Late Lines

In thinking about my last post—about putting into artists’ mouths a simple statement of what they do–I went back to my favorite art text of all time, “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” a book by Lawrence Weschler about Robert Irwin. The following fragment (which is transcribed from a photocopy of two pages of the open book) outlines what seems to be Irwin’s breakthrough as an artist and—this is what makes it so amazing—a person. Here we can see how and where the artist, the individual human, and the human species merge.

“…purples. It’s a little more difficult to see the incidental transitions, the low-grade shadows caused by the varying textures, because of the starkness of the contrast between the white wall and the black plank. Still, if I were to daub a slash of red paint in that corner, it would change the whiteness of the entire field. Now, a slash of red paint is a major gesture, and you’d almost need something that extreme to see the contrast in the situation. Because of the extremity of the black-white contrast, for example, it’s difficult for you to perceive how the whiteness of even a particular spot on the wall changes as you yourself move through the room, or as the sun moves through its day. But as you reduce the incidental contrast, it becomes easier to see such subtle discrepancies. If that plank, for example, were gray instead of black….
“Now, what I was doing in those line experiments was to try as much as possible to clear away such incidental distractions. I used, for example, a bright orange paint straight out of the tube for my ground, applied it very evenly over the canvas, trying to avoid any discrepancies in the field while at the same time providing a definite texture. Then I applied the two lines out of the same tube. And it was soon thereafter, when I moved one of those lines that eighth of an inch, that I suddenly realized that that gesture changed everything in the field, not only the composition but even the color! I’d raise that line by the thickness of a sheet of paper, and from across the room this seven foot by seven foot field was no longer the same.”

At first it was not a question of whether the change had been for better or worse: Irwin was simply amazed by the fact of it, or, more precisely, as he subsequently phrased it, “by the fact of how incredibly discerning the human eye can be.” Simultaneously he became aware that a thin crack along the wall a few yards away from the canvas likewise exerted its presence; that when he plastered that crack over and repainted the wall, the canvas itself presented an entirely new aspect. He took to cleaning out his studio, smoothing out and repainting the walls al around, readjusting the lights. Every morning, before resuming with the canvas, he would attend to the smudges on the walls and the floor left over from the day before.
The question presently became where to place the lines for optimal effect. Why did one placement look better than another, and how pure was the perceptual judgment that ascertained this?

“At first I just placed the two lines intuitively. But then I said to myself, “Who really put those two lines on like that? Was it really spontaneous intuition or was it rather cultural indoctrination? I mean, when you think of the degree to which we are inculcated to the whole idea about order and pattern and relationship: the way the street out there is laid out, the way this room is laid out, the fact that I went to school and took a class in design or learned to read from left to right. We have all these incredibly complicated assumptions and ideas about order which are operating all around us. So when I go up and put two lines on the canvas, did I put them on? Or was I simply reflecting this whole baggage that I’m carrying around? That was not really a negative; I just came to doubt that I myself had done it.”

The question then became, How else do you look at it? Irwin’s first gambit was to intellectualize the process, to look for more clever solutions, more interesting, more profound solutions: for example, to float one line right up near the upper border of the canvas. But that just reintroduced the literal subject once again, pointing, not to the presence of the canvas, but rather to the cleverness of its composition and, by inference, of its creator. The painting became a painting about how smart the painter was.
So once again Irwin was faced with the question of an alternative. The answer, he found, in time. He would sit and concentrate on the canvas for hours, for days, for weeks.

“I started spending the time just sitting there looking. I would look for about fifteen minutes and just nod off, go to sleep. I’d wake up after about five minutes, and I’d concentrate and look, just sort of mesmerize myself, and I’d conk out again. It was a strange period. I’d go through days on end during which I’d be taking these little half-hour, fifteen-, twenty-minute catnaps about every half an hour, look for half an hour. It was a pretty hilarious sort of activity.”

Irwin’s entire progression had been dictated by upsurges of boredom; bored with the figurative, he’d moved on to the abstract, and so forth. Now, he mobilized boredom itself as one of his means. “I put myself in that disciplined position, and one of the tools I used was boredom. Boredom is a very good tool. Because whenever you play creative games, what you normally do is you bring to the situation all your aspirations, all your assump-“