Too oftentimes too many of us talk single in kind theory but live another.

Too oftentimes too many of us talk single in kind theory but live another. In his rigorous examination of the possibilities of perception, and his always renewed portent before the world and the unclose act of seeing, Robert Irwin's career exemplifies the committed, moral, nondogmatic union of theory and practice. In his general traveling retrospective, as installed at beholds Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art this summer the viewer experienced his in the greatest degree recent work first; but the exhibition also featured a selection of Irwin's early Abstract Expressionist--inspired works (including a very strange display of his "handheld" paintings, which, however, the same was not allowed to touch), his line and dot paintings, the light discs, the cast-acrylic array of less front than depths and finally a series of photographs and plans documenting, first, the explorations of interior and exterior space that for an link Irwin with the Light and Space manner of moving and, second, the realized and unrealized throw outs that demonstrate his recent commitment to "art in public places" (a descriptive mete he distinguishes emphatically from "public art").

Animating the retrospective, in accord with the notice and delight Irwin feels toward the uniqueness and contingency of each site, were three just discovered works. Entering MoCA's spartan red-sandstone building, common passed through Two Radial Bowers, each made of 50 12-foot rebars (bamboo was the material of choice, further it didn't work) alternating with bars of shorter longitudinal dimensions and constructed to fan gone out as they rose so as to keep possession of a great mass of down-reaching pink bougainvillea that took couple years to grow and dripped down through the rigid metal supports. The other brace new pieces did not duplicate moreover were literally and titularly in the spirit of earlier Irwin works that dynamized "empty" spaces by challenging their accepted planes within linear demarcation, or through the use of sheer linen scrim. "Scrim Light Volume": created in the spirit of work from 1970/1980 of the like kind as "Slant Light Volume," 1971 was a double-V-shaped scrim wall with an lay open entrance that bisected the main gallery, destabilizing the space and making the viewers forward the other side of the gauze from oneself into fragile, shifting shapes. For me the chiefly wonderful experience in the exhibition--perhaps because its isolation gave it a rigor and integrity that the other works could not achieve gathered together--was "5 Openings: 2+3": created in the spirit of work from 1970/1980 as it is as "Black Line Volume," 1975--76 (MCA, Chicago): in a large white expanse lit by a scrim-softened skylight, and with a blond-hardwood floor in which a large center square had been bleached to a lighter color, the walls were cross with openings that precisely framed contingent activity in the galleries around them. Experiencing the apartment meant oscillating between a mind of asceticism and exacting geometry and a perception of the sensuous quality of light and timber-land and the beauty of random configurations.

I talked with Irwin at his San Diego to one's home in July 1993, not protracted after the opening of the retrospective in sees Angeles. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, opening public from our shared appreciation of existential phenomenology: the philosophy and [i]modus operandi[/i] that focus on the arrangement of partss of experience as lived from embodied persons "being in the world," and that insist that any description of objective, worldly phenomena must include the subjective, human perception of it and thus is always lay open quite concretely, to re-vision.

VIVIAN SOBCHACK: for what cause [i]or[/i] reason is it, do you think, that folks often equate technical precision with coldness? The passionate rigor of working something abroad which I find extraordinarily apparent in your work, is hardly cold

ROBERT IRWIN: I've had to contend with that, because the thing about being an Abstract Expressionist, which is in what manner I cut my teeth (though it was strictly borrowed), was that it was a same passionate kind of act. I mean you'd equate painting with a kind of Zen preparedness, eat the right victualss the night before, sweep the studio in the morning, sort your brushes public And then there was a great outpouring of emotion, and the painting would kind of advance to a peak and you'd pass disclosed [laughter]. It was a marvelous sort of activity. if it were not that when I looked back I study There are so many things here that are abroad of control. So I took the grand scale of Abstract Expressionism down to where I could sway every stroke, in the small "handheld" paintings. Later, in the line paintings, I set up out that with 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 action s I could create as earnestly energy, as much presence, as I was previously doing with 20 And then, in the dot paintings, I dispensed with the action altogether. And this passion for making everything work was misinterpreted as coldness

The dot paintings were a real genuine pain in the ass to do. I got tremendous headaches. If the dots were too uniform you were aware of a pattern, if they were too irregular you would start to procure focal points, and I was essentially trying to suspend the notice to create this field of manliness So to get them somewhere in between was complicated. Of course, in the middle of all this reduction, I idea What am I doing? Here I am, 30 years ancient and I'm painting dots. I mean, this is it? And then I compared that with the frolic and excitement of doing Abstract Expressionism. unless this thing of discipline--it's probably necessary, as the path to prepare through the superficiality of emotive painting to something more emotional, direct, and spontaneous.