Robert Irwin’s “Untitled” (Sphere) at Albright Knox in Buffalo, New York
Obviously you need to see most visual art to appreciate it. But reading Robert Irwin’s “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” is almost as good as seeing the art he creates. The book is a collection of conversations with Irwin and the ideas he bats around are big. I knew next to nothing about him before I read the book.
We took the train to DIA in Beacon a while back to see the grounds and entry way Irwin designed there. The Albright Knox in Buffalo has a really good or great piece by most of the big name modern artists. It really is an astounding collection built because someone there had great taste and bought the work as it came to market. I’ve been there many times but had no idea they had three Robert Irwin pieces in their collection, a light piece having been produced and purchased just last year.
In the book Irwin talks about his efforts to move the art beyond the edge of the canvas. This disc, that’s all it is, a perfectly flat round disc with an exquisite coat of paint, is mounted so it hangs in front of a wall lit with four lights with blue gels. If that little museum rope wasn’t at my feet to keep me back I would have gone up there and held this big sphere in my arms.
When Duane Sherwood was town over Christmas we made the obligatory pilgrimage to Vic & Irv’s (they are closed until March) and hatched plans to go to the John Cale Nico tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We were going to take the train down and get off in Beacon. We had all read Robert Irwin’s book and were obsessed with seeing the former Nabisco box-printing facility that was renovated by Dia with Irwin as designer. The only tickets left to the BAM show were scattered about. Peggi, Duane and I contemplated sitting in different locations and then nixed the plan. It’s not like Nico would come back from the dead. Here’s what we missed.
John Gilmore emailed us with a Breaking Bas-ass prediction. He has been rewetting all the old episodes and says the swimming pool in Walt’s back yard keeps popping up and will probably be the last shot of the final episode.
You know how sometimes you read something or hear someone express something that you is true but you have never heard it formulated so clearly. This Robert Irwin passage from the brilliant “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” has really stuck with me.
“As the questions go up, the performance level goes down — and that’s natural, because people don’t yet know how to act on those questions., they’re stumbling around in a fog — whereas when performance goes up the quality of the questions tends to go down. So while the objects that Kazimer Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin (Russian Constructivists) came up with may not have been particularly sophisticated as objects — they weren’t Stellas, or anything — they were absolutely loaded in other ways. Man, we’re still feeding off their questions. Those guys were soaring.”
I like the trade-off and it pretty much explains the attraction of punk rock or so-called primitive art.
I was surprised to find my brother-in-law, an entertainment lawyer, reading a book on the minimal artist, Robert Irwin. “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” was recommended to him by his son, our nephew in New York. My brother-in-law described some of Irwin’s philosophical ideas on questioning and frustration. He sold me and and I navigated to Amazon to add to my cart. I tried to return the favor by suggesting “Philip Guston The Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations” but my brother-in-law laughed and said “this book will be enough of that kind of thing.” You can’t get enough of that kind of thing.
Ai Weiwei is a big guy. He was huge before he was imprisoned by the Chinese government and now of course he is bigger. He’s everywhere especially on Twitter. His work addresses Chinese traditions, multinational intrusion and out right theft and of course censorship. He recreated ancient Zodiac figures that were looted from China in the Opium Wars and they are now on display in a courtyard at the LA County Museum. I loved them. In their permanent collection it was a pure delight to see Picasso entertaining himself with exaggerated form in a room full of portraits and just around the corner a room devoted to Giacomenti’s elegantly refined sculptures.
Another day and another PST stop, this time the Getty overlooking the construction on the 405. I would love to go back and photograph those partially dismantled retaining walls, orange cones and new infrastructure. Robert Irwin designed the gardens at the Getty. “Crosscurrents in LA Painting and Sculpture” was nice but not earth shattering with some Dieberkorns, Hockneys and Ruscha’s but the John Altoon’s painting, “Ocean Park Series”, was the bomb! It reminded me of Don VanVilet’s best work. No time for the permanent collection here and the Rembrandts that knock me out just thinking about them.
“Now Dig This!”, our third installment of “PST” at the Hammer Museum in Westwood focused on the African American art scene in LA and it was an eye opener with strong, graphic, physical, rough and tumble work in a distinctive earthy palette, beautiful Charles White drawings and John Riddle sculptures, names I had never heard of, mixed with political art that still feels fresh, Aunt Jemima with a machine gun and women with Angela Davis Afros shoving the stereotypes back in our face. Minstrel to militant. Right on!
The Hammer’s permanent collection is stellar. Take the fifteen small head sculptures by Daumier!This time I feel in love with Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Touc“, a gorgeously painted dog sitting on a table. I’m no dog person but this looked like it was done by Leon Golub. In the book store, the Hammer has one of the best, I bought a book from the EVA Hesse painting show that had just left and sitting next to that I spotted a complete collection of Robert Irwin”s writings.
