Robert Irwin: viewer as subject

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Michael Govan
The primary medium of Irwin’s art is neither steel nor glass, neither trees nor pavement, but our perception, our curiosity, and our desire to make sense of the world around us. By subtly manipulating our environment in unexpected ways, his gestures provoke us to see differently, to question our assumptions, and to pay an attention to phenomena that in turn cause us to redraw our mental picture of the world. The role of the artist, in Irwin’s terms, is to learn to see not only a physical, quantitative reality but the qualitative aspects of a situation, and to empower the viewer to gain access to that vision as well—to engage in a process of discovery. The real subject of Irwin’s art is not the object, then, but the viewer:

As artists, the one true inquiry of art as a pure subject is an inquiry of our potential to know the world around us and our actively being in it, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic. This world is not just somehow given to us whole. We perceive, we shape the world, and as artists we discover and give value to our human potential to “see” the infinite richness (beauty?) in everything, creating an extended aesthetic reality.

“If you asked me the sum total—what is your ambition?” Irwin told his friend and biographer Lawrence Weschler. “Basically it’s just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is. It’s not saying that I know what the world should look like. It’s not that I’m rebuilding the world. Basically what artists do is to teach you how to exercise your own potential—they always have, that’s the one thread that goes all the way through.” By Irwin’s measure, a work of art succeeds when it challenges our perceptions to such a degree as to cause us to reconsider our environment and invest it, and ourselves, with greater potential.