Robert Irwin is an artist known for his site-specific light and space installations that aim to draw viewers into contemplating phenomenology and their own experience. The document discusses Irwin's origins and artistic evolution, including his intense period producing canvases with minimal straight lines and later questioning if it's possible to paint without an image or linear mark. It also examines Irwin's Venice studio and how contemporary artists like Warhol, Turrell, and Eliasson have redefined the concept of an artist's studio.
7. Solitude
So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.
8. Irwin had taken the means of traditional
painting right to the edge, but he was still
balancing on this side of the edge.
9. Phenomenology
Irwin says, "The real beauty of philosophy is the
examination of your own moment, your own being in
circumstance."
"When people walk into a gallery where I’ve installed
some of the things I’ve been doing recently, a lot of
them say, "Oh, it’s an empty room. The question then,
of course, is empty of what?" The point of Irwin’s work
is to draw people into a place once considered too
incidental to have meaning. For an artist to make the
viewer a critical player by inscribing his or her specific
experience into the work is a humanistic goal.
10.
11. During a period of intense activity—holed up in his studio for
fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, for months on end—he
produced ten canvases, each with two straight lines hand-
splayed over a monotone ground, into which they virtually
disappeared. Although the lines’ placement had been
painstakingly calibrated for the most neutral effect, each
canvas still read as “a painting of two lines,” and Irwin next
wondered, “Is it possible to paint a painting without subject
and without linear mark?”
12. During the sixties, therefore, Irwin
systematically pursued the mystery of aesthetic
presence, dismantling the activity of painting
through a series of progressive questionings—
or, more properly phrased, bringings-into-
question—at each stage stripping away the
inessential elements of the art act while
simultaneously opening up his perceptions to a
whole range of experience that had previously
been excluded.
“Is it possible to paint a painting without
image?”
19. Warhol’s “Factory”
The Factory was the hip hangout
for artsy types, amphetamine
users, and the Warhol superstars.
It was famed for its
groundbreaking parties.
22. Studio Olafur Eliasson forces the
visiting critic to reconsider what an
artist’s studio encompasses, and the
critic’s relationship to it. For the most
part, this is due to the studio’s labyrinth-
like complexity—the bewildering depth
and range of projects and people in play.
http://www.olafureliasson.net/
studio/pdf/
Sternberg_Press_Coles_Eliasson.pdf