Does it Move You?:
How to Look at Art, According to the Late Robert Irwin

Leer en Español

Robert Irwin with Light and Space (2007). Primaries and Secondaries, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2007. 115 fluorescent lights, 271.25 × 620 inches. Museum purchase with funds from the Annenberg Foundation. © 2024 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

In January 2016, I had the extreme and surreal pleasure of interviewing the late Robert Irwin, the groundbreaking Southern California artist who died last year at the age of 95. He chose the location—an ordinary McDonald’s in San Diego—and over the course of 90 minutes recounted the trajectory of his career. In 1970, he had abandoned his Venice Beach studio to pursue “site conditional art,” an itinerant practice of his own invention. For half a century, he traveled from place to place “to make work in response,” as he put it, devising often-temporary installations that highlighted the particular and overlooked beauty of the site. These works often deployed the simplest materials to render maximal effect, like a square incision into a window to bring the sea into a museum, or a diaphanous textile hung from the ceiling to give light a physical body. Irwin was associated with the Light and Space movement, a name that none of its exponents ever truly liked,¹ but his lifelong contemplation of light’s ineffable qualities always struck me as a pious devotion to the sublime. Irwin put it more simply: “Part of my shtick is to make you aware of how fucking beautiful the world is.”

Irwin fundamentally redefined the possibilities of art, not only for me, but in the greater course of art history. I left our conversation convinced that artists must possess some superhuman gift of vision. But very recently, as I reread our transcription following news of his death, I had two major realizations: First, what I thought was a conversation was actually his standard art school lecture (many great examples of which are available on YouTube),² and second, as a younger critic, I had such a superficial grasp on what he was saying that I missed the vast majority of the underlying meaning. In the most disarmingly simple terms, as he sketched on a McDonald’s napkin,³ Irwin presented all the mysteries that he had painstakingly unlocked: the truth of art as an incremental, open-ended endeavor, a lifelong process of following one’s curiosity into the unknown. He had constructed a philosophy that totally demystifies art criticism, cutting through the fog of artspeak, hype, and other distractions. His rubric for critically assessing art essentially came down to one question: Does the work move you or not?

§

Irwin’s McDonald’s lecture began with a brief and heroic account of modern art, wherein he described Kazimir Malevich unveiling his paintings of white squares in the early twentieth century: “His friends, not his enemies, said ‘My God Malevich, everything we know and love is gone.’” The underlying lesson here was that, once in a great while, when you find you can no longer move forward from where you are, the course of human progress necessitates a factory reset—“to begin again at the beginning,” Irwin wrote in Artforum in 2012, “which is the essential history of modern art.”⁴

Irwin’s practice began in 1950s Los Angeles with abstract expressionist painting, which by the following decade had evolved into the total dismantling of its constituent parts. “I took the pieces apart and examined every one,” he said, which began with stripping his canvases down to pairs of parallel lines. Irwin spent much of the early ’60s in a state of quiet contemplation, studying the fluctuating tension between these lines, testing what kind of energy ordinary paint could produce. His 1963 dot paintings remarkably capture his emphasis on physicality over imagery: Comprising an almost imperceptible haze of red and green dots, they read as blank canvases from afar, yet up close radiate a strange, seductive light. With these dot paintings, Irwin had disproven the necessity of mark-making, and his later disc paintings breached the conventions of the frame. This successive dismantling of painterly convention “took ten, fifteen years, but I finally dismantled the whole thing,” Irwin said, “not knowing what the result was, or where I would go.” And so in 1970, having actually dismantled his entire studio, “I put myself on the road.”

At this point in our conversation, the artist took a moment to recall unboxing a piece of Japanese ceramic raku ware, a seemingly tedious process of untying a bow, opening a box, and reaching into a drawstring sack. The underlying function, he found, was that by the end, “you’ve been brought down to a scale where suddenly a thumbprint becomes meaningful.” Although this aside felt insignificant at the time, it’s how I understand the trajectory of Irwin’s practice: the numerous but necessary steps of retraining one’s ability to see. Irwin had a remarkably straightforward description of his process. “You look at a thing and spend time with it,” he said, and after parsing out the overlooked minutiae that make it beautiful, you find ways to draw them out. He loved the translucence of scrim for the way it traces the contours of light as if it were a physical object, and in 1997, he hung a sheet halfway down from the ceiling of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was, unfortunately, not well received. In the absence of traditional indicators of art—no images, no marks, no frames—visitors would enter, see a seemingly empty gallery, and immediately walk back out.⁵

The amazing thing I’ve found, however, is that the less conditioned you are to artistic conventions, the easier it is to read Irwin’s work. In 2016, I brought a friend to see All the Rules Will Change, Irwin’s survey at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. My friend had nothing to do with the art world and had never heard of Irwin, yet he had a remarkably easy time parsing the artist’s conceptual intent and clever jokes. My friend looked at Square the Circle (2016), a vast swath of scrim stretched across the curve of the museum’s circular architecture, and said “The wall is there but it’s not.” As he stood before a dot painting, he rubbed his eyes in disbelief. To him, the energy radiating from it felt like “staring into a lightbulb.”

Robert Irwin with untitled (1969–70). Primaries and Secondaries, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2007. Cast acrylic column. © 2024 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

§

In both Irwin’s worldview and in mine, anything could be art, and anyone can be an artist. His students at the Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), UCLA, and UC Irvine included Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Chris Burden, and Vija Celmins, all of whom became groundbreaking artists whose works resembled neither his nor one another’s.⁶ He marveled at their range. “I never taught anyone to be this kind of artist or that kind of artist,” he told me, “but over a period of time, I taught them to understand where their strength lies.” That understanding is seemingly what he meant by his frequent references to “sensibility”—constants that define our singular engagement with and perception of the world. “We all have an intellect, but we also have a sensibility, and your sensibility is why you’re here.”

This is what I mean by a work moving you: Through the artist’s sensibility, you can feel their presence in their work. Sensibility has both psychic and visceral registers. There’s aesthetic signature, as in the high-precision, meditative realism of a Celmins painting, or the gestural paint handling of an artist like Ed Clark or Willem de Kooning. (“I could never do a stroke as good as de Kooning,” Irwin said. “His splatter was as accurate as the lace of a Vermeer.”) There’s also the conceptual sensibility of a distinct worldview, as in Burden’s lifelong exploration of masculine anxiety and pleasure. The litmus test of successfully expressing a sensibility—whether the work moves you—functions across all types of art, fashion, television, cinema, and beyond. Irwin admired car customization as a Southern California folk art: a functional object that bore the sensibilities of its owner. “It can be a whole description of a personality and an aesthetic,” Irwin said in The New Yorker in 1982. “You enhance it with your life.”⁷

The irony of Irwin’s approach to broadening art’s horizons is that it also narrowed my definitions of what art is. Often, when I see work in a gallery, I feel the acute absence of its sensibility. In those cases, I don’t question whether the work is good or bad, but whether it’s actually art at all. Setting Irwin as the bar for maximal artistic ambition offers a point of reference that clarifies what other works may lack. We can start with physicality. In his pursuit of the perpetually elusive qualities of energy and light, Irwin developed the quiet patience of a hunter. This is why he hated the photography of his work: “You read it too quickly.” Strangely, I see a lot of work that aspires to quick readings, likely meant to compete for attention in a world of digital pictures; these may look great on social media, but they feel underdeveloped in terms of technical handling, material understanding, or texture in real life. And where conceptual strength often expresses itself as psychic or emotional tension, art market forces—especially in our art fair-dominated era—tend to prefer the frictionlessness of the purely decorative. Conceptual gravitas is then outsourced to the contrived fiction of the press release, and artists are less likely to venture into the unknown, instead working within the limits of the comfortably familiar. All of this seems like a regression in artistic progress, and not the kind represented by modernism’s measured dismantling. Ad Reinhardt once said: “Art is art. Everything else is everything else.”⁸ Irwin estimated that 90 percent is everything else, and I tend to agree. “When you look around the art world today,” he told me, “it’s like they don’t know the rules of their own game.”

§

Contrary to my initial takeaway in 2016, artists are not those born with superhuman vision: “It’s just that an artist takes time tuning into their sensibility,” as Irwin put it. Tuning in means following one’s curiosity where it breaches the walls of all we know and love. What we call avant-garde comprises all the strange proposals that result from those breaches, and art history is all the contributions that withstood the canon’s repeated rejections, as well as the test of time. Indeed, time is an excellent filter, through which unmemorable work is inevitably forgotten. Recently, when I asked my friend if he remembered seeing Irwin’s show at the Hirshhorn almost a decade ago, his answer surprised me: “I think about it often,” he said, recalling his feelings of awe at the artist’s clarity and precision, and his simultaneous confusion as to what he was looking at.

Life is so long, and its possibilities are so vast. At the time of our interview, Irwin was 87 years old and was just finishing his magnum opus—untitled (dawn to dusk) (2016)—a project already sixteen years in the making. (Delays were related to fundraising and the artist’s desire to get it just right.⁹) Commissioned by the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, dawn to dusk is Irwin’s only permanent, freestanding installation, and perhaps the best work I’ve ever seen: a horseshoe of a building with two parallel hallways, one black and the other white, each with double sheets of scrim and long rows of eye-level windows running the entire length. The black hallway is a long and meditative descent into the depths of night, where the eye-level windows cut the landscape into a thin line, primarily framing the infinite sky. The sun travels alongside, periodically stretching its arms through the windows and nestling its rays on the surface of the scrim. At the end of the hallway is a short passage through a series of scrims that, depending on which side you begin, get progressively lighter, lifting you out of the darkness, or progressively darker, plunging you into it. At a certain point, they trigger the overwhelming, primal elation of greeting the first morning light, or profound, elusive memories of exiting the womb and arriving on Earth. When I visited in 2018 on a trustee field trip hosted by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the small contingent of Berlin-based artists and dealers called the work “good,” which was their way of saying they were deeply moved. At least two people cried.

If artistic practice is a road—or a black hallway, or the packaging of a raku cup—both destination and distance are unknown, but all the rewards lie on the road itself, and they often exceed the possibilities of the imagination. It’s taken six years for me to realize that Irwin’s Chinati installation was his rendering of the sunrise, free from the constraints of representation. Each rereading of our conversation illuminates a new lesson, and undoubtedly I will find more tomorrow. What a beautiful idea—that all the mysteries of life are already there in front of you, slowly revealing themselves as you approach. This is the greatest thing I learned from Robert Irwin: The only difference between the known and unknown is time, and there is always more to see.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 36.

Robert Irwin, Five x Five (installation view) (2007). Tergal voile, light construction, and framing materials. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Museum purchase with funds from the Annenberg Foundation. © 2024 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Photo: © Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

Janelle Zara is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and the author of Becoming an Architect, a title in Simon & Schuster’s Masters at Work series. You can find her work in a variety of publications focusing on art, design, and architecture, including The Guardian, T Magazine, Artnet, and many others. Her favorite In-N-Out location is the one outside LAX.

More by Janelle Zara