The Room At The Museum of Modern Art

Overview

A passionate equivalence: attention to the incidental, the peripheral, everything that was beside the point. These were aspects of the wisdom of the race track. They were also coming to constitute increasingly, the core of Irwin's artistic enterprise. Irwin was coming to feel that just as everything had bearing at the race track, so no single object could be isolated, transcendentally sheltered, in the world of art.

"What I was becoming critically involved with, there in the late sixties," Irwin explains, "was that whole mental structure which allows one to separate or, in a sense, focus on particular things as opposed to other things. Why, for example, one focused on objects rather than the light which reveals them. On what conditions, I started wondering, do we operate with art as a confined element in the world, in other words, an object or a painting as an isolated event in this world, surrounded by the world but somehow not totally or directly attached to it, actually somehow superior to it? It's a highly developed, raised rationale that this art object exists in. Indeed, we are oriented to look at such focal points as, in a sense, more real. And it's because of that that we're not really aware of what takes place otherwise, the so-called incidentals, the information that takes place between things, the kind of things that happen around, the multiple inter-active relations."

"The art world is highly invested in the idea that you can take an object and set it in a room, and the internal relationships will be so strong and so meaningful that all the kinds of change that take place on the object as a result of its being in a new environment will not critically affect our perception of the object. If that is the given assumption, then the object can be moved from one environment to another without its being critically altered, which then gives rise to the illusion that it can be moved from culture to culture, that it has the ability to transcend its cultural specificity, which in turn gives rise to the ultimate illusion that the object can transcend time. Because what is being claimed is that there exist certain objects isolated and meaningful enough to be transcendent, that they have the power to go on and on, that they are, as it were, timeless."

"Well, one of the things that I was becoming involved in at that point in playing artist was the growing suspicion that this breaking down of the edge, the idea of the painting moving into its environment, was putting the whole heightened rationale of the art object into doubt. There is simply no real separation line, only an intellectual one, between the object and its time environment. They are completely interlocking: nothing can exist in the world independent of all the other things in the world.

To me, the whole history of contemporary art starts out as a highly informed and highly sophisticated pictorial activity. But by the time I arrive on the scene, as a post-abstract expressionist, there is at least the possibility of looking at the world as a kind of continuum, rather than as a collection of broken-up and isolated events."

The single experience that perhaps more than any other had raised Irwin's doubts about the transcendability of the art object had occurred in 1968 in New York, and we have already alluded to it. By way of preparing for an exhibition of his discs in two New York shows that year, Irwin had spent days neutralizing the exhibition spaces (in one case at the Jewish Museum, in the other at the Pace Gallery), meticulously repainting the walls, clearing the floors, squaring the corners, and so forth. This activity, which he had undertaken solely as a way of removing extraneous distractions from the viewing experience (something he had often done, and without problem, in Los Angeles) was, however, perceived by New York critics as an abrasive, fetishistic gesture, just too cool to be ignored, indeed in itself a distraction to any calm viewing of the pieces. Interestingly, rather than being angered by this response, Irwin became fascinated by it. Indeed, he came to feel that such critics were right; an activity that meant one thing in L.A. could mean something altogether different in New York.

"I mean," he explains, "I could see how if you spent your life in the confines of cluttered light, and thought of your existence in the maze of the city as an exercise in personal survival in which the prime requirement was a continuous mental toughness-sure, I could see how such subtleties might not seem real issues." Context then, was everything. But, if this were so, was it even possible to aspire to the creation of objects where this shift would not occur, especially when the shift seemed all the more pronounced in objects produced along the borderland of aesthetic inquiry? Or might some altogether different approach be called for?

This perplex consumed Irwin in his studio activity between 1968 and 1970. It was held in abeyance, but conspicuously so, in all of his experiments with sheet glass and acrylic columns. It was an implicit presence when, in early October 1970, Irwin opened his Venice gallery space for a showing of his "Skylights-Column" installation. Later that month, it became an explicit concern as he travelled cross-country to the Museum of Modern Art, where he made the first of two gestures that taken together, would constitute the decisive break of his mid-career.

In 1970 most of the curators at the Museum of Modern Ar were jill/olved in rrse'.J([.i:mg and compiling large-scale historical retrospectives, but one young curator, Jennifer Licht, was hazarding a more adventuresome approach. She noticed that one small room on the museum's third floor, off to the side of the Brancusis, was going to be empty for several months, and she sought museum backing for an installation by the controversial Robert Irwin. She did not get it: she did, however, get confirmation that the room was going to be remaining empty. And so, more or less on her own authority, she invited Irwin to perform a transformation of the space.

"In other words," Bob was recalling the situation for me one afternoon, "the museum had not actually asked me to do it, nor had they appropriated any funds. They did not pay me to come to New York, and when I got there, there was no money to pay the painters, electricians, carpenters, and so forth; so there was to be no assistance of that kind. In fact it was worse than that: the painters, electricians, and carpenters were themselves not going to let me touch the room - you know, infringement on union prerogatives; it was their thing - so that I had to arrange with them privately on the side before they'd let me do it. Furthermore, I wasn't allowed to do anything during gallery hours. So what happened was that I began hanging around after hours along with my buddy Jack Brogan, who had been a technical consultant for me on several of my earlier projects. We'd walk in each night as the patrons were leaving, stay until the final guards were closing up, and come back the next morning even before the early birds arrived. And we just spent about a week there, trying out all sorts of different solutions."

There were no two ways about jt e roolill W.a£ am w{gJ~ roorm It was jammed in one corner on the third floor, wrapped squat and L-shaped around a box-like storage structure that protruded from one corner. Access was only possible from one side, a narrow floor-to-ceiling passage at one end of the base of the 'L'. As Irwin recalls the space, the walls were "fat," the kind of walls you'd find in a basement, bowed as if by too much weight. "So that was all kind of interesting, because there was no way that room was ever going to be beautiful; it's basic properties were just too clumsy."

Irwin had arrived in New York with the intention of reproducing one of his Venice studio-type installations. He arrived, as it were, with his bag of conventional tricks, the sum of his two years of Venice explorations. None of them seemed to fit, or at any rate they couldn't simply be applied to the new conditions. The awkwardness of the room itself forced him toward the next phase of his endeavour: each installation from there on would have to arise out of the unique configurations of each new site. As Irwin put it, "Instead of my overlaying my ideas onto that space, that space overlaid itself on me."

Irwin spent several nights just sitting there, taking in the situation. He cleaned the walls, repaired the floor. He tried this and that, put things up and took them down. As if at the races, he ran his hand over the whole situation. Finally he made his wager: it consisted of three major gestures. The room was bisected by two banks of recessed fluorescent lights. "Actually they had once been part of a parallel set of sky-lights that ran the entire length of the museum, passing right over the various walls. They were about two feet wide and four feet deep with an old-fashioned egg-crate filter level with the ceiling, about two inches deep. They had long since stopped using them as skylights, so the egg crates were all dirty, and inside there were these fluorescent fixtures that simply butt-ended, ran the entire length of the museum. Well, I cleaned the skylights and then took two colours of light, a warm and a cool, a pinkish and a greenish white. I mean, had you seen either by itself, it would have just seemed white, the way this bulb over here seems white, even though it's decidedly yellow. Anyway, there were eight shafts of light altogether in the two banks, and I interspersed them, warm-cool-warm-cool. And when you put them side by side like that, the pink one made the green look green and vice versa. The egg-crate filter tended to fracture the light through the room into very subtle bands of warm and cool; but these in turn naturally blended and it was almost as if the room had a rainbow in it. It was all very strong, almost too strong, too romantic in a way; and yet, 011 the other hand, a lot of people didn't see it at all. So, go figure. Anyway, that was the decisive gesture; everything else merely complemented it."
The most awkward element in the room had been the far wall, the longest and most squat. Irwin addressed its presence by stretching a single strand of piano wire, taut, at eye level, parallel to and about a foot in front of the wall. He and Brogan devised a way of having the wire appear to pierce the walls at either end without any trace of incident. "Then we painted the first six inches or so oi the wire white," Irwin recalls, "so that even walking within a foot of it, you could not see the wire going into the wall. I daubed a little bit of white at various other places as well, so that the wire seemed to come and go. You had this visual element that you couldn't really hold in focus, no matter how hard you tried. It was just too slight. And yet, at the same time, you couldn't ever really look at the back wall either, because your eye was always getting caught up by this line. Your eye became suspended. And if you hadn't had the subtle colourations to orient yourself by and they were very metastable - then it would have been hard to tell where the wall was. It could have been two, four, ten, fifteen feet back; your ability to focus on it or hold it in place had been destroyed."

Finally, Irwin stretched translucent white scrim, about four feet down from and parallel with the ceiling, about halfway across the room. (One bank of lights shimmered behind it, the other was clearly exposed.) As one entered the space from the room next door, one was thus confronted with two very distinct volumes of light (one at four feet above, and the other at eight feet below). "That scrim material, like th wire, tend~d to affect the space as a kind of de-focusing element," Irwin explains. "It's very hard to focus on that material: it sets up an ambiguity that makes every thing do one of two things: either become ambiguous or razor sharp by comparison. Where a corner is will be very hard and extra clear, but where there's just surface will be very ambiguous.

"So that everything in that installation conspired to skew one's expectations, to raise some and lower others, so that your perceptual mechanism became tilted, and you perceived the room as you otherwise might not have. And that was all that was there. There was nothing else besides that". There was not even a plaque with any attribution. The museum kept putting one up, almost by force of habit, and Irwin kept having his friends at Pace come over and take it down. "I wanted to set it up as an opportunity which the spectator would have to deal with. In other words, you had to decide whether the room was there. Well, you knew the room was there, but you had to decide whether what was there was intended, whether or not it was finished, before you even got to the question of whether or not it was art. You had to deal with the simplest questions, which I felt was rather nice, because not only didn't we label it, we didn't even announce it in any way. The museum, of course, cooperated in that because they hadn't even been interested in having the thing there in the first place."

Ironically, the more sophisticated one was it seemed, the less chance one had of "getting it". "A very naive audience could simply walk in, people who had no criteria as to whether it was art or not, and they could just like it or not, but they would immediately know what was going on and respond to it, one way or another. The more sophisticated person, with his or her expectations about what it was supposed to be, and about what art was and should be, tended to have a great deal of trouble with it."

Irwin had an opportunity to experience this peculiar phenomenon the very night he finished the room. "I was standing there that evening," he recalls, "and next to me were my friends, the people who were on my side, who were rooting for me in the situation, people like Jenny Licht and Arnold Glimcher. They were seeing it for the first time, and they were clearly rattled. They were trying to like it, trying in a sense to deal with it, but they just weren't sure: there was that nice awkward silence that's in the air when people don't quite know what to say or do. They were standing on one foot and then the other."

"Well, the museum was open that evening," continues Irwin, "and I still had the area closed off with a divider, but it was slightly ajar. And presently this black kid, about fifteen years old, peered around the corner and immediately said, "Yeah, wow, man, okay, all right. Hey, baby, this is all right." He just came in the room and spun around, sort of walked around in a revolving circle, turning as he went, just sort of really reacting and responding to it. And then he asked me if I'd done it, and I said yeah, and he said, "That's just fine, man, that's all right, okay." And then he shook my hand, said thanks, and walked out, leaving my two friends there, a little bewildered as to what the hell to do."

Irwin notes that in time Licht and Glimcher warmed to the piece. He didn't have time, however; h left the next day, returning to Los Angeles. And then something very interesting happened: nothing. "It was kind of amazing," Irwin recalls. "There was no response at all. It was up there for two and a half months (they just left it up for a while). There was no official record made of it, but more curiously, no one even wrote about it, which is very interesting, considering that thl was right in the middle of an art milieu where if you just sneeze it gets recorded, dissected, and analyzed. Things like that are picked up automatically when you do something at the Museum of Modern Art. I mean, I know a great number of people saw it; you just have to assume they did. Whether they saw it, I don't know. But they were there, they went through it and yet no one wrote a single word about it, which I found very interesting and, in a funny way, kind of flattering, because it really was not intended to lend itself to those kinds of methods. So, in effect, they responded without knowing they responded.

"But still, after about six months, I got a funny feeling at one point, a doubt as to whether I had don that piece at all. I had gotten no response, and the Question of identity became very real." Irwin paused. It is still a problem with his work these days, one that has never been completely worked out. "Now, interestingly enough," he continued, "maybe a year later, one artist, Richard Serra, said to me, "That thing you did" - he didn't like it particularly, but it was bothering him. "Why did you do that?" was the tenor of his Question. It turned out, maybe a year later, that a lot of people had seen it, and a tremendous number of artists. Maybe other people saw it, too, but L started getting this feedback from ali sorts of artists - and artists' opinions are, to rile, the ones that count. Artists who didn't necessarily like it, or who weren't necessarily convinced by it, but who were troubled by it, it was stili going around in their heads. So, In a funny way it was recorded, and it did have its effect."

At any rate, it certainly had its effect on Irwin. From Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin By Lawrence Weschler.

Empty Shoebox. A found empty white shoebox in an otherwise empty space. This work is a version of a Gabriel Orozco's Readymade sculpture originally shown at the Venice Biennial in 1992. The work consists of two elements, the shoebox (which I will supply) and the space. The space is to be any room, preferably self contained, the size and shape of which are unimportant. However, what is important is that the room is completely empty of anything other than the shoebox. The lid of the box is to be placed on its underside and can be put, directly on the floor, in any part of the room. If it gets lost or damaged it can be replaced by a new one. There is to be no label or explanatory text to accompany the exhibition.