Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin
"But then you get to the point where you're about to place your wager; the race is about to be run. You evaluate the sum total of the information, which has to do with how the money has been bet, what the horses looked like on the track, all this information — and it's like you run your hand over the race — I've had this happen so many times, it's the only way to explain it — you run your hand over the race. All this information is logically there, but there's something wrong. You don't know why something is wrong, but something is not correct. You can't put your finger on it, but say, like in this instance, I say to myself, 'Something in this race is suspect, it doesn't feel right.' So then I have to reevaluate everything in terms of this ...
There it was, months of work, and maybe three people saw it. A few days later he demolished it, built another one, and later demolished that. I don't think he ever made one of those for display anywhere, and they were so beautiful. It took me a while to understand — I mean, here he was, an artist, and how could he not show his work? — to understand that what he was doing was pure research.
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 that's the last thing you can do for them, that's the worst thing. And wherever I've been, once it begins to shift from why to how, I simply leave: I'm gone.
But now, when you have a construct like that, that's how you go through the world. In other words, you don't just do it when you're looking at painting. We're talking about a mental construct to which the whole civilization has deeply committed itself. And what it says, simply, is that as I walk through the world, I bring into focus certain things which are meaningful, and others that are by degrees less in focus, dependent upon their meaningfulness in terms of what I'm doing, to the point where there are certain things that are totally out of focus and invisible. We organize our minds in terms of this hierarchical value structure, based on certain ideas about meaning and purpose and function.
Grace: you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord. It would not have happened without all that work, but the result cannot be accounted for as the product of the work in the sense that an effect is said to be the product of its causes. There is all that preparation — preparation for receptivity — and then there is something else beyond that, which is gratis, for free.
I came to see that when I was preparing these public shows: the canvases were so highly realized that virtually nobody else was going to know the difference one way or another. I mean, why was I going to so much trouble? Obviously, as I came to realize, it was for myself. I was still learning, studying, considering the effect of the circumstances, and so forth. And as my research moved on, I no longer needed to attend to those particular examples.
"I was driving over Mulhulland Pass on the San Diego freeway, you know, middle of nowhere at about two o'clock in the morning, when I just got like these waves — literally, I mean I never had a feeling quite like it — just waves of well-being. Just tingling. It's like I really knew who I was, who I am. Not that you can't change it or whatever. But that's who I am: that's my pleasure and that's my place in life. To ride around in a car in Los Angeles has become like one of my great pleasures. I'd almost rather be doing that than anything else I can think of."
Additional information
- Pages: 215
- ISBN: 0520049209
- EAN: 9780520049208
- Dewey: 709.24
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: University of California Press