Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/641424
accouterments and saying that I would go anywhere, anytime, in response," he explained in "Notes Toward a Model," a catalogue essay for the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1977 "Robert Irwin." He left Los Angeles for the Four Corners desert, sharpening his sensibilities to light and space in pursuit of what he called conditional art. "Essentially, conditional art is starting out with no plan," says Irwin. "You go." "I've never seen him walk into a space with an idea of what he's going to do or what material he's going to use," says the artist Joseph Huppert, a former Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego security guard who met Irwin before his 2008 exhibition there, and has been working as his assistant ever since. Conditional art instead forms out of the diversity of information the space has to offer: "The tactile, the auditory, the smell, the traffic flow, the ambience, all the way down to the way weight is distributed on the tile and carpet, the way they feel different," Huppert says. "From there, ideas start to form. To see him pick from the miasma of what he's accumulated and take from it what is relevant to what he's doing is really amazing to watch. He puts that in motion to make something beautiful." Over the course of five decades, the conditions of various sites have produced a vast body of work through unpredictable materials. At the Hirshhorn, he'll distort the museum's circular orientation by imparting right angles to the rounded walls using scrim, the thin, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque textile he prizes for its manipulations of light. His 2003 outdoor work at Dia:Beacon comprises orchards, pavers and hawthorn trees, which together form a meditated response to the visitors' journey through the surrounding landscape, which for Irwin begins at Grand Central Station. Irwin's emphasis on the slow unfolding of experiential details is why he opposed the photography of his work for so long. "They read it too quickly," he explains. "The one thing photography never had was a level of energy in the world." (When Huppert showed him Instagram, and the proliferation of posts that appear under the hashtag "#robertirwin," he simply replied, "Weird.") Where the Hirshhorn takes a look back on Irwin's career, elsewhere, in Marfa, Texas, its future is in formation. Following 15 years of setbacks, Irwin's long-awaited installation for the Chinati Foundation, is finally nearing completion. It's a U-shaped concrete building erected on the footprint of a former military hospital, which, like Chiu's description of the Hirshhorn show, is also a journey from dark to light. Its 50 windows will be partially tinted into a graded sequence that shifts from dark to light and back again on each side; one wall of the corridors will be darker than the other; and there will be a black and a white scrim bisecting the wings. "So, why Marfa?" Irwin asks. "Something's going on there, nature-wise. Something holds the clouds down at a lower level. The minute you arrive off of Highway 10, suddenly things start getting magical." On his iPhone, Huppert produces a short time-lapse video of the Chinati site in which its construction workers, scaled down to the size of ants, scurry about the ground at a fast-motion pace. The main subject of the video is the unusually low-slung, white tufts of clouds of Marfa that intermittently gather and disperse against the surreally blue skies overhead. "They just run across the sky. People talk about it like the Northern Lights—or they say the Marfa lights, which is bullshit," Irwin continues. "Basically I'm courting that light." To enhance visitors' views of the sky, he's placed the windows a little higher, reducing the view of ground to another very thin, strategically placed straight line. Irwin's practice was built on the art of dismantling: first the frame, then the edge, and ultimately the walls of his studio. "It took 15 years to dismantle my art and figure out where to go from there," Irwin says. "And for a while there was nowhere to go from there. I knew that at one point, if I stayed in the studio, I would only continue to do what I was doing." His trading in the confines of the studio in exchange for the world has thus far only been to his art's benefit. "Part of my schtick is how to make you aware of how fucking beautiful the world is." 206 CULTURED Irwin's "All The Rules Will Change" at the Hirshhorn encompasses his artistic career, from his early abstract paintings (Bed of Roses, center), to his long-awaited project at the Chinati Foundation, now nearing completion. ARCHITECTURAL IMAGES COURTESY OF ROBERT IRWIN PROJECT, THE CHINATI FOUNDATION, LEFT PHOTO BY JESSICA LUTZ; CENTER: COURTESY OF ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY, NEW YORK