12:10 PM

Broken Social Scene "Romance to the Grave"
from Forgiveness Rock Record (Arts & Crafts, 2010)

Produced by Sam Prekop and sounds a lot like the Sea & Cake, which I don't mind one bit. Both groups will be at the Paramount in Seattle on October 15th (I usually shy away from big shows like that but I'm a little tempted). They're also releasing a split 7" with two previously unreleased tracks at the end of the month – click here for info/pre-ordering.

[Photo: Emily walking into the Robert Irwin piece 9 Spaces 9 Trees on the University of Washington campus, October 2010 ]

A Way of Seeing

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Robert Irwin, Varese scrim, 1973

I've been thinking about the artist Robert Irwin (whose recent show at Pace Wildenstein Strath wrote about here) a lot lately. Irwin is one of those artists for whom I have complete respect – even awe. He has steadfastly followed his artistic conscience wherever it's taken him, no matter the consequences. That conscience led him away from the canvas, and finally even away from his studio, which he dismantled, disposing of the contents in the early 1970s, with no clear idea of what would come next. What did ensue was a complete rejection of the idea of art as object, and the development of the concept of art as a process of perception, intended to deliver awareness of aspects of our environment that we would otherwise ignore.

Five views of Robert Irwin's Scrim veil – Black rectangle –
Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1977

Irwin had a retrospective at the Whitney in NYC 32 years ago, in the late spring of 1977. Writing about the show in his fascinating biography of Irwin, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, author Lawrence Weschler explains:

Irwin used his museum pieces to raise questions that were then aimed at the surrounding world into which the major work had already broken out. Lovely as it was, Irwin's Whitney installation was primarily intended to function as a catalyst . . . . The great floating rectangle and the way it in turn brought out the modulation of the ceiling and the reticulation of the floor established the predominant theme of the grid; and just as many museum visitors experienced, as if for the first time, the hegemony of right angles within the room, so they were now invited to translate this reclaimed vision out into a city where the grid of clean horizontals and verticals is so pervasive as to have become almost invisible. Beyond that, the room seduced the sympathetic observer into a certain attitude of perception, a posture of heightened attention, and this heightened vision was in turn available for transposition into the world. Walking out of the musuem onto Madison Avenue, Sotheby Parke Bernet diagonally across the street looked different from the way it ever had before; both it and the look had been reclaimed.

The catalog for the Whitney retrospective included photographs of two on-site installations by Irwin, each followed by photographs of an unmediated environmental effect; for instance, a photo of Irwin's "Black plane – Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street" (in which Irwin painted black the square demarcated by the crosswalks at that intersection) was followed by a photo taken from a helicopter, titled "Black planes – Shadows, Park Avenue," in which, in Weschler's words, "Park Avenue is revealed as a succession of black building shadows and thin strips of intervening sunlight." Of the implication of these photographic juxtapositions, Weschler observes,

And that, of course, was just about as far as you could go on a particular line of aesthetic inquiry, for it implied not only the dematerialization of the art object, but the virtual evaporation of the artist's role qua artist. And Irwin was willing to say as much. Sitting there in the Whitney's coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. "That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it's beautiful," he commented, "that, as far as I'm concerned, now fits all my criteria for art."

Weschler concludes, "at the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing."

The cover of Irwin's 1977 Whitney Museum exhibition catalog

I think having Irwin on the brain lately has something to do with being back in the Northwest – not necessarily because Irwin is from the West Coast, but because there is so much more space here in which to see, and I'm consistently aware of my surroundings in a way that I wasn't on the East Coast (as beautiful as New York is). There have consequently been a few times lately when I've read a description of an artist's work as evoking or referencing this or the other natural feature or architectural idea, or causing one to think of x, y, or z thing in the physical world outside the gallery. And more than a few times my reaction has been not, 'oh, that's interesting,' but instead, 'well why isn't that thing that we're being asked to consider the real art object?' Of course, art often has the goal and effect of causing a viewer to look differently at people, objects, or surroundings. But Irwin bravely took this idea to places that no artist of whom I'm aware had gone before, and I think I have him to thank for this question.

Art critic Roberta Smith asserted in 1976: "Duchamp bluntly illustrated that any object could be art if so called. Irwin's work has been suggesting, with increasing insistence, that any situation is art, if so experienced." I think this is as good an explanation as any for why I've never felt a need for spiritual enlightenment that couldn't be satisfied by a walk in the woods or some time by the water (or even contemplating a manmade object as beautiful and strange as the Space Needle or Chrysler Building or as mundane as a crumbling barn in the middle of a green field). That's my church, and it's more than enough.

Drew Smith, untitled (Pacific Ocean)

Buy Seeing is Forgetting here (or borrow it from your local library), and watch a short documentary on Robert Irwin here.

The Name of the Thing One Sees

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We saw a bunch of gallery shows when we were in New York last week, but my favorites by far were Robert Irwin at Pace Wildenstein (above) and Fred Sandback at David Zwirner.

These massive Robert Irwin pieces at Pace were totally overwhelming. The fluorescent lighting patterns immediately called to mind letterforms and swastikas – symbols that convey meaning, whether they are letters put together to form words, or a swastika, which has a ton of meaning certainly in the twentieth century, but also as the oldest known symbol. So I found that, staring into these harsh lights, I was almost urgently trying to pull meaning out of the patterns, but realizing that ultimately they are just formations that in and of themselves had no meaning. If that makes sense.

Fred Sandback's show at David Zwirner was also really intense. These "panels" you see in the photo (see more here) are actually just pieces of string attached to the ceiling and the floor and pulled extremely tight at 90º angles. You could walk right through them if you wanted – but when you're standing next to them, it feels eerie, like if you did walk through them you might enter another world or slam against a forcefield, like a kid running through a screendoor. I found myself thinking about walls and doorways a little differently as we walked around Chelsea for the rest of the afternoon.

There were other bright spots (I liked this photograph by Carolee Schneeman at the Carolina Nitsch Project Room, for example) but overall it was a bit lackluster. No matter, those first two shows were so memorable, it was worth the time.

We also had time for a quick run through Soho one morning. We saw this show at Team Gallery featuring the work of Gardar Eide Einarsson, Davis Rhodes, and Stanley Whitney

…which reminded me of the more geometric elements of Bas Louter's current show at Ambach & Rice (formerly OKOK Gallery, pictured above) in Ballard.

And we tried to see the Stephen Sprouse show at Deitch Projects, but were a little too early and they weren't open (click here to see some images from the show, though judging from a peek through the window, that doesn't really do it justice). It's sort of a bummer to miss things on a quick trip like this, because it's not like we can just go back over there and see it tomorrow or something – but it was great to cruise through our old haunts and see what we saw.