Meet Me at Miracle Mile

In 1997, Robert Irwin was commissioned for a site-conditioned piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). Initially designed as a home by architect Irving Gill, the museum overlooks the ocean, and one of the rooms has a wraparound window on three sides.

Irwin felt it was such a challenge. He had noticed that the view completely overshadowed past exhibitions. For his installation, he cut a square in the middle and two half-square squares in the corners. It was an homage to plein-air painting, nature and the world itself. He knew the only way to improve the room was to take something from it.

Irwin, 1° 2° 3° 4° (1997)

1° 2° 3° 4° refers to the three dimensions of the physical world plus the fourth dimension of the way we sense the phenomenal world, which is in constant motion. Viewers can hear the ocean and feel the breeze filling the space. The world outside is dazzlingly bright – really more beautiful than any painting in the world.

“If you asked me the sum total — what is your ambition? Basically, it’s just to make you a little more aware than the day before of how beautiful the world is.”

From Dots to Discs

In the wake of New York’s Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Los Angeles artists explored new mediums and ever-subtler means of expression. Breaking away from traditional formats of painting and sculpture, they created art not as objects, but as an experience which affected the way we see.

Between 1964 and 1966, Irwin went from figuration to his dot paintings. From a distance, they appear like pure white canvases. But perception and reality are not the same. Up close, the illusion changes slowly and distinctly. Thousands of dots, like a series of vibrations, come into view.

Irwin, Untitled (dot painting, 1965)

Irwin, Untitled (dot painting detail, 1965)

It’s daringly simple, but each painting took years to complete. Irwin said it was “excruciating, back-breaking work.” He began by covering a canvas with a thin layer of Fournier silver-white. Then he painted meticulous arrays of pin map-sized dots of red and green, more concentrated in the center and less and less dense towards the edges. The colors cancel each other out from afar but pulsate like an optical illusion as the viewer approaches.

“What you’re looking at is the actual mechanism of your own perceptional process. You can’t paint a red painting without an element of green in it strategically placed to pick up the eye again, to bring it back, to refocus it. This history of taking it all the way down is a destructuring of the whole process of meaning. Perception is at the crux of the matter.”

Between 1966 and 1969, Irwin moved to his disc paintings in an effort to eliminate edges and the sense of confinement. “The circle was simply the most neutral shape I could find.” He had always noticed how incremental changes and incidental distractions – whether shafts of lights or scratches on the wall – can transform the physicality of a room. He went to extraordinary lengths to neutralized those spaces.

“We don’t see the world in frames, so how do I break it? And after you break the frame, how does the artist function?”

Irwin, Untitled (disc painting, 1967)

His disc paintings went through a succession of phases. Backdrops and shadows became as elemental. He painted the center as close to the same shade as the wall. Light was carefully calibrated so that white is both color and shadow. He went from a thousand dots to just one, but one with an illusion of floating images.

“The discs solved that one simple question – how to paint a painting that doesn’t begin or end at the edge. What it says, simply, is that as I walk through the world, I bring into focus certain things which are meaningful, and others are by degrees less in focus. We organize our minds in terms of this hierarchical value structure, based on certain ideas about meaning and purpose and function.”

By breaking its frame, Irwin broadened the boundaries of art. Like a Rorschach, viewers described the disc painting as an eye, a butterfly, the sun, a mandala, even a four-leaf clover. Artforum editor Philip Ledger called his work “an experience of space and light.”

The Light and Space Movement

The term caught on. Other critics had used “ambient art” and “environmental art,” but light and space described the elemental. In Los Angeles, the light is always shifting, refracting in so many ways. Irwin and other artists learned to incorporate and manipulate light as a medium, altering the viewer’s perception to create a sensory experience. Unconcerned with Renaissance art or historical figures, it became the art form that rivaled New York’s.

“With the light in Los Angeles, suddenly, the world is my oyster.”

Irwin, Dawn to Dusk (2016)

Again, the use of light seems obvious and simple. But Irwin’s came from years of reading philosophy, including Hegel, Wittgenstein, Kant and Sartre. “Perceptualism,” as he called it, became the foundation of the Light and Space Movement. Taken from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, it was a way of questioning the instability of our human senses. Art critic Peter Frank summed it best, “The basic tenet is … what you see is not what you think you see – nor is it otherwise.”

“What our perception presents us with at every moment is an infinitely complex, dynamic, whole envelope of the world and our being in it. The fact that we take this for granted – as a given – speaks not for its insignificance. On the contrary, it is, in part, an explanation of our perceptions’ extraordinary from-to character.”

Art and Technology

In 1969, Irwin participated in the introductory Art and Technology project at LACMA. He and James Turrell were paired with Dr. Ed Wortz of Garrett Aerospace, responsible for the environmental control systems for NASA’s manned space flights. Together, they conducted experiments at UCLA’s anechoic chamber, a silent, light-blackened room used for sensory deprivation.

“What happened is those senses changed their thresholds. You start building your world in that black, soundless space. There is a way you look and see and listen every day, but when you’re suddenly cut off from the world of sight and sounds for six to eight hours and then return to it, there occurs a change in acuity.”

Irwin would spend hours inside and come out, always feeling the world had shifted. His insights were heightened. They conducted numerous experiments in perceptual psychology and learned how to integrate the senses. Out of this experience came Irwin’s clear glass and acrylic columns – optical instruments not meant to be looked at but looked through. A passing viewer might miss them except for a flash or glint of light. Almost invisible yet prismatic, the view varies from different angles.

Irwin, Untitled (1971)

The Art and Technology program allowed LA Artists to elevate the methods and materials they were already working with – paint, resin, acrylic, and lacquer. Their illusory works played on perceptions on multiple levels.

“Art is not an object, it is an experience. Like time and space, art has no actual physical dimensions or, if you wish, infinite dimensions. This art exists in the pure void of concepts. To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception.”

Scrim Veils

In 1970, a young curator at MoMA invited Irwin to transform an otherwise empty room on the third floor. It was a covert installation. He used fluorescent lighting and a translucent white scrim as a defocusing material. Scrim also gives shape to light. The effect was subtle, and it was up to the viewer to question its intention.

In 1977, The Whitney held a retrospective. On the fourth floor is a room bisected by a veiled scrim with natural light coming through. A black line lined the wall at eye level. Some viewers saw an “empty” room and turned back, but more discernible eyes saw a complexity of shapes and textures, substance and shadows. Variations unfold the longer the viewer experiences it.

Irwin, Scrim Veil-Black Rectangle-Natural Light (1977)

In May 1980, he worked on an installation next to his old Venice studio. He painted the walls and ceilings white, adjusted the skylights, and hammered out the brick wall facing the street—replacing it with sheer, semi-transparent scrim. Passersby stopped to examine it. The gallery became the exhibition rather than anything inside of it. Light and shadows moved. At night, cars would shine their headlights through. Only the scrim barred people from the gallery, located on a somewhat decrepit street, yet no one laid a hand on it. It was mesmerizing.

“I was becoming critically involved with that whole mental structure, which allows one to focus on particular things: why, for example, one focuses on objects rather than the light which reveals them.”

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue 3

Between 1960 and 1970, Barnett Newman painted a series of four paintings. An homage to Piet Mondrian, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I-IV take their name from the three primary colors and are meant to be didactic rather than a means of freedom of expression. In these large-scale paintings, Newman had eliminated the easel.

As an homage to Newman, Irwin’s 2006 installation eliminates everything else. Six seven-meter honeycomb aluminum panels are laid out facing each other, and the corresponding reflections create a color spectrum. Distorted lights create illusions of objects and people hovering.

Irwin, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue 3 (2006)

“I’ve talked of a sentient being, a cognitive self, how one approaches anything in the world – whether you first run your hands over it or you run your mind over it.”

Unlights

Irwin’s odyssey turned to ever more complex variations of light installations. In 2020, Pace Gallery exhibited Unlights, eight sculptural works consisting of rows of six-foot fluorescent bulbs arranged vertically. The colors are staggering. Using layers of theatrical gels, they present a range of astonishing tones.

On display, some bulbs are turned on, and some are not. Some are turned on all the time, and some never. Again, Irwin plays on perception. Thin full-color zips, light black and gray paints on the walls and subtle stripes create illusions of shafts and shadows. To the viewer, they evoke everything from Matisse’s closing cutouts to Beethoven’s last symphonies. Made over 15 years, they were also among Irwin’s final works.