Seeing is Forgetting
July 18th, 2008
I have just re-re-read (is that right? third time through) Lawrence Weschler’s classic “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” a biography of Robert Irwin. I consider myself an Irwin fan, though I admittedly have still not made the trip across town to see the re-installed “Nine Spaces, Nine Trees,” which was formerly sited at the old Public Safety Building in an unfortunate location, where it earned the nickname “Jail for Trees.” Shame on me, really for not making the trip yet.
Anyway, I was getting ready to go to the airport for a weekend trip to Chicago, I didn’t have a book to read, and magazines just sounded boring, so I looked through the books out in the studio, and decided to read this one again. The runner-up was Agnes Martin’s “Writings”, which I have also since re-re-read, and will be the subject of another post.
First off, if you have never read Weschler, you need to. Whether it’s this book, the one about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, or the one about Boggs who draws detailed copies of currency, each one is a treat. Weschler has a way of bringing his subject to life on the page that is casual without being simple. Descriptions fail me, but it is pure skill.
Back to Irwin: It was a good refresher to read this again - to understand the narrative curve of Irwin’s artistic life. And I guess honestly, my motivation for reading this again, now, is that I feel as if I am at a crossroads. So the passages about those moments in Irwin’s life where things changed — or didn’t, but could have — were the ones that struck me:
In this context, we can look at the late line paintings in two ways. On the one hand, they constitute the beginning of a phenomenological investigation that was to take Irwin, over the next decade, through a succession of reductions — through the dots, discs, columns, rooms, desert experiments, and city projects that were to follow — all the way to ground zero, achieved somewhere in the mid-seventies, when Irwin declared that nonobjective art now meant “nonobject,” and that perception itself, independent of any object, was the true art act. But another way of seeing those late lines is to realize that they themselves were that ground zero, that in a period of two years Irwin had achieved a complete revolution in his thinking, and that everything that was to follow was merely an acting out, a fleshing out of the discoveries he had made with them, discoveries the implications of which it took him another decade to unfurl.
In any case, biographically, the late lines constitute the fulcrum of Irwin’s artistic career. ” All my activities after those line paintings,” Irwin concedes, “are a result of how those paintings taught me to look at the world.” This was true on the obvious level, that is, they taught him how to perceive the world in a new way. “When I look at the world now, my posture is not one of focus but rather of attention. There’s a floating kind of feeling when I work in a situation now.” But there was also a more subtle (and pervasive) transformation, that of his driving motive. When Irwin initially joined Ferus — the reason he left Landau in the first place — he was animated principally by ambition. He was fiercely competitive: he wanted to be the best goddamn abstract expressionist on the block. something happened, though, over the next several years. He got hooked on what he was doing: curiosity came to supersede ambition as his principal motivation. It has stayed that way ever since.
“Those lines,” Irwin is likely to grin nowadays, “that was where, at age thirty-five, I finally grew up and became an artist.”
And, years later, an even more profound turning point:
Irwin returned to Los Angeles, to his Venice studio, where the “Skylights-Column” installation was still up. It didn’t make sense anymore. Something was wrong. For twelve years he had been pursuing a course of inquiry, each question opening out onto the next, the lines to the dots to the discs to the columns, but after the Modern Art piece, a fundamental transformation occurred. He had been following the questions through; now he was about to follow them straight out.
“It had been a long journey,” Irwin summarizes, “starting out from my more or less naive approach as a painter to now be arriving at a point where, to some degree, I had dismantled the whole thing: image, line, frame, focus, transcendability. I’d dismantled the art endeavor, but in the process I’d dismantled myself. My questions had now become way in excess of any answers that I had, or even any possibilities. In fact, I arrived at this point with a real dilemma, and the dilemma was that all my questions now seemed external to my practice. The column not being successful is a good example. And it seemed to me that, if I continued doing what I was doing, I was simply never going to get to my questions. I would simply do those things, maybe better, or I’d extend them, maybe richer. So I really had a decision to make at that point, and it was a fairly radical one in my life. See, I felt that if each day I got up and went down the street, the same street basically, and went into that studio, which was a particular scale and size, a room, and so on and so forth, and if I brought with me all my expertise — which is what you can’t help but do in a situation like that, bring all the things you’ve learned to be good at (and I’d learned a lot of techniques) — that I would essentially continue to do the same thing. And I didn’t know exactly how to resolve that. But what I did was the simplest kind if thing — which was not an answer, but I think fairly reasonable given the dilemma — and that was to get rid of all those habits and practices altogether.
“I cut the knot. I got rid of the studio, sold all the things I owned, all the equipment, all my stuff; and without knowing what I was going to do with myself or how I was going to spend my time, I simply stopped being an artist in those senses. I just quit.”
Note that Irwin says that, through dismantling the art endeavor, he dismantled himself. This ties back to other recent reading of mine, as well, and has been an important “ah-ha” moment for me: the process I go through (essentially painting the same painting over and over again, for the past seven years) has not been a process of making the paintings better, although I believe that has happened in some cases. Rather, it is a process of making my self better. More precisely, the repetition has made my self less.
I have an old friend — and an excellent draughtsman — whom I rarely see anymore. He has to some degree dropped out of art circles, and when asked about it, says (I have heard this through the grapevine) that he has “pulled a Landkammer.” What he means is that he isn’t at all the openings and art parties like we both used to be. Our names are rarely on anybody’s lips. When I run into folks I know from the “art world,” they sometimes ask if I am still making art.
I relate this to make a point: in the art community, ambition is expected (and — I have to admit — somewhat necessary). When that ambition shifts and becomes an internal ambition, the evidence of ambition is not as apparent, and others assume that there is no fire left in the belly. In some cases — maybe most — that’s the case. But not always.
