Readernaut

The point is to get people to peel those visors off their faces, to remove the goggles, to abandon the screens. Those screens whose very purpose is to screen the actual world out. Who cares about virtuality when there's all this reality—this incredible, inexhaustible, insatiable, astonishing reality—present all around!

It's strange. With food, for instance, people seem to be able to understand what's involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience.

Most people in this city—and it's true of most cities—are simply oblivious to the incredibly rich spectacle of the everyday world; they're missing out on this visual Disneyland happening all around them all the time. All that drugs do—they don't heighten or brighten one's sense of perception—all they do is momentarily override all the habitual inhibitions to clear seeing which we manage to place in our way most of the rest of the time.

At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.

There's an important distinction to be made here, between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don't stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I'm not an evangelist. I'm not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you're going to get a half-hour answer. It doesn't make any difference whether or not it's a sophisticated question, only that you have a genuine interest in its properties.

I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I'm saying it to you. I mean, I didn't put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let's say, up at UCLA, and you'd say 'Well, let's take advantage of that. We'll have him come up and talk to the students.' And that's what I'd do. Or, 'We'll have him come up and do a piece in the patio.' And I would just come and do that.

The problem with teaching full-time, and it's for that matter a problem I'm having with these conversations of ours in terms of my anxieties about the book you're writing here, is that there comes a moment when there occurs a shift from why to how. I mean, people want you to be their guru, and tat's the last thing you can do for them, that's the worst thing. And where I've been, once it begins to shift from why to how, I simply leave: I'm gone.

[W]hat you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you're setting out to do (a figurative painting or nonfigurative or whatever). Say you're going to paint a figurative painting that's going to be about that model over there and the trees outside behind her and the oranges on the table. It's just a million yet-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say "N-n-no." You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing, the only difference is the character of the product.

Let's say at a particular point the scientist gets what he set out to get, he arrives at what he projected might happen if he mixed the particular right combination of chemicals in the right way. But the same is true of the artist: when he finally gets the right combination, he stops, he knows he's finished.