Tag: Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

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.

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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.

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