Presented by The Contemporary Art Council
Seattle Art Museum, October 1st
Speaking at the Seattle Art Museum auditorium Friday night, Robert Irwin gave an account of his career within the context of the broader phenomenological history of art. Although it is essentially the same speech he has been giving in recent years, it has — like his art itself — steadily expanded and evolved.
As the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus says, "Just as no man can stand in the same river twice, that same man cannot stand twice in that river," and so it is with Irwin.
Irwin uses the language and structures of Hegel to describe this process, for they are uniquely suited to his program of philosophical inquiry and his explanation of his life’s work and the history of art itself. He talked at great length about the changing nature of art over the centuries, his story replete with dissolving picture frames, eroding hierarchies, and crucifixes that eventually gave way to expressionist brush strokes upon the canvas.
Inserting himself into this history, he spoke about his transformation from an abstract expressionist painter in the 1950s to an artist whose work began to reflect a growing interest in issues of perception and consciousness. It started, as observers of Irwin know, with his fascination with the shadows around the margins of his frames and has culminated, thus far, with his garden at the Getty Center and his landscape design for the Dia Beacon.
One of the subjects of Irwin’s talk was Nine Spaces / Nine Trees, a work commissioned by the City of Seattle in 1979 for the 4th Avenue side of the unloved and soon-to-be-demolished Public Safety Building. I was surprised to discover that this work was Irwin’s first site-generated landscape installation. However successful this piece may have been (Irwin did point out the work’s shortcomings in its former site) its presence downtown these last two decades is a testament to the courageous and innovative spirit that characterized the City’s Art in Public Places Program in those days.
If details can be worked out, it may also become the first such work to be moved from an original site to a different, more suitable, one across town as there are currently plans to re-site the work on the University of Washington campus. Although Irwin said that he preferred a location adjacent to the Odegaard Library across the road from the Henry, the exact placement of Nine Spaces / Nine Trees has yet to be determined.
Besides using the example of this neglected work to define a moment during which "public art" gave way to "art in public places," he also spoke at length about the larger trajectory of Modernism. He described the century between David’s Coronation of Napoleon and the abstract geometric paintings of Malevich as the first hundred years; the century between Malevich and the present as the second. He claimed that the era of Modernism is only half over – it will, in fact, take another two hundred years for humankind to fully understand its ramifications.
Irwin has never been content to remain doing what he has done before. More than any other artist of his generation, he has always been committed to taking risks that promise to carry his current investigation beyond the bounds of his last. Throughout much of his talk, Irwin told of the obstacles that presented themselves in the form of Richard Meier and, in the case of Nine Spaces, the Seattle Chief of Police. But in the true spirit of Hegel, he explained how these conflicts resulted in an escalation of understanding that would ultimately make the work stronger than it might otherwise have been.
If only we could watch and listen for another two centuries.
