Robert Irwin: Site Determined, University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, by James Scarborough

INTRODUCTION. When you hear intervention, you think something’s wrong and needs to be fixed. For Robert Irwin, that something was art; it needed to be hacked.

Beginning as an abstract artist, Irwin questioned painting and found it wanting. In one of those eureka moments by which something seems to come from nothing, but which makes sense in retrospect, he turned to the environment as both his medium and his Muse. Thus was his site-specific work born, sensitive responses to particular environments.

Site-specific describes a works’ context but it doesn’t describe its dynamic. Irwin is not a landscape artist the way that J.M.W. Turner and John Constable are landscape artists.Their work is static, frozen in a moment. Irwin’s work is dynamic, contingent on the passage of time and the play of light. Among other things, it is ecological, botanical, and meteorological. Irwin’s process consists of research, evaluation, and orchestration of a site’s particulars. He breaks up a site into each imaginable piece. He then creates a context by which the viewer can put it all back together again; conceptual impressionism, if you will. These site-specific works, then, are Irwin’s – and, by extension our – responses to each particular environment.

WHAT'S IT ABOUT? This groundbreaking exhibition of drawings and architectural models presents four decades (1975 – present day) of Irwin’s outdoor environmental work. Arranged in chronological order, the show begins with his 1975 drawing for his first outdoor sculpture, Window Wall. It continues through his sadly unrealized 1986 Arts Enrichment Master Plan for the Miami International Airport and his gloriously realized 1998 Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Center. It concludes with twenty drawings and an architectural model for his majestic site-specific 2002 work the former Fort D.A. Russell hospital building on the campus of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

WHY DOES IT MATTER? All at once, it

… shows work that has been infrequently, if ever, shown.

… shows the thought processes behind Irwin's environmental projects.

… traces Irwin’s artistic evolution over four decades.

WHAT IF I JUST HAD 20 MINUTES? Savor Untitled (dawn to dusk), the 20 drawings and two models of Irwin’s response to a former hospital building on the campus of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Pre-Irwin, the site was an unattended mess. With neither a roof nor glass in the windows, the site nonetheless offered artistic possibilities for an interplay between in and out of doors. The result? Shadows that migrate like a slow motion progression of animation cells with the daily movement of the sun through a corridor’s set of windows.

Then, on the way to your car, consider the freshly- conserved Window Wall, located near the CSULB Art Department. If you didn’t know what it was on your way to the Museum, you certainly would on your way back to your car.

WHO SHOULD SEE IT? 

• Anyone who wants to see a show that traces the evolution of a relatively unknown body of work made by a very well-known contemporary artist.
• Anyone who wants to expand their understanding of off the wall/off the pedestal art without getting put off by too-academic language.
• Anyone who wants to see the epitome of a museum exhibition: Tight, relevant focus; judicious selection of work; modest yet monumental installation; and a just-right amount of didactic material.

THE VERDICT? It’s worth your effort to engage with this deceptively excellent exhibition of the work by a deceptively brilliant artist.

HOW DO I VISIT? Museum hours are Sunday - Thursday 12:00 - 5:00 p.m.; Wednesday 12:00 - 8:00 p.m. The show runs until April 15. The University Art Museum is located at California State University, Long Beach, Horn Center, 1250 Bellflower Boulevard, Long Beach, CA 90840. For more information, call (562) 985-5761 or visit here. 

 

Drawing for Black on White (Wedge for Pacific Standard Time), c. 2011

color pencil and collage on Mylar

Framed: 26 1/2 x 26 3/4 x 1 7/8 inches (67.3 x 67.9 x 4.8 cm) Sight: 18 x 19 inches (45.7 x 48.3 cm)

Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Gift of Steven D. McIntee, 2013.109

Photograph: Pablo Mason

© 2018 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Marfa Color Plan (2002)

color pencil on Mylar

Sheet: 30 x 42 inches (76.2 x 106.7 cm)

Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Promised gift of L.J. Cella

Photograph: Pablo Mason

© 2018 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

 

Two Running Violet V Forms (1982)

Ink and pencil

24 x 46 in (61 x 116.8 cm)

Stuart Collection Records, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego

Photograph: Philipp Scholz Rittermann

© 2018 Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.