LAGUNA LECTURE : Irwin Seeks to Open Doors of Perception

Artist Robert Irwin lectured for two hours at the Laguna Art Museum on Tuesday night, but he didn’t show any slides, though he brought a bunch with him.

He didn’t talk about his eccentric, 30-year career, which has caused some to dub him the “white monk” of Southern California art and induced the MacArthur Foundation to award him one of its so-called “genius” grants.

He spent maybe 15 minutes, all told, describing specific work he has produced.

So what did he talk about? The central idea that has motivated his thought and work for the past couple of decades: the significance of human perception.

OK, but what does that have to do with art?

Patience, please. We begin with ideas.

Why?

Because art, according to Irwin, is “simply a tool by which you think about things.”

Now, some people find it hard to understand why many 20th-Century artists abandoned the lovely pictorial world of recognizable people and objects. But these artists began to realize that conventional painting was too simplistic to encompass the complexity of the real world.

In life, people don’t just perceive objects; they perceive a highly complex world of relations among things.

The problem was that people had begun to think of art as identical with making art objects, forgetting the first step: the artist’s attitude of sheer wonder about the world.

One of the amazing and beautiful aspects of the world, Irwin said, is that we exist in “an envelope” of countless sensations at any given moment. Because we form perceptions unconsciously, we don’t realize what an incredible thing perception is.

“If we are going to take art as seriously as we do, it has to be because it does something of some real value,” Irwin said.

At 60, he has spent the better part of his life figuring out what that real value might be.

Beginning as a painter in the late ‘50s, Irwin--as his biographer, Lawrence Wechsler, wrote--”gradually pared back his painterly activities during the ‘60s, systematically dispensing, step by step, with the usual artistic requirements of image, line, frame, focus permanence and even signature until by 1970 he abandoned his studio altogether.”

First Irwin found it impossible to pay attention only to what was on the canvas, inside the frame. He began altering the room around it because it was also part of the perceptual process. Eventually, he began creating room-size works at major museums, using lights and paint and scrim.

After a brief period of making private, temporary works in the desert in 1970, he began giving lectures about his ideas. He reinterpreted the world of installation art in an ultra-minimalist way (his work for the 1978 Venice Biennale was the outline of a patch of light on the ground).

He says he never read a book until he was in his mid-40s, when, with his usual manic concentration, he devoted nine months to reading the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and six months to that of Immanuel Kant. He found in philosophy reaffirmation and more elaborate formulations of the thoughts that had absorbed him all these years.

But after his retrospective exhibition in 1977 at the Whitney Museum in New York, he worked his way back to involvement in the world. He is working on a master plan at Miami International Airport.

As Irwin noted, most “art in public places” programs are actually in out-of-the-way places. But the Miami Airport could hardly be more public. It has the longest layover time of any airport and is a central transportation hub for travelers bound for four continents.

Although Irwin said he encountered advisers arguing why a road needs to be here or a tollbooth there, there was no one “to argue for enrichment.”

So he figured out a way to reposition roads, garages and toll plazas “to buy space for amenities--gardens and places for people to spend time.”

A few days ago, Irwin presented his plan, and it was accepted.

The point of his work is to allow the traveler to participate in a purely perceptual way, he said:

“You will stand in the same place I did and have the same (visual) cues I did. Your ability to reference it won’t be based on history or art. All the (stimuli) are right there.”