ART REVIEW : Irwin’s Search for the Poetry of Light, Space

What is it about the art of Light and Space that prompts otherwise rational observers to sidle up to the edge of the abyss, then gaily fling themselves off onto the treacherous rocks below?

Take James Turrell’s intriguing Roden Crater, which has been variously assessed as the crowning achievement of 20th-Century art and as America’s answer to the Sistine Ceiling. This, despite the fact that the complex sculptural alteration of an Arizona volcano is years from completion.

Now, the lead catalogue essay to the lovely, concise Robert Irwin retrospective, which opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, opens with a poetic reverie about the transformative experience of an installation he designed for a subway link to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. The uniquely ephemeral luminosity and aural resonance of “Sound Chasing Light” are lovingly described.

Of course, “Sound Chasing Light” was never built, as the essay finally notes.

What is especially odd about such fantasy projections concerning art that doesn’t exist is that the subject of the provocative, sometimes problematic genre of Light and Space art is the complex beauty of real, lived experience. Irwin has put all his artistic eggs in a basket of phenomenology, creating perceptual essays on circumstance and ineffable experience, as they unfold to the senses. If only observers would, too.

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Organized by MOCA director Richard Koshalek and curator Kerry Brougher, the Irwin retrospective will travel to New York’s Guggenheim Museum, perhaps in the fall, and make a three-city European tour. It features 36 paintings and sculptures dating from 1959 to 1971; two new, site-specific indoor works, designed “in the spirit of” the spare, contemplative installations that secured Irwin’s international reputation in the 1970s; and a rather daunting room that includes plans and documentation of commissioned projects, most never realized, from the 1980s.

For MOCA, Irwin has also created a new outdoor piece: two big, sheltering arbors fabricated from steel construction bars. Each holds aloft an effusive burst of deep-red bougainvillea, as if an offering to sun, sky and expectant museum visitors.

Irwin was pivotal to the progressive movement toward an art keyed to the physical and conceptual qualities of the site in which it’s seen. For his retrospective, the anomalous setting of a museum, modern product of a 19th-Century way of thinking, has been pointedly considered.

Chronologically, the Irwin show has been installed backward. Unusual, if not unprecedented, the method here works beautifully, for it subtly elucidates the art under consideration.

You start with the bougainvillea arbors in the courtyard outdoors, beyond the confining walls of the institution, and you end deep in the innermost gallery of the building--the museum’s heart--looking at a 1959 Abstract Expressionist painting, with which Irwin began. “In the world” is where Irwin attempts to work today; “in the museum” is where his conception of art began.

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Irwin has sought to overcome art’s traditional pictorial qualities, which he believes encumber and delimit an artist’s true goal of enhancing our capacity for perception. Throughout, his aim has been to free this artistic subject from presupposed, often unconscious bonds.

First, he tried to undercut the pictorial by emphasizing art’s physical properties. Finally, he did a 180: Irwin jettisoned the material objecthood of art--the canvas, paint and stretcher bars of traditional painting.

The dense, five-year period from 1959 to 1964 is the show’s most captivating section, for it reveals an artist suddenly recognizing his problem, then using art to literally think his way through to the other side. It begins with “The Lucky U,” a large, technically skillful painting that recapitulates the thick, roiling gestures of Abstract Expressionism.

However, such a canvas merely pictured what was then conventionally meant by “art.” So Irwin tried to replace the pictorial with the physical, emphasizing a painting’s qualities as a tactile object. He brought the scale way down, placing little canvases in boxy, wooden frames--furniture for paintings--which meant they could be held in the hand.

Their small, thickly painted, abstract surfaces have something of the look of raku , a ceremonial form of Japanese pottery. Yet, a painting that “looked like” a Japanese pot still interfered with an anti-pictorial aim.

He next began to make paintings thick with scumbled lines. Their blunt tactility was soon refined in Irwin’s most exquisite canvases, whose visual demand for close scrutiny results in some of the most beautiful paintings of the early 1960s.

These “line paintings” stack two, three or four parallel, horizontal lines across the surface of a monochrome canvas, painted with small, delicate, feathery brush strokes. The lines, thick and smooth, were probably painted with a palette knife. Against the feathery surface, an oddly tactile sense of perception kicks into gear.

The show appropriately separates this exceptional moment from what came next, with a wedge-shaped installation of translucent white scrim, bisecting the gallery and illuminated from above. You pass through this wedge of crisply outlined, visually mushy space by way of a portal cut in the center.

On the other side are Irwin’s well-known dot paintings and illuminated disks. Painted on slightly bowed canvases, the thousands of tiny, hand-painted dots create, from a distance, a visual halation of color floating before the canvas. The disks, of painted aluminum or plastic and supported on hidden stems projecting from the wall, seem to float, appearing at one moment to be radiant spheres, at another to be holes in space.

The most dramatic work here is a clear plastic disk with a grayish, horizontal band spray-painted across its surface, from 1966-67. Gorgeously installed on a snow-white wall, the edges of the disk vanish from sight, leaving a linear blur hovering in space. An eccentric apotheosis of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” the disk means to visually erase art’s conventional edges.

After the simple clarity of the line paintings, the bowed dot-paintings are startling in the complex, Howard Hughes-like obsessiveness of their craftsmanship. The techno-aura further expands in the disks, with their shaped aluminum, formed-acrylic and electric spotlights.

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It’s as if the closer Irwin got to his subject of unencumbered perception, the more material hardware he needed. Like lead wings for Icarus, no matter how excruciatingly refined the object was it stubbornly stood in the way of the perceptual subject.

So, by 1971 Irwin had dumped the art-object altogether. His principal materials became the circumstantial ones of light and space, manipulated by yards of scrim and string deployed in architectural settings.

Most of these installations were made in otherwise empty museums and galleries, but eventually he dumped the art world, too. Since the early 1980s Irwin has labored, mostly unsuccessfully, to execute his work within a public realm. The non-art world has resisted his conception of art, radically defined as creating any possibility for a heightened moment of awareness.

Certainly it’s possible to argue with Irwin’s dismissal of traditional painting as a mere confirmation or sanctification of what one already knows. And his willful faith in the possibility of slipping into the aesthetic dialogue with a spectator before that confirmation process begins can likewise seem uncomfortably manipulative.

Still, there’s no arguing with the bracing, off-center challenge of Irwin’s art during the past 35 years. It has rigorously set the terms for much compelling art of our time.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Aug. 15. Closed Mondays.