November 16, 2023 : Issue #55
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
Another week with the artist Robert Irwin, in observance of his passing last month at the age of 95 (see here). This time out, a look back at his great long-gestating Marfa project which culminated at long last in 2016.
* * *
The Main Event
At Long Last : Robert Irwin in Marfa, 2016
Originally published in Modern Painters, December 2016
(Note: Images scraped, by and large, off the Web, though some are Ren’s own and many are courtesty of Chinati, Alex Marks photographer.)
“You wake up every morning,” the California artist Robert Irwin would often begin the talks he used to give, coming on forty-five years ago now, to anyone anywhere who would have him, “and a whole world is delivered instantaneously to your senses—and you hardly give the sheer marvel of that fact a thought, it’s so taken for granted. The sights, sounds, textures, smells come flooding in, or rather maybe your awareness of, your attentiveness to the world floods out, and you just get up and go on with your day as if this were the simplest fact there could be, which of course it is not.”
Available in Response, he used to call his artistic practice back in those days—and that was pretty much all that was left of it. Over the prior twelve years, across the sixties and into the early seventies, starting out as a figurative and then an abstract painter, he had pretty much dismantled every other aspect of the painter’s traditional activity, systematically dispensing one by one with image, gesture, focus, canvas, frame, signature, and presently even transportable (saleable) object. As one of his last acts, he’d cleaned out his Venice, California, studio—emptying the space, plastering and smooth-sanding and repainting the walls, buffing the floor, cleaning the skylight (the painstaking process took weeks)—and as a last gesture, he sledgehammered a hole in the street-facing wall, and simply walked away.
He got in his car and took off eastward into the desert on the first leg of a tour of the country’s borders (across the south, up the Atlantic, then back along the northern perimeter and down the Pacific)—for some reason that seemed a sensible thing to be doing for starters—in pursuit of presence, as he’d sometimes say, perceptual presence, the core and almost sole truly valid artistic subject, as he’d come to feel. And so it came to pass that, pulling into Marfa, Texas,
a once thriving little high-desert ranch town about three hours southeast of El Paso that had lately been emptying out precipitously (what with the post-war closing of the nearby Ft. D.A. Russell military base and consequent shuttering of the town’s lifeline train stop), outside the town hall, he came upon his old New York artist pal, the minimalist master Donald Judd (one of the few New Yorkers who’d been taking their California counterpart seriously), and suitably startled, each simultaneously asked the other, What are you doing here?
Irwin explained the general idea behind his trip, noting that the sense of presence (the sky, the clouds, the light, the clarity of the air, the knife-sharp horizon falling away in the near-far distance) seemed especially strong in these parts; and Judd, agreeing, explained how he’d lately been thinking of relocating his entire New York operation out to somewhere around here. They presently doffed caps, Irwin continuing on his way (completing the circuit, launching into his years of responsive availability, lecturing, reading, promulgating a series of subtle temporary specifically site-conditioned artistic interventions in locations all around the country and presently the world, becoming one of the first artists to receive a MacArthur Fellowship and a few years after that getting selected to spearhead one of the grandest public art projects of all time, the Central Garden at the Getty Center back in Los Angeles)—while Judd for his part indeed began buying up the town (the abandoned supermarket, the empty bank, a slew of vacated warehouses, and presently the entire mothballed and crumbling former military base), and filling his new properties (with the military base recast as the Chinati Foundation), on a permanent basis (the way he felt things ought to be seen and preserved), with his own work and that of his friends (separate buildings or barracks for the likes of John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenberg, Roni Horn, Carl Andre, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and John Wesley, among others), slowly turning the place into an art world mecca and a magnet for a growing community of young artists. Judd himself didn’t live to see all of it, dying in 1994 (right around the time Irwin had taken up his Getty Garden project), leaving the directorship of Chinati to his late-life partner, the brilliant charismatic German curator Marianne Stockebrand (who as it happened had hosted an Irwin travelling show back in her own Cologne museum that very year),
while the stewardship of the remaining Judd properties in the town of Marfa and also back on Spring Street in New York went to his two kids from an earlier marriage, Flavin and Rainer.
After the Getty, Irwin moved to upstate New York for a few years to design and help realize the transformation of an abandoned former Nabisco paper box printing plant into Dia Beacon, but he kept dropping by Marfa, and meanwhile Stockebrand and her lieutenant Rob Weiner, in the midst of their myriad other initiatives, kept returning to Judd’s own late-life resolve at some point to invite Irwin to undertake a longterm project there in Marfa. By 2001, the various pieces seemed to fall into place, and Stockebrand was able to offer Irwin the site of the old Ft. Russell hospital, off on the town-side perimeter of the former military base. In the event, it would end up taking another fifteen years of planning, conceptualizing, reconceptualizing, and most importantly fundraising (a good part of that under the auspices of Chinati’s new director Jenny Moore) for the presently 87-year-old Irwin’s scheme to come to fruition: but this past July the completed piece, Untitled: From Dawn to Dusk finally saw the light of day, amidst much community and art world celebration.
Though the artist himself was not there.
*
The hospital itself, back in 2001, was a severely dilapidated ruin: the walls were still there, barely, but the roof and floorboards had long since been pillaged for firewood, it was said, and the window slots were gapingly raw and empty (the whole complex resembling something out of Pompeii).
Still, it couldn’t be denied, the place had presence, it had that in droves, and Irwin resolved to salvage what he could of the complex’s original footprint: a slightly elongated square (the lateral corridors longer than the front and back ends), with a separate structure (the infirmary) slotted into the spacious courtyard patio in the middle. The original structure had responded to the gentle upward slope (front to back) of its site, by requiring several steps up at the entry and then leveling the floor through the whole structure as it moved toward the rear, where it almost met the risen ground. But, as I say, the floorboards were no longer there, and the effect, when one walked the scrabbly dirt of the interior corridors, was that the narrow vertical windows up front and along the beginnings of the lateral sides were up high, their ledges almost at the eye level of an average sized person, such that one only barely made out the far stretching desertscape all around (granted, toward the back of the up-sloping corridors, the windows seemed to subside to more conventional knee-height, in turn divulging a more conventional view).
Up there at the front, though, gazing through the window slits, it was mainly the sky that stood out—and Irwin had come to feel that the sky itself accounted for much of the magic of the place: it was wide and usually dazzlingly crisp and blue but low, owing to the white puffy cumulus clouds that were constantly scudding by just overhead, so thick their underbellies were often scored deep grey.
At first Irwin hoped to integrate the dramatically crumbling walls themselves into the final structure, but it soon became clear that they could no longer support the weight, at which point he decided to tear them down altogether, and in his first major gesture, to wedge the structure’s former footprint into the rising slope, retaining the low floor and high windows of the original front of the ruin through the entirety of the recast structure.
Over the years, the planning went through many iterations (“Many, many iterations,” Weiner now laughs, wincingly), but early on Irwin decided to slice an opening through the front, street-facing side of the squarish perimeter into the empty courtyard space beyond: he wasn’t yet sure what he was going to put in there (that too went through many, many iterations). As for the corridors, though, at first he played with the idea of a steadily darkening and then lightening sequence of colored films spread over the windows and a system of long skylights above (a differently unfurling spectrum of colors along each of the lateral sides). He was still in thrall back then to his recent experience of the infinite plenitude of hue and value he’d encountered amidst the flowers of his Getty Garden, a revelation he’d recently begun replicating across a series of variously colored-film-wrapped fluorescent bulb arrays in projects elsewhere.
But gradually, here, he dispensed with the idea of colors and, perhaps referencing those eerily italicized (self-underlined?) clouds passing by overhead, he decided to bisect the squarish rectangle longitudinally, rendering the interior walls and ceilings of the east side black and those of the west side white. At the outset, approaching from the street, the visitor would be invited to choose which side to enter, left or right: to either side there would first be an open-ceilinged foyer, as it were, with walls and windows but no roof and open to the elements above, a notional souvenir of the site as it had first been encountered. Then entering through glass doors, the immersive experience would truly begin: down the middle of each of the lateral corridors, Irwin and his team had stretched a long sheer transparent scrim, floor to ceiling, black on the east side and white on the west, or actually a double scrim, two like-shaded scrims five inches apart, and, come to think of it, by no means always transparent. Depending on the angle from which they were viewed and the time of day and the resultant slices of light (or lack thereof) splaying in from the crisp windows to either side of each corridor, the scrims could read as anything from solid walls to nothing at all: sheer air. The main thing the scrims served to do, however, as with so many of Irwin’s other signature projects (including the recent reinstallation of his legendary 1977 piece at the Whitney in New York) was to catch, momentarily hold, and then gradually release the raking light streaming through the whole length of the lateral corridors. (Speaking of the length of those corridors, incidentally, the street-facing windows looked out onto the midtrunks of trees rising outside whereas, mysteriously, those to the back of the structure looked out onto level earth, almost as high as the window ledges and continuing to slope up off into the distance.) On the far side, the back corridor for its part, was painted half black (east side) and half white (west), with three taut single scrims to each side slicing perpendicularly across the corridor (black to the east and white to the west), each of the six scrims in turn bisected by narrow rectangular openings, allowing free passage, pinched hourglass-like, from one side of the installation to the other.
Up until the last minute Irwin had not been sure the piece was going to work: as usual with his pieces, there would be so many countervailing aspects of the eventual experience, a virtual infinity of them, the way different features would be interacting and intersecting with each other, that the thing could just have collapsed into undifferentiated chaos, and he wouldn’t be able to know for sure until the whole thing had been completed. (“It’s always like trying to capture lightning in a bottle,” he warned, still fretting, a few weeks before the inaugural weekend, during one of the last of his countless evaluative visits from his San Diego home.)
In the event, however, it worked superbly: Irwin and his construction crew had nailed it. If you happened to enter the space by yourself (say, a few hours before the official opening hours), there was a sudden hushed splendor to the whole experience: an inheld breath. But the experience was even better if there were a smattering of other individuals ambling through. (For all its emphasis on the phenomenology of individual perceptual experience, Irwin’s is also a deeply social practice: the sense of presence it affords often heightened by the intersubjective presence of others having a similar experience.) Rounding the bend there toward the back and into the splay of six intervening scrims (three black and three white), time and again one heard the same gasps, and often the very same exclamation: “It’s like we’ve all died and gone to Heaven” (with the other visitors, similarly stilled there in the distance, seemingly floating in the light-drenched indeterminate haze, like so many fellow angels).
Only it was not like that at all. Or rather, it was as if the determinedly atheist Irwin were insisting, “This here, this place right here right now, like every other place at every other time, is already Heaven, if we had but eyes to see, a heaven from which only death may eventually remove us.” For one thing, unlike with transcendental heaven in all its much vaunted timelessness, Irwin seemed to be suggesting, crucial to the splendor of our worldly portion were the very workings of time itself with all its continuously albeit subtly registering changes.
And indeed, as many were pointing out that inaugural weekend, what Irwin had fashioned here on the edge of Marfa was a huge uncanny timepiece: Rolex, eat your heart out! A modernist minimalist Stonehenge on the high West Texas plains. If, as the Untitled’s subtitle recommended, you were privileged to obtain access to the installation at dawn (the rooster from the neighboring hardscrabble farmstead crowing away), you could watch the sun’s rise register incrementally first on the darkened east side—a series of blushes, then widening bruises, and little by little down-furling rectangular curtains of light spaced out along the darkened double scrims and onto the still darker wall beyond, and a few minutes later, as the sun rose higher and broached the roof of the eastern side of the building, the same sequence would be repeating itself across the whitened western corridor of the structure. (Where tree trunks or branches intervened, the projected rectangles of light could momentarily register as silhouetted Chinese scrolls, shimmering with the breeze). In the evening the opposite: the lowering sun pouring in through the outfacing windows, across the doubled scrims, and window-crisp rectangles of blazing orange light casting themselves onto the darkening far white walls between the blue-blushing bays of the actual windows facing into the interior courtyard: a steady trill of orange-gray-blue-gray-orange-gray-blue the length of the entire corridor (the intervening orange rectangles rising infinitesimally by the moment with the setting sun). The respective sun-facing corridors of the building could grow quite warm early and late in the day (there are no artificial temperature controls anywhere in the structure, and all the light is natural), but curiously at blazing midday, when there are hardly any shadows at all, the whole space on both sides an aquarium of seemingly undifferentiated light, the corridors are remarkably cool, thanks to the gleaming corrugated slanted tin roofs. The point is, the piece is changing all the time (gloamings and gleamings, gutterings and glow, floating from one vantage to another with the passing day)—a meticulously thought-out mechanism, as it were, for occasioning heightened attention. Attention which—just look out through those windows!—one was being invited to train out onto the whole rest of the wide, wide world: just look at what the light was doing with those clouds, or for that matter to that otherwise seemingly undistinguished stand of sage brush over there.
More so it seemed to me than with earlier Irwin pieces, however, there was as well with this one a heightened sense of mortality, and not just because Irwin himself is doubtlessly entering his own sunset years. Dawn to dusk, indeed. The center of the interior courtyard, as I say, had gone through countless iterations (at one point Irwin had even thought of replacing the infirmary with a white cube space for displaying some of his own earlier pieces from the sixties), but in the end (and it was really only during the last several months), during a drive through Washington state, Irwin had happened upon a stand of orangeish-brown rust-colored basalt columns (natural pentagonal and hexagonal stone plinths jammed together and rising majestically, Devil’s-Tower-like, into the sky). Whereupon he’d traced out a twenty foot square of the things and asked the good folks at Chinati to figure out some way of hauling the whole combine over to their site. There, and only in recent weeks, with the help of his regular stone guy, the consummate Laddie Flock, Irwin and the rest of his crew reinstalled the towering plinths into a compact monolith, or rather (technically) polylith, rising mute like some mysteriously anonymous monument—talk about a sense of occasion!—in the middle of the courtyard which he now overspread with a wispy shimmer of low thin Blue Gamma wild grasses and eight Palo Verde trees spaced along the perimeter of the courtyard.
As it happened, on the far interior side of the polylith—invisible from the street, but quite striking when one ambled about the geometrically arrayed, low corten-girdled walking paths, Irwin had strikingly left a sole stone plinth fractured and spread horizontal along the ground: a fallen totem.
Which was the thing I happened to be looking at, having just arrived the day before the official opening and headed right over, when one of the Chinati folk came over and informed me that Irwin himself would not be coming for the inaugural festivities: back in San Diego, the night before, he’d collapsed and been rushed to the hospital, in as yet indeterminate but possibly quite serious condition. They thought it might have been a stroke.
Damn Irwin: he positively hates it when I free-associate like this (through the coming on forty years of our friendship, much of our relationship has devolved to our looking at some common object and my saying “That reminds me of…” and his vesuviating, “Can’t you just shut the fuck up about what it reminds you of and simply experience the thing, for once, plain and direct!?”), but what was I supposed to do, gazing on that fallen plinth?
In the event, even though he never did make it to the opening, things weren’t as dire as all that: his dramatically lurching bouts of vertigo and vomiting turned out to have been caused, not so much by the exhaustion of the prior months of frenzied activity (and for that matter the months before that, this being one of his most prolific years ever, with other major installations at both DIA Beacon and the Hirshhorn in Washington), but rather by some kind of inner ear disruption.
Had Irwin experienced any sudden loud noises recently, his doctor asked him, once he’d stabilized a bit. And, turns out, he had. One evening a few nights earlier, back in Marfa, he’d been walking in the alley between his hotel and the gas station convenience mart next door (on the prowl, as ever, I’d bet you, for his perennial cup of Coca Cola, the syrup perfectly calibrated, the ice crushed just so) when not more than five feet in front of him a tremendous lightning bolt had slammed crashingly to earth. Might that have had anything to do with it, Irwin now wondered. Um, yeah, replied the doctor, self-evidently.
Not to worry, though: steadily on the mend now, Irwin will be back to check things out in Marfa sometime in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, back home myself, I wake up and find myself noticing the uncanny blush of dawn in the corner of my shade-darkened bedroom, and the rainbowlike arc of color reflected somehow off something, already decomposing, and now that sudden spear of light stabbing along the ceiling, slowly widening, and it’s all, all of it, so heartrendingly beautiful, and so very very present: A gift.
* * *
MORE TALK
Good Talk
Weschler and Irwin in conversation at Chinati in Marfa, October 1, 2007
For those of you who still haven’t had enough of Robert Irwin in conversation, you can find the extended transcript of a spirited, tumbling, by turns hilarious and then quite unexpectedly heartening colloquy between Ren and the late master at Chinati in the fall of 2007, on the occasion of the publication of the second edition of their collaborative biography Seeing is Forgetting, at a time when Irwin’s hospital project still seemed mired in a phase of endlessly receding latency, here.
* * *
IN MEMORIAM
{For more on Brogan, see issues #2 and #3 of this Wondercabinet, and for more on Irwin, issues #14, #50, and #54 }
* * *
ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
* * *
NEXT ISSUE
Once again, we aren’t quite sure. In fact, you know what? We’re going to dispense with this rubric from here on out: How can we (or you) know what we’ll think till we see what we say?
* * *
OR, IF YOU WOULD PREFER TO MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION, CLICK HERE.
* * *
Thank you for giving Wondercabinet some of your reading time! We welcome not only your public comments (button above), but also any feedback you may care to send us directly: weschlerswondercabinet@gmail.com.
Here’s a shortcut to the COMPLETE WONDERCABINET ARCHIVE.