Robert Irwin
I’ve been playing catch up with Robert Irwin’s work from the moment I first saw it in high school, and I’m still not any closer. But maybe that’s because his medium is in questions; the work never declares a final form, nor does it settle on any meaning. Instead, Irwin’s installations filter and underline the changing conditions – light, shadow, scale – of their sites, gradually shifting seeing into feeling. By drawing in your focus, Irwin slows you down and temporarily blurs your peripheral vision, only to return it sharpened and more acutely aware of your surrounding details.
The first Irwin I encountered was Two Running Violet V Forms (1983), an installation of two blue, small gauge, chain-link fence-like structures that rise 25 feet into a eucalyptus grove at the University of California, San Diego. The blue comes from the structures’ plastic coating, which when hit by sunlight, refracts into every blue you know – from the pale, see-through baby blue of your favorite linen shirt to the solid, glowingly saturated blue of the best Yves Klein monochrome to the deep, unrelenting midnight blue of a moonlit night. Each “fence” snakes diagonally down the gently sloping hill of the grove, before snapping back and almost disappearing at the point of each “V”. The installation seems to continually contract and expand like an accordion, its movement pronounced by the changing blues that at times collapse into and confuse themselves with the sky. […]
