Robert Irwin, untitled, 1971, synthetic fabric, wood, fluorescent lights, floodlights, 96 x 564" approx., Collection Walker Art Center, Gift of the artist, 1971.
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1969, Acrylic paint on cast acrylic disc, with two lighting fixtures, Disc: 53-1/4 x 3-3/4", Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1986, Accession Number: 86.5887.
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1980, mixed media: fiberboard, paper, plastic and fabric, 22-3/4 x 22-1/8 x 10", Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration, 1980.49.6. |
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Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Avenue
612-375-7600
Minneapolis
Friedman Gallery
Robert Irwin:
Slant / Light / Volume
August 6, 2009-
November 21, 2010
For 50 years, Robert Irwin has been a pivotal influence in contemporary art as an artist, theoretician, and teacher. His mid-1960s transformative pieces helped to define the aesthetics and conceptual issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement (as did the work of fellow artist James Turrell also in the Walker’s collection) by exploring how phenomena are perceived and altered by consciousness. Irwin orchestrates the act of perception. His seemingly simple architectural interventions are philosophically rich exercises in the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space. Throughout the 1970s, he repeatedly worked with translucent scrim, a fabric routinely used in theatrical stage productions. Appearing opaque unless lit from behind, this material is often used to situate actions taking place in the foreground and background; to metaphorically frame the action in the past and present, or to distinguish realms of consciousness versus dream-states. In Irwin’s hands, scrim becomes a formally divisive yet supremely gentle and ethereal agent of transformation. This almost anti-sculptural material objectifies light and space, creating volume from both of these intangibles.
The untitled work, a powerful and ethereal site-specific installation by Robert Irwin — an oblique plane of translucent scrim fabric, in Slant / Light / Volume is reconfigured for a new audience in a gallery with a slightly higher ceiling than the original space in which it premiered, The exhibition is organized by curator Elizabeth Carpenter with the full cooperation of the artist. Commissioned by the Walker in 1971 for Works for New Spaces, the inaugural exhibition of its Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building. By lowering the coffers in Friedman Gallery, the dimensions for the original work, which is 15 feet high, has a span of approximately 48 feet across, and slants at an almost 45-degree angle, will remain exactly the same. The piece has not been on view since 1989.
The Walker exhibition contains a single, untitled work of art which Irwin’s preparatory drawings and notes refer to as Slant/Light/Volume. Site-specificity, a core tenet of the artist’s practice, has been both a dream and a curse. “All those things that I did in the 1970s, basically no one’s ever seen them,” he once remarked. “I exist as some myth, which is the worst thing I could be, because I’m talking about reality, not myths. If you can’t experience the works they have no meaning.”
Irwin is cognizant of the paradox in making short-lived artworks that rely on the visitor’s physical presence and perception to complete them—but for him, it’s a necessary one: “From a phenomenological viewpoint, to make the observers necessary to complete the quality quotient of art is probably the most human, the most emotional, the most sensory thing to do.”
Robert Irwin: Slant/Light/Volume is organized by the Walker Art Center.
Throughout his long career, Robert Irwin has pondered whether we ever have an absolutely pure or direct moment in front of a work of art. This installation, last on view 20 years ago, represents his effort to foster such an experience.
Irwin’s transformative pieces in the 1960s and 1970s helped to define the aesthetics and conceptual issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement. Along with fellow artist James Turrell, he explored how phenomena are perceived and altered by consciousness, in effect orchestrating the act of perception. His seemingly simple architectural interventions are philosophically rich exercises in the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space. |
