Series:
Essay 9:
Synopsis:
Spirits
Charlatans
An artist’s responsibility is to communicate with an audience in a meaningful way, and the artist who rejects his responsibility is a charlatan
I recently read Seeing Is Forgetting, by Lawrence Weschler, which is a biography of the artist, Robert Irwin. Mr. Irwin was a California abstract artist who was active in the 60’s and 70’s. From the beginning, Irwin hated “the sophisticated critics with their literate biases,” who were trying to “read” art for its meaning. That became the theme of his career: to strip meaning from his art so the art couldn’t be read.
Irwin started with big canvasses of abstract designs, but gave them up because he couldn’t control the meanings that a viewer might find in the big space.
Then Irwin did a series of small canvases, less than a foot square, set in big, thick frames of wood. The canvases had no images at all, thereby making it impossible to read them.
Then Irwin spent two years holed up in his studio making paintings that meshed perfectly with the conditions and lighting of his studio, but he found that the paintings changed slightly when put in an art gallery. So he’d spend weeks changing the gallery’s walls and lighting to exactly match his studio and thereby control any accidental meanings that the gallery’s environment might put on the paintings. When the art critics laughed at him, Irwin said, “They literally couldn’t see it.”
Then Irwin made paintings that were just a few straight lines. He wanted to show the thing-in-itself, the lines on the canvas as pure perceptual phenomena. But Irwin found the audience interpreting even a few lines on a canvas to be about something: “Oh, that’s a painting of four lines and how their colors create an optical illusion.”
Then Irwin reduced down to one line, but the audience still saw a line.
So he went back into isolation, staring at empty canvasses for hours, trying to create “something showing you all its threadbare reality, its lack of structure, its lack of meaning.”
Here are some 1960’s paintings:
Late in his career, in a philosophic mood, Irwin summed up his art as stripping everything away until he arrived at pure essence of perception. He wanted to delete from a canvas everything on which the audience could project meaning, leaving us only the pure aesthetic thing-in-itself. See a pattern? Irwin has a problem with reduction: he can’t stop doing it. In the 1600’s, Descartes had the same problem. He thought he could introspect to indivisible truth, using pure reason, free of all cultural baggage. Descartes wanted to find the absolute, rock-bottom truth, then build up from there. Descartes was wrong, because his belief that he can think with pure reason, free of cultural baggage, is itself cultural baggage.
Irwin made the same endless reduction: he thought he could reason his way to the basement idea, which is pure perception-in-itself, “unmediated perception,” untainted by narrative, culture and people. But he found people hanging around in every basement. Why? Because no matter how long he stares at a blank canvas, it’s still Irwin staring at a blank canvas. For a conscious being, every perception is the perception of a conscious being. The seen can only be seen by a seer, and the seer brings purpose, meaning, narrative and civilization to the seen as part of seeing. All perception tells a story about the perceived and the perceiver.
In the 70’s, Irwin moved on to empty rooms where he’d drape scrim, which is semi-transparent gauze cloth used as a screen. He put the scrim in places that the viewer wouldn’t notice, and when no one noticed, he said they didn’t get it. Irwin did the same at a UCLA museum with a utility stairwell used by maintenance crews. No one noticed the scrimmed-up stairwell, and Irwin decided the stairwell looked better without his artistic embellishments anyway. He said, “It didn’t need my scrim.”
Art is mediation. When we go into a museum, our purpose is to see art. The artist directs our attention and says “hey, the art’s over here: this means something.” That’s the reason why a picture has a frame, to tell us where the art is. Irwin took away the frame, then the picture, then all the meaning. Maybe Irwin created art, but no one knew where to look for it, because Irwin refused to communicate with us. It’s funny that Irwin wanted his art to show unmediated perception to the viewer, but his art needed a lot of explanatory verbiage before the audience could appreciate it, that is, his art required mediation. If the art is an empty room, the viewer must be told beforehand what to see, otherwise it’s just an empty room.
Irwin is a philosopher who spoke in his own made-up language then wondered why no one understood him. An artist must meet the audience and our purposes halfway, and by refusing to do this, by refusing to share meaning with us, Irwin left us with nothing but artist as charlatan. Towards the end, he said, “That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it’s beautiful, that, as far as I’m concerned, now fits all my criteria for art.” True, but today we have hundreds of millions of people with cameras in their smart phones, and they’re taking photos of that wall and posting it on the internet. They’re making and sharing meaningful art; no need for talk.
If Irwin’s art survives into the future, it’ll explain an historical zeitgeist, that is, his art will only survive because an art textbook will explain, using words, what his art was about, what it meant. There won’t be a picture of his art, because it’d be a picture of nothing. Irwin’s failure is that he refused to accept an artist’s responsibility, which is to communicate with an audience in a meaningful way.
Postscript: Towards the end of his life, Irwin applied for a commission to design an outdoor garden at the Getty Museum. Now, if he wanted the commission, Irwin would have to share with the Getty people something of meaning, or even just something pretty. I imagine Irwin proposing a garden consisting of an empty lot in the ghetto with broken glass and torn scrim on the ground, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he met the Getty people halfway, and Getty accepted his design. You be the judge:
