“To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.”

~ Robert Irwin (1928-2023)

I like to introduce you to the work of Robert Irwin, a contemporary artist unlike any other. While other artists painted and sculpted, Irwin did none of that. He chose to make what he calls “site-conditional art” – installation pieces in different settings or environments, from deserts to spaces in museums. Most of his installations involve the intangible elements of light, at times to dissolve what we see and at times to reveal what our eyes missed. His body of works, if one might call it that way, has changed the way we perceive art, at least it has for me.

Two of Irwin’s coolest “art works” are Disk (1967) and Scrim (1971). Disk was one of Irwin’s first installation works. It centers around a circular, convex aluminum disks sprayed with matte acrylic paint and mounted on a concealed tubular arm 20 inches from the wall. Lighting was crucial to the presentation of the piece. Lighting from the ceiling hit the disc from four angles, creating a flower-like shape of overlapping shadows on the wall that make the shadows seem more substantial than the disk itself. Irwin’s goal was to play with the viewer’s perception by letting the disk lose its solid form as if it is dissolving into a hole in the middle of the world. In his other works from this series, the disk seems to oscillate between convex and concave, altering the viewer’s perception of what they thought they saw.

In another larger scale work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Irwin takes note of an existing large skylight at one end of the gallery and stretches a huge scrim of fine white fabric from the ceiling to the floor in order to make a volume or what had been a diffuse input of light. Here, Irwin is trying to make things visible by veiling them, creating something out of nothing and forcing people to attend to the thing they did not see was there. From one position of the gallery, you can almost see the structure of the ceiling overhead, but as you move to the scrim, the ceiling becomes lost in a fog and at the end of the room, it dissolves into pure light.

Both installations can hardly be called “art” as we know it – they are neither framed pictures nor tangible sculptures. They are simply ways to using light to either play on a viewer’s perceptions of what they think they are seeing. Therefore, perceptual art may be a better term for describing his brand of art as it is meant to teach us that art is fundamentally the empirical act of looking and paying attention to the environment around us. For that, I think Irwin’s artistic practice is a refreshingly original one. While paintings and sculptures will remain as the staple forms of art, he is saying the world itself is art if we look at things closely enough. I agree. After all, what is art is but our projections of feelings and sensations into the external world? 

I’ll end here by sharing two more quotes by Robert Irwin:

“In a way (making art) is a simple thing. For the next few weeks, try the best you can to pay attention to sounds. You will start hearing all these sounds coming in. Once you let them in, you’ve already done the first and most critical thing; you’ve honored that information by including it. And by doing that, you’ve actually changed the world. It’s nothing mystical, but you’ve redefined the world for yourself.”

“It’s a constant, continuous, spectacular world we live in; every day you see things that just knock you out if you pay attention.”

 Watch

“A Few Things About Robert Irwin” (YouTube; 7 minutes)