Robert Irwin
May, 2000
A talk at Mershon Auditorium, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

      Robert Irwin came mainly to speak about the garden he had designed for the Getty Museum in California, but included his own overview of modern art history. He said that he never had as much difficulty to describe his work as now. This isn't surprising considering how his art has seemed to have possession over him more than he consciously controls it, and has taken him to a point very different from where he began. He started out as an abstract expressionist painter, and was rather bad at it, as he described it. He worked to minimize the imagery to the point that it was so subtle that family members couldn't tell his work apart from an empty canvas. He felt that little details such as the marks on gallery walls were too distracting from his work, and so he began to take painstaking measures to control every bit of the presentation environment, sanding the walls smooth and even painting out shadows. In the process of this, the paintings that he had started out being concerned with became less important to him than it was to control the space and lighting, and so he began to focus on those issues exclusively, creating installation or site-specific works. Eventually, this ("naturally") led him to designing gardens.
      His talk found a wonderful midpoint between academic lecture and a casual, friendly talk. Neither the educated nor the layman would have been alienated by his presentation, which dealt with the weighty issues of a century of art history, but in a way that skillfully blended with personal anecdotes and simple analogies. He attempted to explain how the concept of "abstraction" has changed over time, being originally a reference to the pure reality of a thing, apart from our considerations of it, outside of our participation. According to Irwin, this changed when it was realized that the viewer was necessary to create a qualitative reality, the central core of the course of modern art. By creating works that were autonomous in their reality, not referring to anything beyond their own immediate experience, this could be more directly realized in art--he related this to a Malevich quote, the "desert of pure feeling," a place that he always hoped his work could bring a viewer to.
      When he began to talk about his garden at the Getty, it was easy to see how his compulsions have driven him. Every detail was considered. Stones were placed to control and change the sound of rushing water, across which a path crisscrossed to take the participant through the alternating sounds, as well as alternating scents from careful flower selection. The flowers were also selected based on color relationships, with even seasonal changes being taken into account. All of this was arranged to create a spatial-sensory experience that integrated into the existing grounds and architecture. Irwin directed every level of the process, and got really caught up in telling where certain rocks were found, what a certain plant was--details that weren't necessarily of interest to much of the audience, but which revealed how much this work has consumed him.

dlf
2000

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