Seeing is forgetting
How are you looking at the thing you’re looking at? In what ways are you aware of the thing you’re looking at? What are the contours of your awareness? In what ways is your awareness participating in the creation of the thing you’re looking at?
Art over the past few decades has asked stuff like this. If you’ve ever been to an installation by Olafur Eliasson or Yayoi Kusama, you’ve come into intimate contact with these questions. Earlier artists do this, too, like Richard Serra or Dan Flavin. But arguably it all came out of the work of Robert Irwin in the 60s and 70s.
He’s in the pantheon because of the way he existed in the world: with fearless curiosity, asking us all of the questions that, at the time, nobody really bothered to ask. Robert Irwin is one of my all-time favorite contemporary artists, and he has remained so ever since I read his perfectly-titled biography, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, ten years ago. I’ve seen only four of his works in person – five, if you count the garden. And yet.
His work was designed, created from essentially no prior ideas, and it frequently had to be manufactured to precision in factories that had no idea what to do with him:
I asked Irwin how these craftsmen regarded him and his project. “I have no idea how they saw me. Actually, they were mostly guys at sign companies, and most of the time I approached them as a store-window decorator. I never approached them as an artist, because that wasn’t something they were going to understand—hell, even I didn’t understand it—and it only confused matters. It was much better to keep it on a practical level, as if you were going to do a hundred signs in this format.”
And then he did it. He did pretty much all of it – except for some of the installations, which were so ambitious that they frequently couldn’t find funding.
In addition to all of this, he gave the world’s only good graduation speech. He walked up, said “the wonder is still there,” walked off.
Irwin passed away a few days ago. He was 95. He was still creating new work just three years ago. He’s one of the greats, he doesn’t get enough credit, and he deserves to be remembered. Your homework assignment is tripartite: read his book, find something he made, and see it in person.