. Irwin, who says he has “no interest in going over all the stuff in the past,” countered with a proposal for a new piece extending out from the building, a feathery form like the gills of a mushroom. That ran afoul of the Smithsonian’s engineers. Irwin was unfazed; he simply came back with another idea.
“He’s extremely patient,” says Hankins. “When we were doing the feasibility project outside, it went on for like a year. He never seemed to lose his patience. He just saw the Smithsonian and its entire process as part of the given circumstances. It’s not just the physical circumstances — it’s everything else that goes around with it.”
Patience and determination may explain why, at age 87, he’s “busier than ever,” according to his studio manager, Joseph Huppert.
Mary Beebe thinks so. Irwin’s work “Two Running Violet V Forms” was one of the first pieces she commissioned as director of the Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego. Over the years, the two have become good friends.
“A lot of it is about persistence and building up a reservoir of works,” she says. “It’s an old story — other artists around him were getting more attention. He just kept doing what he does and stayed true to himself.”
It helps that Irwin finally allows his work to be documented, after five decades of objecting to photographs. He began collaborating with acclaimed San Diego photographer Philipp Scholz Rittermann, resulting in a full-color, glossy book published in 2014 by Rittermann and Quint Gallery.
But no matter how meticulous, words and pictures only approximate the experience of time, space and presence. The feeling when a breeze comes through “1° 2° 3° 4°” — three rectangles cut into the oceanfront window at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Or the surprise of encountering more than 30 feet of clear acrylic prism in the atrium of the Federal Courthouse downtown. Irwin says it’s the largest column he ever produced. From some angles, the winged obelisk almost disappears. The viewer sees only that architectural elements are suddenly not lining up the way they should, a sly touch of humor in a government bureaucracy.
That flash of discovery — when, simply by seeing, you become a participant — is famously mercurial.
“You have to begin to accept that something is going on here,” says Beebe, who notes that some people initially mistook “Two Running Violet V Forms” for athletic equipment.
“But once you allow yourself to look at something in a different way, or just a more curious way, then ... ” She searches for words. “It is very ephemeral, this sense that you get. It’s not something you can hang on to.”
“One student said to me, about a year ago, ‘Oh, I love the Stuart Collection. When I first got to campus, I saw that blue fence. And I thought it might be art.’”
Beebe laughs and repeats the statement for emphasis. “‘I thought it might be art.’ And I thought, bingo!”
Now that the Hirshhorn exhibition is under way, Irwin and Huppert will turn their attention to Marfa; two publications in development; issues such as protecting “Primal Palm Garden,” one of Irwin’s pieces at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the construction surrounding LACMA’s expansion; and plans for new site-conditional work.
Irwin appears happy to leave the details to Huppert. He’s interested in the frontiers of neuroscience and philosophy. He wants to explore what might be art.
“There’s going to be a wonderful debate,” he says, “which I would love to stay around and be a part of.”
There it is: the smallest nod to mortality, gone in an instant.
“I’m not depressed because I’ve had too good of a time,” he says. “I got the best game in town and I love playing it.”
Myrland is a freelance writer.
Get U-T Arts & Culture on Thursdays
A San Diego insider’s look at what talented artists are bringing to the stage, screen, galleries and more.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Her carefully crafted collages and installations are on display at La Jolla’s Museum of Contemporary Art
Local artist Claire Starkweather Forrest explores the impact of housing costs on families and the culture of communities in her current exhibition in the gallery at St. James by the Sea Episcopal Church in La Jolla
Mexican artist flies a giant balloon that gives his take on migration
From piñata exhibitions to retrospectives from legendary pop artists, there’s plenty of art to see this fall
The local installation artist will debut ‘En La Riviera del Rio Cauca’ in November at Bread & Salt
Kate Ashton is a San Diego artist, teacher, mentor, and owner of Ashton Gallery and the Art on 30th art center
Get U-T Arts & Culture on Thursdays
A San Diego insider’s look at what talented artists are bringing to the stage, screen, galleries and more.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Privacy Policy Terms of Service Sign Up For Our Newsletters